by Pam Houston
Dead Fuels: Fuels with no living tissue in which moisture content is governed almost entirely by atmospheric moisture (relative humidity and precipitation), dry-bulb temperature, and solar radiation (USDA Forest Service Fire Terminology).
By the morning of June 13, the fire has blown up to 150 acres, due, the National Forest Service’s InciWeb site tells us, “to topography, fuel loading, and outflow winds from thunderstorms in the area.” When I’m not looking out the window, I’m looking at InciWeb, which updates the size of the fire every twelve hours and informs us, among other things, what equipment we are being assigned. We started out with a ten-person Type 2 hand crew, one Type 6 engine and a Type 3 incident commander, and today we’ve added an additional ten-person hand crew, two Type 2 helicopters and one Type 3 helicopter. On the Glossary of Wildland Fire Terminology website I learn that a hand crew is a team of eighteen to twenty firefighters assigned to construct fire lines and firebreaks using hand tools, chain saws and drip torches, and that a Type 1 resource provides greater overall firefighting capability, due to power and size, than would be found in a Type 2 resource. Firefighters are on scene, InciWeb assures me, to provide structure protection to cabins and outbuildings on private property.
Also on June 13, a second fire, one they will name the Windy Pass Fire, starts by lightning, and burns 5 to 6 acres on the south side of Highway 160, not all that far from where the West Fork Fire is burning on the north side of the same road. Twenty-seven people are at work fighting the Windy Pass Fire by Friday the fourteenth, and an additional twenty-person crew is on order.
The West Fork Fire is not the first fire that has threatened the ranch since I have owned it, and I know it will not be the last. In 2002—in another hot rainless June—the Missionary Ridge Fire burned for forty smoke-filled days and nights and devastated nearly 73,000 acres of forest, destroying forty-six houses and cabins, and costing $40.8 million to suppress. The Missionary Ridge was what is known as a crown fire, the type that moves rapidly through a forest canopy—treetop to treetop, with flames reaching 250 feet in length or height—instead of on the ground. The Missionary Ridge Fire did all kinds of things normal wildland fires aren’t supposed to do. It burned downhill, for instance, when it is in fire’s nature to rise. It burned right through giant stands of aspen, which sometimes can slow or stop a fire because of the high moisture content in their trunks. When the Missionary Ridge Fire started it was many miles and several mountain passes away from the ranch, but its behavior was so erratic, no one in the region felt safe.
In 2002, there were only isolated stands of beetle kill, but conditions were so hot, dry and windy that summer the fire began making weather of its own, churning up powerful winds inside its self-created vortex, sending columns of smoke and ash up to a mile wide that rose to 40,000 feet and caused birds to fall dead out of the sky. Burning chunks of wood were carried 10,000 feet high, and when the column of hot air that was supporting them cooled and collapsed, the embers fell into unburnt forests, igniting them too, burning through 10,000 acres in a day. Eighteen hundred homes were evacuated as the fire twisted and turned unpredictably, making 50 mph runs up mountain ridges and creating fire tornados with winds of more than 100 mph that turned over vehicles and blew down whole stands of trees. Firefighters stopped talking about how to contain the fire and tried instead to “herd it” away from people’s homes. The San Juan Basin was designated the driest spot in the nation that year, moisture inside the conifers and ponderosa pines fell below 5 percent (boards stacked in lumberyards normally have moisture content of 12 percent), which meant if a spark hit the ground there was a 100 percent probability of ignition. The prevailing winds in southwestern Colorado are easterly, and the Missionary Ridge Fire lay directly to our west.
Then, on June 19, 2002, just when firefighters started to get the Missionary Ridge Fire into the very first percentages of containment, the Million Fire started thirty miles southeast of the ranch near the town of South Fork, burning nearly 10,000 acres and eleven homes. We were smoked in for a month no matter which way the wind blew. Longtime Creede residents packed up their belongings, put For Sale signs on their houses and headed to more watery places—Portland, Oregon, or upstate New York. In 2002, we were made aware and uncomfortable by our proximity to the fire, but we were never put on standby to evacuate. Even at its closest, the Missionary Ridge Fire never got closer than twenty-five miles from the ranch.
