Saturday was our first hot day of the year on the Front Range (~79F) and I had spring fever and ran to the nursery in Longmont to find more petunia seeds. I regretted not putting my hair up as it stung my eyes while the wind whipped it around in the parking lot. While in the store at 3:15pm, I got a call from the Boulder Police. Confused, I said through my mask, “…Hello?” The automated message informed me that my house was under a mandatory evacuation order due to a growing wildfire. Panic set in immediately, but only a second later did the recording clarify that it wasn’t in fact my Longmont house, but the old rental condo I lived in from about 2010-2017 in the NCAR neighborhood. I hung up, checked out, ran to my car, and texted friends with a new baby who live just downhill from NCAR to make sure they had left. Yes, they were stuck in a “line of Subarus” leaving the neighborhood with baby and angry cat in tow. It felt good to have a giggle about the Subarus, a known Boulder favorite, during this time of crisis. I started speeding home and as soon as I turned to the southeast, I could see the massive smoke plume coming from Boulder and it all hit me at once, the trauma was too close to the surface this time to hold back tears.
In 2010 a bunch of friends and I went camping west of Boulder. We put down our tents after a long hike and obeyed the no-fire rules, as everything was pretty dry and crispy that Labor Day weekend. The next day we hiked out, drove home, and noticed a massive wildfire plume coming from the area we had just camped, named the Fourmile Canyon fire. We were so grateful we had obeyed the rules, but it was my first real experience with wildfire after moving to Colorado in 2004, and understanding just how easily it could happen in our windy climate.
At that time and in 2012, my boyfriend-at-the-time and I rented in the NCAR neighborhood in south Boulder in a cute, run down condo on the edge of town. Some of my favorite memories are just walking out the front door and snowshoeing up to the fat-iron at the base of Bear Peak, training for the Bolder Boulder by running on the trails behind the condo, going for evening walks behind the ritzy houses that backed up to the open space, dreaming of someday being able to afford to live with such views. I have a great memory of going for a run with my headphones on and accidentally sneaking up on a bear and rather than doing the right thing, I turned and ran back down. Luckily he didn’t follow! Everyone who ever visited me hiked in this area between Shanahan Ridge and NCAR with me. It was truly Colorado living at its best.
But in 2012 we were in the depths of one of the worst Colorado droughts on record and an intense heatwave hit near the end of June and fires ignited along the Front Range. The High Park fire was massive, just west of Fort Collins and the Waldo Canyon fire just northwest of Colorado Springs had devoured entire suburban neighborhoods in a windstorm. Now it was our turn. One afternoon in late June, a dry thunderstorm’s lightning ignited a fire on the back side of the mountain we lived at the base of. The Flagstaff fire (confusingly named for the road, not the mountain further north) quickly drew the attention of firefighters. Dave, our neighbor and colleague Jon, and I sat out back and took photos of the smoke plume and the planes as they went by, dropping slurry and trying to protect our neighborhood from going up in flames.
We didn’t have a landline phone and were not registered with the local office of emergency management, so it was only when Jon and the other neighbors started getting phone calls that we learned we were under pre-evacuation notice. We started to take stock of our mostly cheap belongings. A quick read of my renter’s insurance policy helped us understand that our personal property was only covered up to $10,000, so we started picking out the expensive things—laptops, cameras, coats, shoes, and throwing them into our vehicles. At the time we had the VW van and my old red Subaru that replaced my recently stolen explorer. This is when I signed up for emergency alerts on my cell phone at that address as we waited for the evacuation order.
That night we could see pine trees exploding in flames at the top of the mountain and just hoped the flames wouldn’t come down the front with the winds. The smoke did, though, especially at night with the mountain breeze and our condo with no AC was stuffy and hot. The smoke kept us from opening windows night after night. Every time I left the condo I’d wonder if I’d come home to it still standing and started taking valuables with me everywhere I went. It finally got to be too much and we just left. We got in the van and headed to Yellowstone and Grand Tetons. They were on fire too. The Flagstaff fire was contained, and the condo saved. A month later Dave would move to NYC and the condo became my home, just me. A year later I would endure the Boulder flood on my own in that condo and rebuild my independence as I became a helper to my flooding neighbors while my ceiling leaked water onto my furniture. During this event, having my phone registered with the city and CU helped me get constant alerts, many during the middle of the night warning of debris flows on the creek. It was truly traumatizing and several people died. The damage was over a billion dollars after a year’s worth of rain fell over four days. I finally left that condo years later as a single woman. Prices were going up too fast and my landlord needed to move into the condo as the area had simply become unaffordable.
Fast forward to fall of 2020 and Colorado was on fire yet again. I hated my Westminster townhome, the pandemic was in full swing, I was teaching online from home, and I was in full house-buying mode. After many heartbreaking offers being turned down in Broomfield, Erie, and Superior, I had just gotten under contract for a home in southwest Longmont when the Calwood fire exploded just west of Longmont in the foothills, directly west of what would be my new home in a few weeks. I ran to the best lookout I knew in Broomfield and started photographing the massive smoke plume.
