The week before mom passed in August of 2020, I was in a janky, nervous mood and needed to get rid of some energy. August is perfect for hiking in the colder high country above 10,000 feet. I’ve wanted to go see Blue Lake, shown here with a shoulder of Cameron Peak on the left. The Poudre River watershed is Fort Collins’ secret backyard with lots of trails but without the crowds of Rocky Mountain National Forest just to the south. This idyllic alpine setting is about 50 miles as the crow flies up the Cache Le Poudre River from Fort Collins. Something came up, and I didn’t take the hike and still have not seen Blue Lake.
The Cameron Peak Fire (200,000+ acres) started that week on August 13th. It started further on the trail down near the road. In the first few days it pushed uphill, but ran out of steam (fuel?) before making it up to Blue Lake. Then it pushed north for weeks consuming tens of thousands of acres. In September, the winds came from the north and west, and the fire turned to threaten the town of Red Feather Lakes and then turned again to jump south of the Poudre River to find more rich forest land.
Fifty miles to the north, the Mullen Fire (175,000 acres) burned the southern half of Medicine Bow National Forest. Between the two fires and another smaller one over in Steamboat Springs, wind direction became everything here in town. For the last two months we have been IN the Plume or OUT of it. First thing in the morning we open the back door, take a whiff, and look for where The Plume is. I check wind forecasts and plume forecasts (yes, there is such a thing!), before going out for the day. Masks are for breathing during smoke events more than for the pandemic. We experienced nighttime at noon just a couple times, with just the vaguest red circle for the sun. Sometimes a few days would go by with no smoke, depending on wind direction or how much loft and mixing the smoke did in the mountains.
On bad days the ash falls. This has happened about ten days over the last two months. There are few things that I have experienced that are more soul sapping than ash fall. It didn’t help, I am sure, that mom passed during the first week of the fire after months of being locked down in an assisted living facility due to the pandemic, fighting through dementia and unclear why no one ever visited her. There was a sense of hopelessness. There was simply nothing we could do but to keep sweeping up the ash, sometimes twice in a day. Between Cameron Peak fire and the millions of acres in California, all my favorite places were burning. Yesterday we had a little ash without smoke, which was quite bizarre. Everyday is different.
The Cameron Peak Fire has burned over 200,000 acres, an area approximately 10 miles by 30 miles. Last week it blew up again, growing by 80,000 acres over two days of hot dry winds. At its eastern edge, it burned the hill across the road from a house we almost bought, and then jumped the road and burned a patch of thirty buildings further east.
I had not explored much of the Upper Poudre in the couple years since we returned to Colorado, and it will be a few years before it will again be a nice place to be. Most of the Lower Poudre burned in the High Park Fire (87,000 acres) of 2012. That land is just starting to recover from the scars, and didn’t have enough fuel to support this fire. I think we are safe in town, but too many unthinkably horrendous things have happened in 2020 for one to completely discount the possibility. Keep referring back to the Serenity Prayer and this too shall pass.
There is no sign of The Plume or smell of smoke today. We’ll see what tomorrow brings.
Update: The following day, our weather was fine until 3 PM when the sun turned red and we started to get a light dusting of ash fall. Cameron Peak Fire has a friend. A new fire to the south (lower blob) blew up overnight, jumping the headwaters of the Colorado River and pushed into Rocky Mountain National Park. A heavy September snowstorm stopped the East Troublesome fire at 193,000 acres, sparing the town of Estes Park and most of the park.
by Tony Brown on 22 October, 2020