Contentment by design - Living - Places photo #1036

A post-fire update

We've been back home a couple weeks now. I've definitely felt sort of numb from that whole experience for most of this period; I guess it traumatized me pretty good. One way I've been dealing with it is that on many days, I've been throwing myself into the annual mitigation work I had begun the day before the fire broke out, spending a few hours using a 10' pole saw to clean out dead branches as high as I can reach over my head, sometimes even standing on a ladder, and also cutting lower branches to create more of a gap between the ground and the start of branches in each tree in order to reduce the likelihood of a grass fire jumping up into the trees. Then I spend an hour or two carrying or dragging the cut branches up the hill and across the property to the a pile that will be accessible to the chipper. This photo was at the end of the day today. I'm about 90% finished, and it's already the most I've done in a single year. I have to be honest and admit that by the evenings, like now, I can barely move. Guess I'm getting older!

Of course, if there's a crown jumper fire, all bets are off. I took a drive on the highway that goes south towards Boulder the other day. That's where the east side of the nearby Calwood Fire reached, and where the neighborhood burned. It was stomach churning to see. The fire must've been an absolute inferno crown jumper at that point because all that's left is black charcoal poles that were once pine trees, scorched barren black ground, and rectangles of white ash where the houses had been. I was left feeling quite shaken after seeing that.

As I've been working these past two weeks, I listened to Cold Millions by Jess Walter (great book!), and something he mentions in the story—a fire in 1910 that I had never heard about before—really gave me pause and provided me with some perspective. I thought our fire, the biggest fire in Boulder County history, was quite massive at 10,000+ acres. That's a lot of land! Of course, that nearby fire is totally dwarfed by the two fires burning to the northwest and west of us. Over the course of a couple months, the Cameron Peak Fire to the northwest of us became the biggest fire in Colorado history at 200,000+ acres; and over the course of just a couple weeks, the East Troublesome Fire to the west of us became the second biggest at just shy of 200,000 acres. (Both those fires are now mostly contained and not growing.) Here's the pause and perspective bit: the Great Fire of 1910 broke out in Idaho, and over the course of just TWO DAYS burned THREE MILLION acres in Idaho, Montana, Washington, and British Columbia, including totally destroying several entire towns. Whoa! What I saw the other day looked immense to me, and that was just the eastern portion of the Calwood Fire. It's difficult for me to even begin to imagine the immensity of the Great Fire of 1910.