The Colorado State Open Thread is for people interested in our squarish state — our land, our people, our history, present and future. People are invited to comment, ask questions, share interests and post whatever they’d like in the comments. People are also welcome to write diaries for this series on a topic that interests them. Please let me know if you’d like to do so and I’ll get you scheduled when you are ready.
Now, don't hang on Nothin' lasts forever but the earth and sky It slips away And all your money won't another minute buy
From the group Kansas, the song is “Dust in the Wind” from the “Point of Know Return” album, 1977
OK, the group is from Kansas, not Colorado and one or more of the members went to my high school (a few years before me). So Sioux me.
Their song always reminds me that everything is impermanent. People will make their mark, then pass on and eventually all of our marks will be erased, as will the changes Mother Nature brings. For people, our time is much shorter than the trees and forests outside my windows, and those are going to be gone long before the mountains are ground down into more of the great plains and whatever will replace them. More mountains? Desert? Another inland sea? Millions of years will pass and life will evolve and change while this temporary state of Colorado is morphed into something utterly unrecognizable to those alive now. A few billions of years from now and we’ll likely be crisped in the outer parts of our expanded red dwarf sun, or whatever it changes into. Dust in the wind, indeed. Do you want to live forever?
The area of Colorado where I live is Estes Park, on the northern edge of the state, just east of Rocky Mountain National Park. We have had between 14 and 15 inches of rain so far this year, in an area that usually gets about 14 inches for the full year. So we’re ahead. Everything around here is green, the rivers are pretty full (and looked a month ago like they would flood) but it’s easy to forget that our corner of the state is unlike that of much of the state that is in drought, in some cases extreme drought, and it’s likely to get worse as the years go by.
When the Mrs. and I took our trip to Seattle on Amtrak in June, we were hugely impressed (negatively) by how hot and dry the western part of Colorado, Utah and California’s central valley. We went west to Sacramento, switched trains and went north to Tacoma, with the reverse coming back to nice, wet and rainy Colorado. We had two weeks of rain every day when we returned, though not continual rain. Still, it was enough to cause mudslides in the area around Glenwood Springs onto I-70 and Estes Park was very wet, if not soggy. We have dried out some, but monsoons are in the prediction for August, so we may get moisture (hopefully without lightning).
I found a long, interesting story in the Aspen Times — about the inevitability of more Megafires in Colorado. If you have any interest in how Colorado is likely to burn in future fires, I think you’ll be interested in this. The East Troublesome fire came within three miles of our house and caused us to evacuate last fall for a week.
Colorado’s scariest wildfire in 2020 was not its largest. East Troublesome shocked because of its sprint and then its leap. It grew by 87,000 acres in a fiery dash across the headwaters of the Colorado River and past Grand Lake, most of that in just a couple hours. Smoke plumes rose 40,000 feet. The winds, variously estimated at 50 to 100 mph, were strong enough to bend over lodgepole pines.
Then embers vaulted across two miles of treeless tundra at the Continental Divide, raining into the Estes Valley, at the eastern gate to Rocky Mountain National Park.
Nothing like this had ever occurred in modern Colorado history.
The YMCA served as one of the staging areas during the fires. I hadn’t realized just how close the East Troublesome fire got, because for weeks the big bad fire was the Cameron Peak fire, which was on the northern boundary of the park and along Highway 14 and down the Poudre Canyon to Drake and almost to Fort Collins and Loveland. Cameron Peak still holds the title of largest fire in Colorado history, but I don’t know that it will keep that for long.
Inside the battle to save Rocky Mountain National Park during last year’s wildfires… may be behind a paywall (I hope not, but you could also try www.coloradohometownweekly.com/...) but it is a fascinating explanation of the pivotal weather and firefighter efforts to stop the East Troublesome fire just before it got to Estes Park.
Some 24 hours earlier, a “crazy fog bank” had rolled in from the Eastern Plains and temporarily parked the fire on the east side of the park, Lewelling said, buying fire suppression crews precious time to get aggressive in battling the blaze. But in the early morning hours of Oct. 23, the fog started to lift, the winds picked up and the fire resumed its advance toward Estes Park through Moraine Park and Upper Beaver Meadows.
“On the morning of the 23rd, I was absolutely certain that we were going to see Estes Park burn,” Lewelling recalled last week on a tour of damage in the park, the first time park officials have shared the inside story of last year’s wildfires and their ramifications. “There was nothing to stop the fire if it ran. It had the recipe of being a major, major disaster.”
If the fog bank that parked the fire seemed miraculous, what happened on the night of Oct. 23 and early morning hours of Oct. 24 was even crazier, when as much as 2 feet of snow fell, halting the threat to Estes Park. While fire suppression efforts would continue for several weeks, and it would be two weeks before the park reopened to visitors, the snowfall effectively ended the existential threat after just three days.
Miraculous? Lucky? Who knows? I am just fortunate that the fire stopped where and when it did. The rest of Colorado is set up for fires that the drought is making worse all the time. For updated information on Colorado’s drought situation, you can visit climate.colostate.edu/… and see that much of the western third of the state is in extreme or exceptional drought, while the eastern half is not in drought at this time.
If you’re interested in learning about west coast fires, Besame had a diary at www.dailykos.com/… that filled in a lot of their details a few days ago.
Please comment as you will — you don’t have to comment on weather. You can comment on whatever is on your mind. Did you watch the All Star Game? Did you go on a trip anywhere that you’d like to share? Did you see interesting flowers or wildlife? We had a mountain lion captured on our critter cameras walking up our driveway this morning about 4:30 AM while we were all safe in our beds. BIG Kitty. Let us hear from you. The floor is yours.