Review by Jeanne Englert
Wildfire – February 2003 – Colorado Central Magazine
Fire In the Sky – Colorado’s Missionary Ridge Fire
Published in 2002 by the Durango Herald<
ISBN 1-887805-04-4
ANYONE WHO CLOSELY FOLLOWED last summer’s Colorado wildfires, no matter where he lives, will want to buy Fire in the Sky, written and photographed by Durango Herald staff members.
Although this book focuses on the Missionary Ridge fire that raged just north and east of Durango, its story shares common elements with the other major conflagrations in Colorado in 2002, such as the Coal Seam fire near Glenwood Springs and the Hayman fire along the Front Range. Last summer tinder-dry conditions made cities, towns, overgrown forests (due to a half-century of fire suppression), and subdivisions in the “red zones” — what Ed Quillen calls the “Stupid Zones” — even more vulnerable than usual.
The Missionary Ridge fire began June 9, 2002. Special Agent Brenda Schultz of the U.S. Forest Service concluded that the cause was most likely a glowing carbon particle jolted from a vehicle exhaust pipe as someone negotiated the steep, washboarded dirt road near the first switchback on the first Missionary Ridge Road in the Upper Animas River valley, not far from Baker’s Bridge (where Butch Cassidy and the Sundance kid faked their famous leap in the movie of that name.)
By July 3, the 25th day of the fire, it had consumed 114 square miles, and it had become a Type I fire with 1,662 people assigned to it. A tent city of firefighters from New Hampshire to Seattle, Washington, had been erected at the La Plata County fairgrounds, a city within the city. It eventually cost over $40 million to contain, and in the aftermath, there were mudflows that threatened homes spared by the fire itself.
I quote directly from the Herald story:
“I wish I could stand up here and tell you that when the fire is contained, your worries would be over,” Kyle Zimmerman, chief engineer for Los Alamos County in New Mexico, told La Plata County residents. “You folks have to deal with the ash, the soil, the rocks, the trees. You’ll have these surges of water and debris that come down to the community. It may scare you.”
This 117-page book, printed on high-quality slick stock, does full justice to the hundreds of color photos taken by Herald staff photographers. These alone tell the story of the ferocity of the conflagration. The smoke plume rising up to 44,000 feet in the sky reminds one of the Mt. St. Helen’s volcanic eruption.
Accompanying the photos is an excellent text, which has all of the immediacy of the day-to-day reports in the Herald. The writing is so vivid I could feel the fire’s heat, smell the smoke, and hear the freight-train roar of its sound.
The sheer awe of this conflagration, captured in photos and described in the text, would be enough but the Herald staff never allows those pictures to detract from the story of the human beings who lived in the fire’s path nor of the heroic firefighters who fought it, one of whom died. One photo of a clearly exhausted firefighter is unforgettable as is a photo of a couple clutched in each other’s arms at the Bayfield school evacuation center. I would turn back to these photos again and again.
EVEN SMALL PHOTOS, such as one showing a handwritten note posted on a door, saying, “We are evacuated,” and a line in the text about how a La Plata County undersheriff entered homes of evacuees, collected framed family photos and keepsakes, and pitched them into the bed of his pickup to save them, gave me a feel for what the people who lived through it experienced as if I had been there.
Though far away, safe in Lafayette, I can nonetheless bring to this review personal experiences. I had two dear friends who were in danger in the Missionary Ridge fire. One lived just below Lemon reservoir, which, because of the drought, held only a fraction of the water it normally stores. The fire burned right through his property. He thwacked underbrush, cut off low lying tree branches and watered down his property right up to the last minute when the evacuation order came.
The other lives in the Hermosa trailer park near where the fire started. He was hoping that the bosque of cottonwood trees along the Animas River would create a buffer zone between him and his humble abode. But he got really scared when a collateral fire outbreak occurred on the other side of the Valley just after he saw a freaky reverse fire coming back down Missionary Ridge. The only thing that stopped the fire from burning the town was a fortuitous rockfall that had cleaved off from the valley cliffs a couple of years before, creating a natural firebreak.
By then, I was a TV junky watching the noon news, the four o’clock news, the six o’clock news, and the 10 o’clock news, and thinking that as long as their answering machines still had a voice, they were okay. Then, that awful night. Nothing. The phones were dead. The fire had destroyed the transmitter.
Another former Durangan, herself an evacuee in the 2000 Cerro Grande fire near Los Alamos, New Mexico, was also frantic with worry; she called, “Are they all right?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Can’t get through.”
The Herald’s book brings it all back. The awesome extent of the Missionary Ridge fire and the other fires raging in Colorado last summer, the plight of evacuees, the ignorance of the people who choose to live in “the stupid zone” — one fire deputy saw a butane gas tank tucked up next to a house that burned, melt — the heroics of the firefighters, their comradeship, the logistics of combatting such massive blazes, the outpouring of community support…it’s all told in Fire in the Sky.
— Jeanne Englert
A former Durango resident, Jeanne Englert swept ashes from the Hayman fire off of her backyard deck in Lafayette last summer.