The West Fork Fire, however, is walking distance from the ranch—a serious day of walking, to be undertaken by a serious walker, because of the 12,000-foot mountains that make up most of the terrain between. Also, in the eleven years since the Missionary Ridge Fire, we have gained half a million standing beetle-killed trees.
A thing that sets me apart from a lot of other people on the planet, and connects me intensely to others, is that for all of my childhood and some of my adulthood, I believed if I stopped paying strict attention my father would kill me or, if not kill me, do such irreparable damage to my life I would become as miserable as he. My father was in assisted living in 2002 when the Missionary Ridge Fire was running seven miles a day toward the ranch, but I still thought, as I always think when I am afraid, Here he is, finally coming for me. In June 2013, eight years after his death, I thought it again.
An infrared flight on Friday night, June 14, reports the West Fork Fire has grown to 470 acres, mostly into the Burro Creek drainage, and is officially listed as zero percent contained. Sixty-seven people are now assigned to the fire, digging hand lines and conducting small burn-out operations, trying to secure the south flank assisted by a Type 1 and a Type 2 helicopter that are dropping water on the ridge to the west of Borns Lake, trying to keep the fire from moving on to private lands. The crew has also started reducing hazardous fuels, clearing brush and laying hose in case structure protection is needed. This afternoon, firefighters helped safely evacuate thirteen backpackers from along the West Fork Trail and Rainbow Hot Springs.
Burn Out: Setting fire inside a control line to widen it or consume fuel between it and the edge of the fire. (As distinguished from a backfire, or backburn, which is a fire set along the inner edge of a fire line to consume the fuel in the fire’s path and/or to change the direction of the fire’s convection column.) (Glossary of Wildland Fire Terminology).
On June 15, Greg, newly arrived for his summer visit, calls me into the kitchen to show me a plume out the window, a thin whisper of smoke rising behind and to the right of Red Mountain. It’s innocuous, really—no wider than a contrail. We scan the internet looking for reports of this newer, closer fire, but upon finding nothing, we can only conclude the West Fork Fire is growing quickly, and growing straight toward us.
A few hours later InciWeb confirms the fire has more than tripled in size, growing to 1,700 acres by midnight. The growth was primarily northward in the Weminuche Wilderness, but the fire has also expanded east and west and has crossed the West Fork River near Beaver Creek. The Windy Pass Fire also made a significant run on the fifteenth as it raced through pockets of dead and down fuel and it has grown to 108 acres.
For public and firefighter safety, the West Fork Trail has been closed. Please do not call 911 to report an outside smoke haze or an outside smell of burning wood, especially if it is occurring in the morning. If you see a smoke column (that is not up near Wolf Creek Pass) at any time please call 911 (The Pagosa Springs Sun, June 15, 2013).
Spanning the Continental Divide and accounting for huge portions of both the San Juan and the Rio Grande national forests is the Weminuche Wilderness, which, at two-thirds the size of Rhode Island, is the largest wilderness area in the state (780.9 square miles). Both the Colorado and Rio Grande rivers make it all the way from their headwaters in the Weminuche to the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, respectively. The average elevation inside the wilderness is 10,000 feet. It contains three peaks that rise over 14,000 feet (Eolus, Sunlight and Windom) and many others that rise above 13,000 feet. The Weminuche is among the most rugged countr
y in the Continental United States and, as the spruce beetle has proven, some of the most fragile. I can walk easily into the Weminuche right from my back fence.
Wilderness is the highest form of protection of any U.S. wildland and there are currently 110 million acres with this designation. No roads, vehicles or permanent structures are allowed in a wilderness, nor mining, nor logging. As far as I am concerned this is all good news. But because the Weminuche is a designated wilderness, there are restrictions on how the forest service is allowed to fight any fire inside its borders.
On June 16 I’m scheduled to leave the ranch and drive to Aspen to teach for a week at the Aspen Summer Words writing conference. From there I’m scheduled to fly to Oregon for another week of teaching, and another week teaching in Big Sur after that. Greg will stay and tend the ranch. We talk about worst-case scenarios. He will keep the dogs with him at all times. As long as we are given notice before evacuation, we have friends with stock trailers who’ll help us evacuate the equines. If there’s no time to come back a second time with the trailer, Greg will turn the sheep loose and let them fend for themselves.
