Colorado Arrives at the Dawn of Megafires, Part Three

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This is Part Three of an article that first appeared on BigPivots.com on July 9, 2021.

There’s no escaping the rising temperatures. If the atmospheric emissions ended tomorrow, temperatures will continue rising for decades. “That is baked into our system,” says Veblen.

“It’s just going to get hotter,” says Brad Udall, a climate scientist at Colorado State University who has conducted ground-breaking research on aridification of the Colorado River Basin. His 2016 study with Jonathan Overpeck found that roughly half of the “drought” could be attributed to rising temperatures. “You ain’t seen nothing yet.”

Colorado was hot last August when the Cameron Peak Fire broke out in the Medicine Bow Range, north of Rocky Mountain National Park. Another fire, the Williams Fork, broke out about the same time in the area north of the Eisenhower Tunnel. For a time, those in Winter Park and Fraser worried that the fire might sweep across the Vasquez Range and make a run on their communities.

Another heat wave engulfed Colorado last September, if nowhere near as intense as those of June, either in the Southwest or in the Pacific Northwest.

“Increasing frequency and intensity of heat waves are where probably the most robust connection exists between a warming climate and extreme weather,” says Schumacher, the state climatologist. “Numerous studies of heat waves in different parts of the world have shown that they have become much more likely. It takes a particular weather pattern to set up for something like this to happen (in this case, the very strong high pressure or heat dome), but all indications are that these situations are made more likely by climate change.”

Writing in the New York Times last week, former Roaring Fork Valley resident Susan Joy Hassol made the same point in an essay co-authored with climate scientist Michael Mann. “Record-breaking hot months are occurring five times more often than would be expected without global warming,” they wrote.

In Colorado, this shift seems to be playing out by extending the “hot season,” says Schumacher.

The East Troublesome fits in with that pattern of lengthening wildfire season, 75 days longer than in the 1970s. It broke out on October 14, the last day of the first rifle-hunting season. It spread somewhat slowly from a remote area between Kremmling and Grand Lake for almost a week. Then, on October 20, came the winds, hot and fast, by some estimates 100 mph. It’s likely a miracle that only two lives were lost that evening, those of two elderly people who had chosen to shelter in place.

“When you get fire behavior like that, there’s not a whole lot you can do to stop it,” said one firefighter. “That’s equivalent to trying to do something with a Category 5 hurricane.”

The wind and the heat picked up twigs and needles and lofted them across the Continental Divide. Grand Lake, at the west entrance, escaped serious damage, likely the result of mitigation work done over the last decade. But lodgepole pine near the entrance to the national park just a few miles away testify to the heat and the winds, drooping like spaghetti.

Estes Park itself appeared sure to go up in flames as both the Troublesome and Cameron Peak fires approached. Sharon Brubaker, among the 6,700 residents of the community, didn’t wait to find out. She loaded her 2-year-old grandson into her car and fled, despite fears of another threat: COVID. “It was a gut reaction,” said Brubaker. “I looked at the sky and I knew that I needed to get out of here.”

Novak, the fire chief in Vail, had been working the Cameron Peak Fire, helping defend homes. When the flames came roaring at them, they abandoned the effort. That, he says, is the philosophy of firefighters in Vail and elsewhere. They will prep and leave, not stay and defend.

Later, talking to his town council, Novak emphasized that Vail could easily see the same congruence of weather that caused East Troublesome’s extreme fire behavior. A fire starting in Eagle or Gypsum could roar up the valley through Vail and across Vail Pass into Summit County. That’s what happens in megafires—or a gigafire, as California’s first million-acre fire has been called.

Paul Cada helped protect the YMCA of the Rockies near Estes Park as the East Troublesome fire roared in. “I saw what extreme fire looks like when it was coming into Estes Park,” he says.

Since 2014, Cada has worked in Vail as the town’s wildland program manager. It has been his job very fundamentally to prepare Vail for fire.

Vail, like other mountain communities, has evolved what it considers a mountain aesthetic. Wooden shake shingles, long a manifestation of that aesthetic, were banned on new housing in 2007. In 2020, the town adopted a new wildfire plan. Newer building codes require masonry exteriors and frown on decks that could be ignited by embers thrown from a mile away, as occurred in East Troublesome.

Some changes have been painful, facing opposition. One of them significantly discourages use of vegetation amid houses, rows of trees—that might catch on fire. Houses need strong fire-resistant berths of 30 to 60 feet.

A former Forest Service ranger likened Vail’s response at one time of wanting to fire-proof the forest so that houses could be put amid the trees. Now, there’s a new approach—one that doesn’t totally preclude fire, but can improve the odds.

“You don’t necessarily have to control extreme fire behavior to prevent significant loss to a community,” he says. “What you do need to do is prepare the community for that, and that’s really the approach we are taking in Vail. We are not necessarily able to stop or even control the extreme fire behavior that we will likely see one day. It’s about making sure our community is prepared to respond to it when it happens but also be able to bounce back as quickly as possible.”

Vail has been aggressively trying to reduce fire risk along its flanks as well as in its subdivisions. Even so, both Cada and Nowak emphasize the limits of their work. It will not preclude extreme fires. The right combination of hot days and drought —well, that’s when megafires happen.

Jerry Fedrizzi and his wife, Jan, have taken the onus of personal responsibility to heart. They grew up in Glenwood Springs, have lived in Eagle since 1968, but have a cabin at about 8,300-foot elevation above Glenwood Springs. The days of 30 below in Eagle have become distant memories, he said on a hot June day while describing his continued work to remove vegetation from around their cabin. A fire official who studied their work gave them a 90% favorable rating, he reported proudly.

The temperature in Eagle was predicted to hit 97 degrees the next day, an unprecedented mark, and the wind was “just awful,” he said.

Not one prone to despair, Fedrizzi was nonetheless troubled. “It’s grim,” he said, “and I don’t know what will happen in the next 10 to 20 years.”