A FEW YEARS BACK we visited relatives on their small farm in Vermont. I had never been that far northeast. It was lush and green with healthy woodlands bordering the roads. One night we gathered around a large fire. As folks began heading to bed, I looked back at the fire and asked our cousin, …
A NUMBER OF “wildfire risk reduction” projects are proposed or already underway across tens of millions of acres of national forests in the western U.S., including Pike and San Isabel and 3.5 million acres of the Front Range in Colorado.1 The 2021 Infrastructure bill allocated over $3 billion — with Colorado’s U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet, …
By Greg Felt My wife said it and Salida Fire Chief Doug Bess agreed with her. They had grown up together in Salida and neither had ever looked out the window at a wildfire. In that regard, I’d heard many recent comments from community members about “our luck” – the good being the manner in …
Essay by Lincoln Bramwell
Wildfire – December 2007 – Colorado Central Magazine
THE RECENT WILDFIRES that burned 600 square miles, razed some 3,000 homes, killed 14 people and forced the evacuations of over a half-million Southern Californians shared one characteristic: All the homes burned were so close to public land that fire moved easily from hillsides covered with chaparral into subdivisions packed with natural vegetation.
Review by Ed Quillen
Wildfire – July 2007 – Colorado Central Magazine
The Charcoal Forest – How Fire Helps Animals and Plants
Written and illustrated by Beth A. Peluso
Published in 2007 by Mountain Press
ISBN 0878425322
Brief by Allen Best
Wildfire – January 2007 – Colorado Central Magazine
The horrors of the 1994 Storm King Fire, in which 14 firefighters died near Glenwood Springs, illustrated not only the dangers to firefighters, but the true cost of insulating mountain homes to the threat of fire dangers. Then, in 2002, a second fire raced across land adjacent to Glenwood Springs, this time gutting houses but taking no lives.
Review by Ed Marston
Wildfire – July 2003 – Colorado Central Magazine
Smokechasing: A New Look at Wildfires
by Stephen Pyne
Published in 2003 by University of Arizona Press
ISBN 0-816-52285-5
Brief by Central Staff
Wildfire – July 2003 – Colorado Central Magazine
During the first week of June, the sky was hazy over Central Colorado, which inspired a familiar question: Where’s the fire?
When the sky was hazy last summer, the answers were nearby: Hayman, Missionary Ridge, Iron Mountain, Coal Seam, etc.
Brief by Central Staff
Wildfire – July 2003 – Colorado Central Magazine
If you don’t clear the brush and trees around your mountain home, you could lose your fire insurance — if you’re currently insured with State Farm, anyway.
In May, the insurance company announced that it planned to conduct inspections on about 21,000 Colorado houses that it insures in areas that are prone to wildfire.
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
Letter from Virginia Simmons
Wildfire – August 2002 – Colorado Central Magazine
Editors:
Your July issue included a timely article by Allen Best, with a mix of facts and opinions about the history of wildfire in Colorado. Whereas some of the opinions seemed well supported, I wish to point out one which set off some sparks in my head.
Sidebar by Chas S. Clifton
Wildfire – July 2000 – Colorado Central Magazine
When a planned 600-acre prescribed burn at Bandelier National Monument exploded into a huge wildfire in May 2000 that burned homes and other buildings in Los Alamos, N.M., many people probably wondered how a fire is “prescribed.”
Typically, fires are started to “reduce fuel load” — in other words, to clear overgrown trees and brush before they burn on their own — or to improve wildlife habitat.
Sidebar by Chas S. Clifton
Wildfire – July 2000 – Colorado Central Magazine
Many Colorado Central readers live in what is called the “urban interface” — in other words, right up against the trees. Many of the homes that burned in the canyons of Los Angeles, in the Oakland Hills fire a decade ago, in the Black Tiger fire outside Boulder more recently, and in Los Alamos this spring, were similarly situated. Whether the fire nearing your home started from lightning, a campfire, or a forester’s drip torch, the end result might be the same — a sooty foundation and a pile of ashes.
Article and photos by Chas S. Clifton
Wildfire – July 2000 – Colorado Central Magazine
DESERTED MUCH OF THE TIME, the old Wetmore school’s parking lot was filled one night in October 1999. The big basement room — the lunchroom in former days before consolidation with the Florence school district — was packed with eastern Custer County residents, and volunteers were carrying in more folding chairs from the storerooms.
