By Matt Lit.
I grew up watching The Andy Griffith Show. I always loved how Andy Griffith managed to never directly tell Opie what to do. Rather, he would opine in a general way—a subtle story with a moral.
I remember seeing the first bore hole when I lived in Wildernest. It’s a beautiful neighborhood along a 3.5-mile road that snakes its way west from I-70 toward Buffalo Mountain, between Silverthorne and Frisco.
It didn’t come as a surprise, though the realization was all too disturbing. It was August, 2005. Within a year, nearly every lodgepole pine was dead. It wasn’t a surprise because about three years earlier, on my way down valley to visit friends, I saw entire stands north of Henderson Mill, on Ute Pass Road, that were devastated by the mountain pine beetle.
Pine beetles are normal. What was not normal was the years of preceding drought and increasing temperatures that left the pines unable to defend themselves from these normal pests. It was an incredibly disturbing time to experience in Summit County. Acres upon acres of pines devastated, turning rust red, then ashen gray.
What I wasn’t ready for was the mitigation. Lumbering yellow beasts rolled in sometime in 2009. Mindless machines trampling the National Forest trails that were my backyard. One hundred yards in. Five hundred yards in. One mile in. Farther. Everywhere I hiked there was evidence of these beasts creating new tracks and leaving in their wake chopped pines and chewed up soil.
I forced myself to stay out of those woods as Monkey Wrench Gang thoughts swirled through my brain. I was already in trouble with the Forest Service, but that’s a story for another time.
The only humor came in hearing Texans remark on our “purty red tuhrees.” More than one family would ask if I could Photoshop their family photos and turn the tuhrees green.
When it was over, the swath of clear-cut trees was remarkable.
Destructive. Final. Or so it appeared.
June 12, 2018. I was on my way to teach a morning class at Colorado Mountain College, in Breckenridge. Pulling up to the stop sign at Ryan Gulch Road I looked west up the hill for traffic. What met my eyes was smoke. A big, ——g billowing form that was growing—rapidly. Hopping out of my car already calling 9-1-1, I felt a strong, westerly wind in my face and knew it was coming down the hill. Fire.
My day—a lot of people’s day—changed in that instant. Within a very short time, the fire grew dramatically. Even with fire crews en route, it was very clear this fire threatened the entire hillside. Viewed from a hawk’s perspective, Ryan Gulch Road is a swath of oxygen with a dense amount of fuel on either side. The fuel is called condos and townhomes and homes. To a fire they are fuel with a central channel of life-giving oxygen.
Within an hour or so there were choppers in the air and even a DC10 firefighting jet dropping water and retardant. My buddy and I were at his place with our dogs on evacuation standby. My photojournalist self was chomping at the bit to get better angles, even though I knew I had to stay put. I’ve shot a lot of fires in my photojournalism days but today was different.
Tense does not do justice to how we all felt that day. The skies were dark with smoke, smoldering pine needles fell from the sky, blanketing the ground, the roofs. The aircraft were in a constant pattern (and yes, it was a hell of a rush to photograph a DC10 only 100 feet or so overhead!). By about 5 p.m. the worst of it was over.
During my years in Summit, I maintained an excellent relationship with the fire department in Summit County. The one thing I heard over and over from them was “we could have lost the hill.” But we didn’t.
Why?
Because more than 10 years earlier a pesky little beetle bored the first hole of tens of thousands of holes in the pines, killing almost all of them.
And the resulting (seemingly disruptive) clear cut that cleared a swath of trees up and around Ryan Gulch Road proved to be the one thing that saved Wildernest from burning to ash. That buffer created enough of a break, an elimination of immediate fuel, that determined that day’s outcome.
I hope Opie is listening.