Early this morning, as I looked outside the upstairs door at the new day, I saw a brand-new smoke plume to the south — uncomfortably apt for a week of posts centered around, among other things, the theme of fire.
Distances are deceptive here. What’s actually in town looks, from our place, as though it’s just a few tenths of a mile down the highway — in other words, near enough for something like fire to spread fast and close. This would’ve been somewhere in town, probably on the west side; it appeared to be a small structure fire, and was apparently brought rapidly under control.
But it’s an unsettling sight all the same.
Nothing, of course, like that sight that faced Wings when he captured the image above. That was much more than merely unsettling; it had the potential to be catastrophic. It’s a remarkable shot, one he captured on film on that late summer’s day in 2003 when an afternoon lightning strike ignited the conflagration that swept across the ridgeline and down the slopes of the peaks east and south of the Pueblo.
You can see how green those slopes were then, and he caught that shot only moments after the strike; the flames were already spreading like . . . well, you know. That’s the nature of wildfire.
Of course, back then, we were only in a five-hundred-year drought, and despite that truth, the vagaries of climate change were still bringing us routine summer rains. We were lucky up here for a very long time.
That luck ran out about five years ago.
The far side of that ridgeline overlooks the brand-new burn scars of the Hermit’s Peak/Calf Canyon Wildfire Complex now: two fires ignited through unbelievable levels of active federal negligence, fires that grew so large ad spread so fast that they merged into one megafire that has been burning since April 6th.
Even now, with all the flooding rains in that area over the last three weeks, it’s been stalled for the last two of those weeks at 93% containment. It’s going to be burning for a long time yet . . . and will create an active danger of reignition for far longer still.
On this side of the ridgeline, the fire in 2003 swept through at speed as well, although without the added fuel of a twelve-hundred-year drought on top of years of aridification, beetle infestation, and deliberate official negligence, all driven on gale-force spring winds day after day after day for weeks and months on end. The brutal irony? This year saw the first real new green begin to carpet those burn scars on the slopes in the photo above. New green on this side . . . while on the opposite side of the ridge, the fire consumed everything in its path and then some, and its burn scars have been further debrided by floods, flash- and otherwise, over the last few weeks.
We can only hope that those involved in fixing this particular mess have enough institutional memory to recall the 2003 fire and the lessons that should have been learned from it. Lessons such as the need to return continually for months on end to turn over the hot earth, soak it thoroughly, dig deep to soothe the wounded skin of the soil. That was the lesson ignored in what would become the Calf Canyon portion of the megafire: a prescribed burn in January was not sufficiently attended after the initial outage, and high heat and gale force winds conspired with the drought to reignite it in the middle of April.
Now multiple ecosystems and unique microclimates are devastated and worse.
Summer is wildfire season here, no question. Summer, not early spring. And summer historically is also monsoon season, and the two elemental powers tend to play off each other, conspiring and collaborating as much as they contend: The storm calls the lightning; the lightning ignites the earth, and then the rain comes through to extinguish it.
Mostly.
Or, rather, they used to do so; that entire sentence should be rewritten in past tense now.
It’s been brutally hot today, the mercury passing the century mark. We were granted a few scattered moments of cooling drops, courtesy of equally scattered sprinkles and one small shower that last no longer than five minutes. The heat is back now.
And our world is altered — in some ways irrevocably, at least in our own lifetimes.
Which means that we are now like the hawk, always on watch. Is that an unusual clouds drifting along the ridgeline, or a pall of smoke? Is that a giant dust devil spinning across the fields just south of us, or is it the plume from the newest blaze? Is that the reflection of the setting sun on a vehicle in the backcountry, or is the glow of new flames?
In this place, summer is now a season of fires, both new and reignited by conditions and circumstances.
Which means it must also be a season of memory reignited . . . and one of lessons learned. The land can’t afford anything less.
~ Aji
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