As California’s biggest fire of the year raced toward his neighborhood and the police ordered residents to evacuate, Justin Freese decided he was going nowhere.

Instead, he calmly unfurled his 300 feet of fire hose, readying his generators and surveyed the fire’s progress. Mr. Freese, who owns a shop specializing in car exhaust systems, calculated that he had enough fuel and food to last him about a year — and enough water, nearly 10,000 gallons, to defend his two-story, wood-shingled home in Forest Ranch from the onslaught of fire that leveled a neighbor’s home on Thursday.

“I live up here — I’ve gotta be prepared,” Mr. Freese, 40, said Friday, as he paced his property set amid the conifer forests a 20-minute drive outside the city of Chico.

Through the trees, the sky looked angry. A tower of wildfire smoke — streaked orange, red and black — soared into the sky as the Park fire tore through the valley below. By Saturday morning, it had consumed more than 300,000 acres of land, making it the largest active fire in the country, and it was still zero percent contained.

Eight years ago, when the Camp fire killed 85 people in and around the town of Paradise, it awakened many Americans to the dangers of living on the edge of wilderness in fire-prone states like California.