“Raging Wildfires” by Kaia Gallagher
Peering through a grey, foggy mist, the eye of a home security camera in Grand Lake, Colorado picked up the bright blaze of a rapidly expanding fire that glowed along the horizon. Through the thickening smoke, the security camera recorded swaying pines that were buffeted by sixty mile per hour winds. Within minutes a widening band of white, hot flame ignited nearby trees in explosive bursts.
As the air thickened and turned red, the fire splintered into hundreds of blazing spots of light, while sparks of ember ignited skeletal lodgepole pines, remnants from a beetle epidemic that occurred a decade earlier. The security camera continued to scan as dancing bonfires rose into the air and then subsided. Shortly after, the flames crept toward the dry vegetation around the house; the camera eye was engulfed in a bright light and ceased its scanning.
A nearby resident watched a similar scene as her security camera captured the fire that raced towards her home. Shocked at the rapid advance of the flames, she said, “I can’t begin to tell you. It was so gut-wrenching when I opened up the Ring app and saw fire coming up our driveway and flames moving up the hillside. It was horrific to watch. I’ve never experienced anything like that before.”[1]
Her family was given only thirty minutes to evacuate. Watching from afar, they felt numb as they anxiously saw the red-hot flames drawing closer to their house. A short time later the eye of their security camera was blinded while their home burned to its foundation.
Firefighters said the explosive growth of the East Troublesome Fire on October 22, 2020, was unlike anything they had ever seen. Shortly after the fire ignited, Jay Winfield, Commander of the Northern Rockies Incident Management Team #6, reported that East Troublesome had grown from 19,000 to 30,000 acres. By the time the sun set, the flames, fueled by gusty winds, spread to 125,600 acres, as the fire scaled the steep peaks in Rocky Mountain National Park. Proceeding over the Continental Divide, it streamed toward the town of Estes Park where critical response teams warned area residents,
Evacuate the area immediately and as quickly as possible. Do not delay leaving to gather belongings or make efforts to protect your home or business.
In response, 15,500 Estes Park residents joined the 4,032 Grand County evacuees who fled from the burn area the previous day. Few could believe their homes might be gone. “You never think it’s going to happen to you,” a displaced resident lamented. Another homeowner who escaped compared the smoke shrouding the fire zone to a solar eclipse. “The sky was blood red and dark – you couldn’t even see the sun,” he said. “It was surreal; it was like being on another planet.”[2]
As he provided a news update on the fire, Brett Schroetlin, the Sheriff of Grand County, explained, “We plan for the worst. This is the worst of the worst of the worst and no matter how we look at it, we can’t control Mother Nature.”[3]
Chris Joyner, a fire information officer, concurred, saying, “This is absolutely the most intense fire behavior I’ve seen in the years that I’ve been doing wildland fire.”[4]
In Denver, where I lived, over one hundred miles from the fire zone, the air the next day was hazy and hazardous as ominous news reports emerged from the burn area. A neighbor shared texts she received from a Grand Lake firefighter who was battling along the front lines. A friend worried on Facebook whether his mountain home would survive after he noticed that it straddled the edge of the fire’s perimeter. Another family who lived near Grand Lake posted updates as they salvaged five carloads of possessions before leaving everything else behind.
While the fire continued to burn, an apocalyptic cloud layer soared forty thousand feet. The sun in the mountain skies glowed with an ominous orange hue, as dark plumes of smoke blackened the skyline along Route 40 – the highway that joined Winter Park with the Grand Lake region. Even though Rocky Mountain National Park was closed, Trail Ridge Road stayed open to accommodate the fleeing evacuees. Due to the large number of downed trees that blocked the highways, travel into the mountain region was restricted to firefighting crews.
By the time the last embers were extinguished, East Troublesome had become the second largest wildfire in Colorado’s history, charring more than three hundred square miles of forest land and destroying roughly five hundred buildings and homes. An elderly couple who did not want to evacuate were later found dead.
As a proud Coloradan, I knew the Grand Lake community as a sleepy mountain town that touted itself as the gateway to Rocky Mountain National Park. The single road leading to the town’s front entrance meandered along the borders of Shadow Mountain Lake, the man-made reservoir that served as the headwaters for the Colorado River. Every summer, my husband and I joined friends at lakeside restaurants before attending the Broadway musicals that were hosted by the Grand Lake Repertory Theater. Grand Lake was also the place where my daughter was married in a rustic lakeside barn managed by the U.S. Forest Service. As I followed news reports, I worried over how much of the vibrant community could be saved.
