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Heather Ochs with her daughter, Caelyn, 8, and other family members outside a Red Cross shelter.Credit Ilana Panich-Linsman for The New York Times

MIDDLETOWN, Calif. — As they watched the sky go black and flames race toward their homes, the artists and campers, retirees and families living in this mountain town knew it was time to flee. Some, fearing that the drought-fueled fires raging across California would bring this moment to their door, had bags packed, ready to go. Others did not.

So as the fire crested a ridge line on Saturday afternoon, people grabbed insurance papers and birth certificates, shoes and extra socks. They loaded up antique rugs but left behind a mother’s quilts. They wrangled horses and pets. The Nelson family grabbed Tick, their Chihuahua mix. Steve Shurelian, 60, picked up an ailing neighbor. Neighbors screamed at one another to get out. The embers streaked down like missiles. By night, escaping families were driving through curtains of flame.

“I felt like it was the end times,” said Janis Irvin, who believed her house was destroyed. “It was red and black and boiling.”

By late Monday, 11,000 firefighters across California were still battling to contain a dozen large wildfires that had destroyed hundreds of homes, displaced 13,000 people and turned white-fenced neighborhoods into char. A least one person had been killed, an elderly disabled woman unable to escape when her house here in Lake County was swallowed in flames, officials said.

The blaze that began in Lake County, called the Valley Fire, has burned across 62,000 acres, and was only 10 percent contained. In Middletown, most of downtown — including a new arts center and Noble’s Saloon — survived untouched, but entire residential blocks were heaps of ash. Grape fields were scorched black. A scrim of smoke continued to rise from the tinder-dry mountains that ring the town.

A trickle of people were allowed to return on Monday to inspect their homes and retrieve livestock, but hundreds more were still sleeping on cots or in tents at evacuation shelters on the northern and southern edges of the fire.

“I’m looking for my wife,” one man said as he walked into the cafeteria of a Red Cross evacuation center at the Napa County Fairground, about 30 miles from Middletown. Over crumb cake and pancakes, neighbors reunited, asked about each other’s homes and recalled how the erratic, whipping winds had brought the fire down from the mountainsides on Saturday afternoon and transformed their town into an inferno.

“It did things fire isn’t supposed to do,” said Capt. Mike Walton, a bulldozer operator with Cal Fire, the state fire agency, who escorted a friend into Middletown to see his destroyed home. He pointed to the black skeletons of trees and a neighborhood grid reduced to ashes. “Fire does weird stuff. But look at this.”

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Middletown, population 1,300, is a winding mountain drive away from the wealth of Napa Valley’s vineyards, a town that residents say is part cowboy and part hippie. The clothing-optional Harbin Hot Springs — destroyed in the blaze — was a cultural anchor for many artists and liberal transplants from San Francisco who said they had fallen in love with the mountains and Middletown’s small-town eclecticism.

“We’re more like family here than a town,” Deanna Hingst, 32, said as she stood in her family’s charred backyard. All that was left of the house was an interior brick wall, a chimney and her mother’s Corningware cook set.

For some, Saturday began with uneasy premonitions. The winds were blowing in all directions, whirling dust and leaves. As the day wore on, people in town started to notice fire trucks streaking up Highway 175. Others started to watch growing columns of smoke rising around Cobb Mountain.

Other blazes during this fire season — among the worst in the state’s history — had come uneasily close, but Ms. Hingst said she never believed a fire could rake across the center of town. Even as the fire spread down from the mountains after about 4 p.m. and cars streamed away, Ms. Hingst said, she packed up to evacuate on the assumption that she would soon be back.

In the wooded neighborhood of Anderson Springs west of Middletown, people were getting frantic. Margit Pataki raced from room to room, trying to decide what to take. Ms. Irvin packed her laptop but forgot it as she rushed out the door.

As the flames raced through, Ms. Pataki and other neighbors gathered at a friend’s home in Middletown, expecting to wait out the fire. They opened a bottle of Champagne as it grew closer to town.

“I guess we were just in denial,” Ms. Pataki said. Eventually, the police warned them that the fire was approaching the school and several large propane tanks, and the women fled down the road and to shelter.

At the Harbin Hot Springs, Harlan Sadberry, 71, the head of security, knew the situation was dire when an ember ignited a spot fire near a guest building. All afternoon, he had been visiting campsites and cottages to tell the 533 guests about the looming danger. Most left quickly, but one guest told Mr. Sadberry that she would not leave. He finally persuaded her to go.

Map Major Fires in California Three large fires are raging in California and have consumed more than 270,000 acres.