Article by Mick Souder
Wildfires – July 2002 – Colorado Central Magazine
By 10 a.m. yesterday morning, I heard two chain-saws doing whatever it is they do when the neighborhood is a ponderosa forest during a drought on the edge of the San Juan Mountains and the Colorado Plateau. By 10:05 I only heard one chain-saw: mine. I was creating a brushless space around the log house we live in. I imagine that’s what the neighbors I couldn’t see (nor hear at that point) were doing as well.
Since the first of the year, Durango has gotten about an inch of precipitation. While most of Colorado has 19% of the normal snowpack for this time of year, the San Juans have 6%. Now we are going into our driest three months and the region already has a mid-summer brown look.
The kids are pretty nervous about being in the woods in weather as dry as this. It doesn’t help that we were only about eight miles as the wind blows from a fire in Breen that took two days to get under control. We could see the smoke, and Lisa swears there was ash falling on our house. (I didn’t see it.)
But that was a grass fire near the LaPlata River. If that took two days to put out, what’s going to happen if something sparks up here on the side of King Mountain where there are thousands of 60-foot trees for fuel and no moisture anywhere nearby? Maybe I’m a little nervous too.
Maybe that’s why — with every report of a fire — I make the perimeter a little bigger with my trusty Homelite 240.
I feel fortunate to work out of my home. I will most likely be here to do something if the fire hits the fan. I already know I need to grab the file cabinets, the computers (with my laptop and phonecard I can work from anywhere), the pictures, jewelry and cats (no problem getting them into the Eurovan — they like getting in the van every chance they get). The rest of the stuff? That’s why God invented insurance companies.
While I would expect a big check from an insurance company if something were to happen, I don’t expect — nor would I deserve — any sympathy if this whole area were to go up in flames. Western forests burn from time to time. And in some respects the forests around here are overdue.
One day a couple of years back, I was working a Bike Safety Rally for the Kiwanis of the Narrow Gauge. It was a slow time and I did what people here do when things get slow; I gawked at the countryside. A retired Forest Service guy was gawking with me and he pointed out a patch on a hill that had burned a few years before. The patch was denuded of brush and trees.
The old forester contrasted that bare patch with all the other hills and mountainsides that were full of oakbrush, piñon, and juniper, and said “If you look at pictures of Durango 100 years ago, the surrounding hillsides look like that patch” as opposed to the thick vegetation on the other hills. His implication, of course, is that fire is part of the circle of life in these parts — and that the efforts to repress fire may create a big conflagration someday.
The overgrowth and the drought make that a possibility this year — or if the drought continues for a couple of years, next year or the year after.
Ed Quillen, a columnist for the Denver Post, calls these mountain forests that an increasing number of people are moving into “the Stupid Zone,” as in: it’s stupid to try to live here. I accept that assessment. Right now I’m worried about fire, worried about the well running dry, worried about the bears digging through my garbage. Last night when the cat didn’t come home, I worried that the coyotes had gotten her. (I got up at 1:30 a.m. and found her hiding under the deck). Then I worried about how the mice will run amok if the coyotes eat the cat. In the winter, I worry that if it does snow, I’ll be stuck here for a week.
But at one point I stopped writing to watch a good size raptor fly around the nearby trees, and the trade-off seems to be a fair one.
If the fire comes, you won’t see me on TV complaining that the fire department didn’t save my home or that I was unlucky to be in the fire’s path. If someone were to interview me, I’ll say that I was grateful to live in a beautiful place, and it was fun while it lasted.
Meanwhile, I have oakbrush to clear….
Mick Souder is a free-lancer who works from his home in a dry Four Corners forest.