Throughout the summer of 2020, I noticed that the weather in Colorado was hot and dry. Denver set a record for the number of days that were at or above ninety degrees. Coupled with the warmer than usual temperatures, rainfall was less than 10 percent of normal and most areas of the state were either abnormally dry or in extreme drought.
Colorado was not alone that summer in facing a catastrophic wildfire season. Fires destroyed 5.8 million acres in California, Oregon, and Washington. In addition to burning an area larger than the state of New Jersey, the record-setting fires burned hundreds of homes and caused thirty-six people to lose their lives.
Scientists have attributed the expansive growth in the wildfire season to climate change. As the amount of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gasses in the atmosphere has increased, the weather across the West has become warmer and drier. As a result, fire seasons during the past two decades have started earlier, lasted longer, and burned hotter while the average acreage lost to wildfires has tripled.[5]
When news reports displayed pictures of the burn areas along the Pacific coast, I willed myself to believe that the fires were far away, happening somewhere else, and unlikely to threaten my life. Even after historically large fires broke out in Colorado, I convinced myself they would soon be extinguished.
Only a few months before the East Troublesome fire broke out, I was surprised when a hazy layer of thick smoke obscured the nearby peaks that I could usually see from the deck of the vacation cabin we own near Winter Park. After a large plume of smoke from California mixed with the smog emanating from several Colorado fires, health officials warned those with respiratory problems to stay inside. Unsure how hazardous my usual hike along the nearby mountain trails might be, I spent the afternoon cleaning a thin layer of ash from our outdoor furniture. Life, I assumed, would soon return to normal and the skies would once again become a more typical shade of crystalline blue.
In mid-August when I learned that the Williams Fork Fire was only seven miles away from our cabin, I became concerned. Yet, I remained confident that the Grand County firefighters would be successful in creating a solid perimeter to keep the fire from advancing as more than three hundred firefighters battled to keep the blaze from crossing the Williams Fork and Bobtail Creek near Jones Pass. Unfortunately, despite their efforts, the fire stubbornly remained only twenty-five percent contained.
Two months later, when the East Troublesome fire broke out, I wondered why I had been so sanguine. The wildfires that summer seemed to be getting closer and showed no signs of being stamped out. As the risk that my family might have to evacuate started to become more real, I wondered what we would be able to save and what memories we would have to leave behind. When my husband and I purchased our wood-framed cabin twelve years earlier, we chose not to furnish it with anything valuable, but the space was, nonetheless, filled with items we considered to be irreplaceable.
The cabin walls were filled with my husband’s oil paintings while my grandmother’s needlepoint pillows decorated the living room sofa. The one-hundred-year-old rug in the family room once graced my father’s childhood home while the pictures on the mantle traced decades of winter vacations. It seemed improbable that we might lose it all, but the threat was becoming harder to ignore.
Throughout the summer of 2020, my family had accommodated the changes in Colorado’s weather by running our air conditioner more frequently and keeping the trees in our backyard well-watered. My attention was caught by what was missing. Every fall, I loved to watch the honking Canada geese that flew overhead in large V-shaped flocks. Since Colorado winters have become warmer, increasing numbers of migrating birds have been drawn to the state’s open waters, mowed grass, and few natural predators. In 2019 the city of Denver even embarked on a controversial decision to cull the burgeoning population of geese that were making our local parks and golf courses their permanent home.
During the summer of 2020, the skies appeared to be strangely silent. The flock of geese that usually moved back and forth from a neighboring high school to a nearby golf course had disappeared. Even the noisy crows which liked to pester my dog were gone.
Some of the birds may have adjusted their southerly migration paths to avoid Colorado’s smoky skies. Yet, others appeared to have succumbed to the hazardous air. In western Colorado, bird watchers reported finding hundreds of dead migratory birds, a phenomenon also observed in New Mexico and West Texas. Wildlife veterinarians discovered the birds were suffering from malnutrition and may have died from extreme drops in temperature. While birds have sensitive respiratory systems, the extent to which the smoke-filled skies contributed to their demise was still under investigation.
I began to wonder what other birds might be disappearing around me. We were happy when the Northern Flicker which annually poked a hole in the wood siding behind our Denver home did not return. Were there also fewer robins and bluebirds? Apparently, there were. Studies have shown that the bird population in North America has dropped by twenty-nine percent since 1970. Across the country, three billion birds including America’s most common species have disappeared due to habitat loss and the use of pesticides.[6]
After smoke clouded our skies during the summer of 2020, I wondered what a drop in the bird population might mean for me. Could their reduced numbers be a warning like the proverbial canaries in the coal mines that alerted miners when the air was becoming too poisonous?
