My family may end up among those impacted by the largest wildfire in Colorado history.
My grandparents bought this cabin in 1964.
My grandma still lives but at 94 doesn't get up there much, so it's mainly used by my aunt who lives nearby in Greeley, and me with my wife and kids. The above photo was a last minute trip I took my 5 year old (3 at the time) just the two of us, when we saw a good snow in the forecast. Single digit temps overnight so we slept in the living room in front of the fire. That's just one memory out of 4 generations and 6 decades to which this cabin is the setting.
We were there 2 weeks ago, and other than some smoke in the air, had little concern as the fire was still 15 miles away and mostly contained in the nearest perimeters. Then the wind picked up last week and the fire grew by 30,000 acres in one day, and it was 3 miles away. One day later it's on our doorstep at just under a mile, and has been hovering there for 3 days. When I saw how fast it was advancing on Saturday morning I doubted that it wouldn't move through by yesterday, but they got some cool, wet-ish weather that helped slow the spread. I've been checking the map throughout the weekend...enough to figure out it seems like it gets updated around 9am and again at 9pm. Another fire popped up in an area of Boulder county with more expensive homes so I have to assume it's probably pulled a lot of the state and federal resources away from us "poor" folk, but the local volunteer FD is still working hard on structure protection, which is probably our best hope at this point. With more warning we could have gone to grab anything of sentimental value, like the guestbook with 50 years of entries, or the oil painting my grandfather made 30 years ago that we talked this summer about taking back to our house instead of having it up there. Hindsight.
My grandparents bought this cabin in 1964.
My grandma still lives but at 94 doesn't get up there much, so it's mainly used by my aunt who lives nearby in Greeley, and me with my wife and kids. The above photo was a last minute trip I took my 5 year old (3 at the time) just the two of us, when we saw a good snow in the forecast. Single digit temps overnight so we slept in the living room in front of the fire. That's just one memory out of 4 generations and 6 decades to which this cabin is the setting.
We were there 2 weeks ago, and other than some smoke in the air, had little concern as the fire was still 15 miles away and mostly contained in the nearest perimeters. Then the wind picked up last week and the fire grew by 30,000 acres in one day, and it was 3 miles away. One day later it's on our doorstep at just under a mile, and has been hovering there for 3 days. When I saw how fast it was advancing on Saturday morning I doubted that it wouldn't move through by yesterday, but they got some cool, wet-ish weather that helped slow the spread. I've been checking the map throughout the weekend...enough to figure out it seems like it gets updated around 9am and again at 9pm. Another fire popped up in an area of Boulder county with more expensive homes so I have to assume it's probably pulled a lot of the state and federal resources away from us "poor" folk, but the local volunteer FD is still working hard on structure protection, which is probably our best hope at this point. With more warning we could have gone to grab anything of sentimental value, like the guestbook with 50 years of entries, or the oil painting my grandfather made 30 years ago that we talked this summer about taking back to our house instead of having it up there. Hindsight.