Fast forward to this past December, a little over a year later. We hadn’t had much in the way of precipitation since June and I had taken to watering my lawn with the hose on the weekends to try to keep my trees alive. I was in Wisconsin for the holidays when my phone blew up with friends alerting me to a fire a few miles west of my Longmont home and the intense windstorm that had begun. I kept thinking there’s no fuel left, unless the fire was east of the last one! I learned that the fire near my home had been quickly contained, but the fire just two miles down the hill from my old south Boulder condo where I lived through the Flagstaff fire had been picked up by the 90 mph winds and blown down the road I’d take to Costco on the weekends, eating every house in its path. It burned the entire neighborhood behind Costco to the ground as people evacuated the shopping center in a total blackout of smoke and embers. The fire crept into the city of Superior, spreading out like fingers and burning several houses in a line, then sparing the houses between the lines. The winds easily pushed the fire over the 4-lane highway (36) near the overlook that looks into Boulder Valley and into the Davidson mesa area in the city of Louisville. Entire suburban neighborhoods were burned to the ground so that all that remained was twisted metal and brick chimneys. There was no fighting this fire, it was too windy. The focus was evacuation only and while most humans made it out, two didn’t, and several pets were unable to be saved as people fled in the middle of embers and smoke flying by at 90mph. Some of the most beautiful houses in the city burned one by one. My dear friend Shelley’s neighborhood was at the end of one finger of fire and she lost everything while she drove back from Christmas break in Wisconsin. Another friend’s house was spared as the fire burned everyone across the pond from them, but spared their side. Raymond, my fire photographing friend, was given ample notice before he was evacuated. They were afraid the Avista hospital would go up in smoke and he was just downwind of it.
After years of natural disasters near my home I’ve learned how to get information and it comes down to several reliable local people on Twitter and several webpages I’ve become all too familiar with. I couldn’t take my eyes off the ensuring disaster it and the trauma endured, even from 1,000 miles away watching from my parents’ house in Wisconsin. The Marshall Fire ended up taking over 1,000 homes in the town of Superior and the city of Lousiville. These people didn’t live in the mountains! This was a city! The fire started out on the plains and moved into suburbia and took everything in its path. It snowed that night, as it usually does after a Chinook wind storm, for the first time that season, and it was all too little too late. It snowed every week after that, each snowflake like salt in the Marshall Fire wound. I learned later that several friends, a student, and a colleague all lost homes and will be displaced until they can rebuild. I drive through the scar on my commute to and from work, a constant reminder that life can change in an instant.
So you can image yesterday, when Boulder realized it had to evacuate thousands of people from a neighborhood with two roads out, it had to act quickly. It did the reverse 911, which was the call I got, but it also used cell towers to ping folks. My understanding is it’s the same technology we use for Amber alerts, and us meteorologists use to notify people in harm’s way of a tornado, flash flood, or even recently, a snow squall back in Wisconsin. This notification was necessary because of the massive number of hikers and bikers in the area on our first hot day of the year in probably the second most popular trail head in the city of Boulder. Unfortunately, the notification reached a bit too far, alerting folks in the city of Louisville. You know, the ones whose houses weren’t turned to ash just three months ago, but those who continue to deal with poor water quality and smoke damage. To say that this triggered everyone in the community would be an understatement. Panic attacks, tears, and all of the trauma surfaced with that single phone call or text message during a void of information during what could have been the end of South Boulder as we knew it. In all of our minds we now know that windstorm plus fire equals urban firestorm and just assumed the worst. Thanks to the firefighters and emergency management who were finally able to stop the fire from entering the neighborhood as the winds died late in the day. The fire continued burning overnight, but around 11:30pm I got the call that the evacuation order had been lifted. The smoke was heavy and many friends stayed evacuated overnight. After the sun set, the flames were visible from miles around. The fire was creeping to the south and westward up 2012 burn-scarred Bear Peak, but the winds were low, the temperatures cool, and the fire stayed away from the homes. The fire came within a 10th of a mile of the beautiful dream homes I used to walk by after dinner. I sat at the Lagerman Reservoir for hours and stared at the NCAR Fire, taking photos, and cringing at every plume. I've curated some of the best photos and tweets from this fire here.
And I hate to have to end on this note, but these same people who were evacuated? The community of South Boulder? Well, their grocery store just reopened and last week marked the one year anniversary of the mass shooting that took 10 beautiful lives from us too soon last March.
All of this during an isolating global pandemic.
It’s too much. The trauma is real.
I am a professor who teaches a climate change course, so I relive this trauma semesterly by telling these stories so that we might learn from them. The community is a great one and I hope that we can all lean on each other, be understanding, and persevere. Let’s use this anxious energy to do good, to prepare for next time, to improve what we can, and to find solutions that reduces our risk, the risk that feels amplified these days in so many ways. What about goats? Should we try goats?