In my mental map of the world, I tend to view the environment around me as stable. While I can easily accommodate day-to-day shifts in Colorado’s rapidly changing weather, I find it harder to recognize that the climate I take for granted is irrevocably changing. Colorado’s summers seem warmer, and the winters produce fewer snowstorms. These trends have not forced me to change the way I live. By contrast, Colorado’s dryland farmers have struggled as the state’s extended drought has continued from summer to summer. The state’s ski resorts have also been forced to adjust to a declining annual snowpack and earlier patterns of seasonal snowmelt.
Colorado has experienced cycles of dry weather in the past, yet periods of extreme drought are becoming more frequent and more intense. Climatologists refer to the current patterns of recurring drought in the Western United States as a megadrought caused by climate change. According to Brad Udall, a water and climate researcher at Colorado State University, our situation has become the new abnormal. “Frankly, our climate is not stable,” he said. ‘It’s changing underneath us. And as bad as this is, it could get worse.”[7]
Two days after the East Troublesome fire broke out, the Rocky Mountain region was covered by an early snowfall that dropped between six to twelve inches of welcome moisture, enough to dampen the wildfires, but not enough to extinguish them, particularly when gusty winds threatened to reignite the flames. A week later, the temperatures in the Denver metropolitan area hovered in the mid-70s. The sky was clear, and the air quality was in the healthy zone. Yet, in the Grand Lake area, smoky particulate matter lingered and those with breathing problems were cautioned to stay inside. Weeks after the fire started, the risk of it coming back to life had not diminished.
An unprecedented event like the East Troublesome fire can easily be viewed as a rare occurrence that has not happened in the past and is unlikely to happen in the future, but it is also possible that our smoke-filled skies are here to stay. Rather than being a one-time incident, the East Troublesome fire could be a harbinger for a future in which intense wildfires cover more acreage and burn with more intensity. The trends are hard to ignore, as the risks to our lives creep ever closer. More troubling is the possibility that our opportunities to reverse this future appear to be evaporating. Our smoke-filled skies may indeed be the future that awaits us.
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[1] Lizarraga, Lori, “The East Troublesome Fire Burned Through Part of Grand Lake Wednesday Night,” https://www.9news.com/article/news/local/wildfire/east-troublesome-fire-security-doorbell-video/73-6b5c1271-eb59-4995-b608-ea0450be05e2, Accessed October 25, 2020.
[2] Duggan, Kevin, “What we Know Friday: East Troublesome Fire Conditions to Worsen Before They Get Better,” Fort Collins Coloradan, October 23, 2020, https://www.coloradoan.com/story/news/2020/10/23/east-troublesome-fire-live-coverage-friday-what-we-know/3735745001/, Accessed October 23, 2020.
[3] Oxner, Reese, “Colorado Fire Grows by Over 100,000 Acres in One Day, Hits Rocky Mountain National Park,” National Public Radio, October 22, 2020, https://www.npr.org/2020/10/22/926838887/colorado-fire-grows-by-over-100-000-acres-in-1-day-hits-rocky-mountain-national-/, Accessed October 22, 2020.
[4] Sylte, Allison, “Photos Show Red Skies in Estes Park, Smoke Plume Visible from Front Range as East Troublesome Fire Grows,” 9News, October 22, 2020, https://www.9news.com/article/news/local/wildfire/east-troublesome-fire-photos-views-red-skies-smoke/73-c2587990-3dd4-42ed-a6b5-3da09f2b0298/, Accessed October 22, 2020.
[5] Whang, Oliver and Taylor Maggiacomo, “Western Wildfires have now Burned an Area Bigger than New Jersey,” National Geographic, September 29, 2020. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/09/western-wildfires-have-now-burned-area-bigger-than-new-jersey/, Accessed October 27, 2020.
[6] Peterson, Deborah, “As Wildfire Smoke Blots Out the Sun in Northern California, Many Ask: ‘Where Are the Birds?’” Inside Climate News, September 11, 2020. https://insideclimatenews.org/news/10092020/california-wildfire-smoke-birds-climate-change, Accessed October 27, 2020.
[7] Sakas, Michael Elizabeth, “Colorado Wildfires Are Climate Change ‘In the Here and Now’ – and a Sign of Summers to Come,” CPR News, August 20,2020, https://www.cpr.org/2020/08/20/colorado-wildfires-climate-change-drought-snowpack/, Accessed October 29, 2020.
About Kaia Gallagher
She/Her/Hers
As a Colorado-based author, Kaia Gallagher enjoys experimenting with creative non-fiction formats that blend memoir with fact-based reporting. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of California-Riverside and a Ph.D. in Sociology from Brown University.
Website: https://kaiagallagher.com
Instagram: kgall007