“I’m not leaving,” Greg says. “I’ll be the crazy guy on the news, here with the hose trained on the roof.”
“Please leave,” I beg, numbly throwing my teacher clothes into a suitcase, “if they say you have to. But if you stay, give the barn roof a squirt too.”
The West Fork and Windy Pass fires are now being managed as a complex called the West Fork Complex. A National Incident Management Team (NIMO) has been ordered with a Type 2 configuration. The structure of the NIMO teams allow them a great deal of flexibility in terms of ramping firefighting resources up or down as needed. NIMO teams are also structured to allow for management of longer-term incidents and free up the Type 3 team to be available for new starts in southwest Colorado.
Forest Service campgrounds at West Fork and East Fork are both open as are the private campgrounds in the West Fork area (The Pagosa Springs Sun, June 16, 2013).
On June 16, as I drive over Independence Pass to Aspen, the West Fork Fire grows from 1,700 acres to more than 2,500. As I put more and more miles between myself and the ranch, the winds are pushing the fire straight toward it, up the Beaver Creek drainage and all the way to Elk Creek. As I am unpacking my clothes into sleek white drawers at the world-famous think tank known as the Aspen Institute, firefighters are seeing “extreme behavior” with embers traveling up to a mile ahead of the main fire. As I am eating stuffed mushroom caps and puffed pastries at the conference’s opening soirée, helicopters continue to make drops to cool the south flank of the fire (which is not my flank of the fire), and firefighters are putting in more structural protection around cabins.
On the other side of Highway 160, the Windy Pass Fire grows to 129 acres in such steep terrain it can be fought by helicopter only, while ground crews put in structural protection at Wolf Creek Ski Area in case the fire decides to make a sudden run.
On the morning of June 17, as I walk through the heavily watered and landscaped grounds of the Aspen Institute on my way to class, the total acreage for the West Fork Complex has reached 3,280 and the transition to the NIMO team is under way. The total cost for the two fires so far is estimated at $411,000.
By the time I am done with class on Tuesday the eighteenth, the complex has grown to 4,070 acres, moving north toward the ranch and making some short runs, InciWeb reports, up to the 11,000-foot level.
The Divide behind my house will, I pray, provide some protection. It is higher than 12,000 feet in most places, and 12,000 feet is where the trees run out. There’s a lot of tundra meadow up there that should slow the fire down, as well as a lot of rock. The fire should run out of both oxygen and fuel before it has a chance to cross over. But just to the east of Red Mountain, up at the top of Ivy Creek drainage above Goose Lake, there is a relatively low spot where the trees climb all the way to the top.
Greg reports the last two days have been less windy with more cloud cover and more moisture in the air, but if it dries out again and the prevailing winds kick up from the southwest, if sparks start traveling again, a mile or more ahead of the fire, what would keep a few of those sparks from sailing over the Divide and landing in the dead trees up Copper Creek Basin on our side? And if it does cross over, with a southwesterly wind behind it, there will be virtually nothing between the fire and the ranch but a few tens of thousands of trees, most of them beetle-kill spruce.
On Tuesday night in Aspen, after giving a reading in a state-of-the-art theater and being taken out for some of the most expensive sushi in America, I sit up all night refreshing my computer, waiting for InciWeb to update the perimeter of the fire after their nightly infrared photography flight. Even though my laptop is small and the topo lines are blurry and in some cases, I believe, inaccurate, I have memorized the map on the site with the red burn border that has been spreading like the albumen of an egg on a skillet.
When I ask myself why I am doing this, rather than sleeping in my sleek white bed with a quality mattress and high-thread-count sheets, the only answer is I want to know the moment the fire jumps the Divide. I want to catch it at its jumping. I want to know precisely when the flames become visible outside my kitchen window. I want to be awake when the fire starts altering my personal landscape forever.
