TEMECULA, Calif. (AP) -- A 300-acre nature preserve where artists came to escape the speed and stress of modern life was no match for the fury of nature.
One of Southern California's wildfires reduced the Dorland Mountain Arts Colony, founded in 1979 in the foothills of Palomar Mountain, to a pile of cinderblocks and rubble Monday.
``It's so difficult to think about it being gone,'' said Karen Parrott, executive director of the retreat, which has housed artists and writers including ``The Lovely Bones'' author Alice Sebold.
At the retreat Tuesday, blackened walls stood next to a charred file cabinet and bathtub. A melted refrigerator leaned against a wood-burning stove.
Parrott said the fire destroyed valuable antiques once owned by the colony's late founders Ellen and Robert Dorland, including a Steinway grand piano believed to have been played by renowned Russian pianist Sergei Rachmaninoff.
The Dorlands lived in Pasadena in the 1930s and built an adobe house in the rural hills in southern Riverside County as an escape from city life. After her husband died, Ellen Dorland founded the artist colony in 1979.
It operated as a nonprofit organization, relying on donations to offer invited artists a quiet place to work during one- to three-month stays. In 1988, the Nature Conservancy designated the property a nature preserve, Parrot said.
The blaze destroyed the nine cottages at the arts colony along with other structures, including a workshop owned by the University of California at Riverside.
``We lived with nature surrounding us, and it fed our soul,'' Parrott said. ``In this day and age where technology pushes us to go faster and faster, and we live on the presumption that it's making our lives easier when in fact it's making it more complicated, Dorland was a haven.''
Parrott hadn't been able to inspect the fire damages and said it was too early to speculate whether the colony could be rebuilt.
``In my heart, I hope so,'' she said.
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