Column by Hal Walter
Wildfires – June 2002 – Colorado Central
IN APRIL, AS I was jogging through what is normally a grassy park but is now a sandlot punctuated by sun-scorched, wind-parched, flat-grazed bunches of dead grass, I thought it odd that clouds of grasshoppers flew with every step. There were hundreds of them, like some sort of Biblical prophesy. Grasshoppers in April? I really didn’t need any extra evidence that the climate has truly gone berserk. But this was only the kicker.
The winter was colder and windier than normal, and there was no snow to speak of here in the Wet Mountains. In fact, there has really been no appreciable moisture since last summer. April was obscenely warm and dry. In effect, the country has been freeze-dried.
The hummingbirds showed up a couple of weeks late this year only to find a few parched wild crocuses dotting a tawny countryside. A flock of grackles showed up and I’ve never seen grackles here before. The piñon trees have a rusty look to them. The air in the timber smells like kiln-dried lumber. Many days the sky turns almost black with clouds, like a scene out of The Grapes of Wrath. But it doesn’t rain.
The latest Custer County joke: “Do you have your summer hay in?” But it’s really no joke. And the main topic of conversation at the grocery or coffee shop is about static levels and well depths. Actually it’s a bragging point. Instead of acres and square footage, gallons per minute is now the status symbol. Those of us who never bragged about the former and know better than to boast about the latter have strategically placed chunks of granite in the tanks of our toilets and resorted to two-minute drills in the shower.
One afternoon my phone rang. Actually it rings incessantly most afternoons, as I am very popular with some folks Back East who want to make sure I am editing their newsletter and books and not napping. But this call was different. It was one of my neighbors. “Have you seen the smoke cloud on the south horizon?” I walked out to the front porch and looked up. And up. Sure enough, there was a cloud of smoke towering over the ridge to the south. From this angle, and considering the constant gale, it was tough to determine just where the smoke was coming from or how far I was from the source.
I called the sheriff’s office and was told that the fire was over by Cuerno Verde and Eastcliffe, which is quite a ways southwest of here. Not to worry. I made a business call and when I got off the phone there was a frantic message from Vicki Livingston, calling from Denver: “Hal, there’s a fire heading right for my ranch. I need you to take your trailer over and help move my horses and burros. Thank you.” Click.
I have known Vicki for a few years and in fact one of my jacks was born on her ranch. She has several adopted wild burros and a number of horses. While driving there along the spookily deserted Rosita road, I thought that not many of Vicki’s animals are trained to be caught, much less loaded. And I wondered about what I was going to see and experience. How close would I be to the fire? When I topped the rise at Blumenau, I had my first real view of the fire and realized that it really was headed toward her ranch.
As I neared Vicki’s gate, crews were clearing a fire line along the county road. Trees were being cut, and the earth was being bladed. Between the fire line and the road it would require a long jump for the fire to continue.
THE ENTRANCE TO Vicki’s ranch was sort of a “command post” with a sheriff’s deputy and other officials crowded around. The fire was lapping against the road across from the main ranch and it had actually already burned one of her pastures, straight upwind from her house. Firefighters scurried in all directions, and planes and helicopters buzzed overhead. The consensus seemed to be that the fire would be contained there at the road.
The sheriff’s deputy told me to go on in to the ranch to help load the animals and so I drove on in. I couldn’t find anyone in the thick smoke. Then a breeze came through and cleared the air enough for me to see some people, horses, and trailers on the east end of the pasture.
To get there I had to drive back out of the driveway and around on the county road. This involved driving right past some flames that were licking against the road where the bulldozer was working. Just as I drew near, the bulldozer stirred up a dense amber-black cloud of smoke and dust. It was so thick I couldn’t see past my windshield. I stopped and sat there. I wondered if flames had passed over my truck. Then the wind whipped the air slightly and I was able to creep through the dark cloud and continue on my way.
When I got around to the other side of the property I found Vicki’s caretaker, Maura, along with some neighbors. There were about a half-dozen crazed horses running around in that pasture. In another pasture standing near the top of a steep hill were 13 wild burros whose last experience involving helicopters was when they were captured in Grand Canyon.
Now a helicopter was passing back and forth over us carrying buckets of water from a nearby pond. Slurry planes were flying directly overhead and making runs at the blaze. A spotter plane was circling.
Occasionally I could see flames amid the smoke, or notice as a small tree would burst into full blaze, erupting from the bottom up. Even though I was on the south edge of the plume, the smoke was dense in the air.
We decided to try to drive all the animals into the smallest pasture farthest from the fire, on the southeast corner of the property. That way Maura could wait it out, and if the fire turned that direction she could cut the fence and herd them away.
THIS WAS EASIER said than done. Just about every time we thought we had them cornered and heading toward the gate, a plane or helicopter would fly over and scare them off again. Finally we managed to get the horses into the pasture. The wild burros, including two foals, were actually not as tough to round up, even though they have not been handled much by humans. It still took a while because they turned on us a couple of times before going through the gate.
During the time that it took to round up the animals, the fire had veered to the northeast, following the county road and skirting Vicki’s property. The animals and Vicki’s ranch were now out of danger unless the wind shifted again.
When I left, the area right around Vicki’s place was mostly vacated. The action had moved on with the fire and the wind. From what I could see the fire was fueled not so much by mature trees, but by grass, pine needles and smaller trees. A short distance up the road there were flames on my left and then a little ways farther there were flames on my right. The firefighters moved through the smoke like helpless souls caught in a bad dream. The fire, with the whim of the wind, had headed north, then jumped both the fireline and the road. It would not be contained here.
As I drove away from all of this, one image stood out in my mind. When I was walking back to my truck after rounding up the animals, I saw a porcupine. Usually these animals are amblers, meandering in no general direction. But this porcupine was resolutely marching. She was moving quickly, almost at a run, and in a straight line, heading to the southeast.
Hal Walter’s summer motto is “Overgrazing Prevents Wildfires.” He lives in what are still called the Wet Mountains, even if the name is not appropriate this year.