Any reasonable, self-caring person scheduled to teach twenty-one full days in a row without a single day off would take themselves the hell to bed. To say nothing of the readings, and panels, and the endless infernal mandatory cocktail parties. But in every picture that exists of me as a child I have rings around my eyes so dark I look anemic. Staying awake all night never kept my father from hurting me, but I wanted to know in advance when it was going to happen. I couldn’t bear it if it took me by surprise.
So tonight, I’ll stay awake and be with my ranch, with my barn, and with Greg—virtually—to help them face the fire. I know I can’t keep sparks off my barn roof all the way from Aspen, any more than I can raise a horse’s body temperature by watching the plummeting numbers on Weather Underground, but that does nothing to assuage the fear that if I take my eyes off this computer, all freaking hell might break loose.
Extreme Fire Behavior: “Extreme” implies a level of fire behavior characteristics that ordinarily precludes methods of direct control action. One or more of the following is usually involved: high rate of spread, prolific crowning and/or spotting, presence of fire whirls, strong convection column. Predictability is difficult because such fires often exercise some degree of influence on their environment and behave erratically, sometimes dangerously (USDA Forest Service Fire Terminology).
Spotting: Behavior of a fire producing sparks or embers that are carried by the wind and which start new fires (spot fires) beyond the zone of direct ignition by the main fire. A cascade of spot fires can cause a blowup (Glossary of Wildland Fire Terminology).
Eleven years ago, on June 8, 2002, a forestry technician named Terry Barton started a fire in a campfire ring in the Pike National Forest between Colorado Springs and Denver, thereby starting the largest wildfire in Colorado’s recorded history, burning 138,114 acres and 133 homes. One resident and five firefighters died as a result of the blaze. The fire cost $40 million to suppress and caused another $40 million in property loss.
When questioned, Barton claimed she started the fire, in spite of a total burn ban that was in effect, attempting to burn a letter from her estranged husband. One of her teenaged daughters eventually testified the letter was actually written by Barton herself. A psychology teacher had told Barton to write her feelings towards her ex-husband into a letter and burn it. Apparently, the teacher did not specify a locale.
Professional firefighters suggested Terry Barton might have set the fire on purpose, so she could fight a local fire instead of being called away from her family to fight fires in other states. Psychiatrists speculated Barton started the fire so she could heroically put it out and save the forest. But I like the daughter’s
version best, where she burns her own letter and then lies about it, because of the precise gut-punching combo of empathy and disgust it evokes in me. Who ever thinks they are going to start the largest fire in Colorado history? Nobody. But I have been encouraged to write and to burn such a letter. I have been compelled, in the face of calamity, to tell a tiny, face-saving lie.
On Wednesday morning, June 19 at 8:00 a.m., a red flag warning is issued for the area containing the West Fork Fire. Drier air has moved into the area, and warm and windy conditions are predicted for at least four days. Stage 1 fire restrictions are put into effect, though InciWeb assures us there is no immediate danger to Highway 160, Wolf Creek Ski Area, nor the towns of South Fork and Creede. Also today, NIMO will assume management of the fire. Curtis Heaton, the NIMO incident commander, thanks the Durango Interagency Zone Type 3 team for the great work they did. In other words: “Step aside, locals, the big guns from National are here!” The arrival of the NIMO team means more money, more firefighters, more helicopters, more engines, more technology and more and more professional updates.
By the time I finish teaching my class on the afternoon of the nineteenth, Greg has sent me the first pictures of what looks less like a fire and more like the detonation of a nuclear bomb over the Continental Divide between the ranch and the town of Creede, several miles east of where we saw that first wisp of smoke. To say the fire has grown today would be like calling Hurricane Katrina a really hard rain. The 6:30 p.m. update confirms the afternoon’s red flag conditions have caused extreme fire behavior and the West Fork Fire has, in one day, tripled in size, growing from 3,879 acres to 12,001. It has moved deeper into the Weminuche Wilderness, running farther up the West Fork and Beaver Creek drainages where in many places it has run into rock. A smoke plume has risen to 30,000 feet above sea level and is visible from communities within a 75-mile radius. Flames are leaping more than 100 feet above the trees and communities 150 miles away are filling with smoke, including the city of Pueblo. As of six thirty, the fire has still not jumped the Continental Divide.