In the Line of Fire

Photography by George Kochaniec, Jr, Rocky Mountain News

It all started surreptitiously. An arm of an underground fire, born in a Colorado coal mine closed 70 years ago, burned up toward the surface of the earth, creating a subterranean pocket that caused ground in Glenwood Springs, Colo., to buckle and collapse. Sparks, perhaps even flames, emerged and ignited straw-dry scrub and oak brush. In high winds, the sparks flew miles ahead of the rising flames.

The fire jumped the Colorado River and a four-lane highway, spreading forward, backward, and up slopes; it would be "zero percent controlled" for days, while here in the Roaring Fork Valley we winced at every 40- and 50-mph gust. In the town of Carbondale, 12 miles up valley from the conflagration in Glenwood, people drifted and murmured in little tight knots in the streets, watching the pinpricks of flames lining the dark U of the valley.

Beginning on June 11, 2002, those of us in the valley spent days hunched over radios or driving and hiking to vantage points where we could glimpse the spreading fire. Hundreds of Glenwood homes were evacuated, while the National Guard cleared prisoners from the Glenwood jail to a temporary facility at the Carbondale Middle School.

After four days, evacuees were allowed home, and I drove my two sons down the valley to see the sight that would hold a permanent place in our area's history. Halfway to town, as we rounded a bend, we saw, on the skyline of the Flattop Mountains above and behind town, three waving geysers of flame. Above them billowed opaque brown and black clouds, mushroom piled on mushroom. The first column was pencil thin and the next thicker, both diminishing and rising as trees exploded. The third column was fat, oscillating, jellylike.

"Oh, my god!" shouted Roy, 5, clapping both hands onto his cheeks —unabashedly thrilled at the spectacle. "Oh, my god!" For once, I didn't correct the expression.

Eight years before, on July 6, 1994, our region had lost 14 firefighters on Storm King Mountain, a sentinel west of Glenwood. I still remember walking around Carbondale that day, pushing a baby stroller in the baking heat, suddenly seeing the silvery, flashing undersides of leaves whipping in the wind. That evening someone phoned with the dreadful news of the lives lost in a blowup that blasted black clouds thousands of feet in the sky.

I couldn't help but think of that day—that fire—on the drive to Glenwood. On the ridge of Red Mountain, the dusk sky limned perfectly spaced black toothpicks. Just around the ridge, the mountain's long red flanks looked like sand dunes, denuded of even the smallest of green scraps.

We parked by the slow river, the kids quiet now. In dusk, we watched as low discrete pockets of flame glittered against the inky slopes around us. Storm King was burning again.

Driving the slow miles back up valley, I searched for meaning, for the ideas—about understanding the power of nature, about respecting the unexpected in the mountains—that I'd tried to seed in the children's minds when we hiked the firefighters' Memorial Trail on Storm King the summer before. But all I could really think about was distance. With each passing mile marker, I began to feel a little more comfortable. "See, guys," I said, "doesn't it make you feel better to see how far away the flames are."

"Not that far," Teddy responded.

During a frenetic thunderstorm a few summers ago, the baby sitter and our kids saw lightning hit a tree on the ridge a quarter mile below our house. We had moved from town just before Roy was born, to a house atop a sandy hill—and atop a piñon-juniper forest, twisty and dry. The terrain is just like that of Storm King, except that we lack a stand of Gambel oak at the bottom, a key element in the conflagration.

Our sitter had the wit to call his mother, who wisely told him to keep watching the tree even after the rain pounded down the glowing flames. After that incident, we phoned the fire chief, who kindly visited our house, and we shared costs with Forest Service grants to do fire-mitigation work on the trees surrounding the house.

Last summer I wanted to have more work done, but realized that with winds laying down 200-foot flames, we couldn't do enough. At a neighborhood Fourth of July party, one friend circulated word that if the worst happened, neighbors should head for the dirt corral at his house.

Four fires occurred within a half-hour drive of our home, two of them six miles away in either direction, and visible from the window. I remember driving to pick up the kids at school and the sick drop in my stomach when I spied one of the nearby fires—yet another black column a thousand feet in the sky. The closest fire had been caused by a dry lightning strike; another by construction workers cutting rebar. Friends helped friends who had to evacuate—moved their possessions, led out their horses. We all made lists and gathered papers. Beneath my T-shirt, I wore what little jewelry of value I own.

My eyes itched and burned constantly. One day I went rock climbing in Rifle Mountain Park, passing the flames of a lightning-sparked fire in New Castle on the way. Despite mad blinking, I could not focus on the footholds, and gave up.
Three of the fires lasted until the January snows; fire still creeps underground, smoldering beneath stumps and in pine duff, the mulch of generations of spruce needles. We are lucky the wind died in Glenwood, or we might have lost all of the town above the river. We are lucky the fire didn't go further, taking out a
hundred homes or more, as the Hayman fire near Denver did. And this summer, we hold our breath and pray it doesn't happen again.

Alison Osius '80 is a 15-year resident of the Roaring Fork Valley and
senior editor ofRock and Icemagazine. She lives in Carbondale with her husband and two sons.

Photograph reprinted with permission of theRocky Mountain News