Colorado’s skies filled with smoke on Monday as a handful of fires grew angrily across the state, together scorching 76,000 acres — roughly 119 square miles.
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The most ferocious of the bunch was the Aspen Acres fire west of Pueblo, which exploded from a 40-acre spot fire when reported at 5:30 a.m. to a conflagration that consumed 23,000 acres or 36 square miles 12 hours later.
In size, it is now approaching the Snyder fire near the Utah border, which has consumed 30,165 acres or 47.1 square miles since Friday.
The smoke isn’t expected to settle any time soon, with “critical fire weather conditions” — that is, hot, dry and windy — set to plague Colorado each day this week, potentially spurring wildfire growth, according to the National Weather Service’s Grand Junction office.
“What we are looking at Tuesday is a little bump up in wind speed, but not as gusty as Sunday,” said Scott Rozanski, a meteorologist with the NWS. “We will be maintaining a breezy pattern with continued low relative humidities that keep the fire risk enhanced.”
Rozanski urged people to practice caution and be “weather aware” as they head into the July 4th weekend and beyond.
“Pay attention to the local information your county is giving out about fire restrictions. We are really now in our fire weather season,” he said.
Red flag warnings are expected to continue across much of the southern half of the state on Tuesday, as well as in the foothill areas along the northern Front Range.
By early Monday afternoon, the weather service had issued red flag warnings for imminent fire danger for large swaths of Colorado between Tuesday afternoon and night. The warnings included all of Colorado’s Western Slope and mountains, most of the foothills and metro area and the southern half of the Eastern Plains, according to the weather service.
Strong wind gusts between 35 mph and 55 mph and low humidity ranging from 5% to 15% are expected across Colorado on Tuesday, with similar conditions to follow throughout the week, forecasters said in the alerts.
Rozanski said humidity levels have slowly rebounded at night, only to drop back down during the day.
As of Monday evening, Gov. Jared Polis had declared disaster emergencies for four of the five large fires burning in Colorado: the fatal Snyder fire that killed three firefighters near the Colorado-Utah border, the Gold Mountain fire north of Ouray, the Aspen Acres fire in Pueblo and Custer counties and the Willow fire near Leadville.
The fifth large wildfire, the lightning-sparked Ferris fire, was burning in the middle of southwestern Colorado’s San Juan National Forest, according to the U.S. Forest Service.
The Snyder fire, located 13 miles west of Grand Junction on Colorado’s Western Slope, remained the largest active fire in the state with a 30,165-acre footprint, equivalent to 47 square miles, as of Monday evening.
The wildfire exploded in size over the weekend, trapping five firefighters responding to a smaller fire in Colorado and killing three of them.
Two Utah wildfires converged as they moved into Colorado on Saturday, overtaking two fires already burning in Mesa County. The combined fire, renamed the Snyder fire, remained uncontained as of Monday evening, according to the Colorado Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management.
The firefighters who died were identified Monday morning by the U.S. Forest Service as 38-year-old Emily Barker of Michigan, 27-year-old Nick Hutcherson of Arizona and 27-year-old Sydney Watson of Alabama. An investigation has been opened into their deaths, federal officials said.
The five trapped firefighters were trying to deploy tent-like shelters when the fire overtook them. The two who survived the incident are hospitalized in the Denver area with burn injuries, officials said during a Monday news conference.
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U.S. Wildland Fire Service Chief Brian Fennessy said he would not speculate about whether the crew overrun by the weekend fire in Colorado should have been where they were, according to the Associated Press.
“I will say the fact that they were there was, I’m 100% sure, based on good decision-making,” Fennessy said during a news conference Monday. “The fires in this region over the decades, you know, killed many firefighters. They weren’t being foolish. They weren’t being careless. They were there because they thought they could do what needed to be done to suppress that fire. And many times the weather changes.”
Southeast of the Snyder fire, the Gold Mountain fire burning north of Ouray in Colorado’s mountains also surged in size on Sunday, jumping from roughly 572 acres to 7,103 acres with no containment, according to state officials. That’s roughly 11.1 square miles.
Residents in and near Lake Lenore, Panoramic Heights, Redstone Road and Peck’s Trailer Park, as well as those living between the trailer park and Cedar Hill Cemetery, were ordered to evacuate, according to the Ouray County Sheriff’s Office. Pre-evacuation notices were also issued for residents living on Ouray County Road 17 from the Whispering Pines area to the Black Lake area.
The Willow fire sparked near Leadville just before 4 p.m. Sunday and quickly grew, its flames pushed forward by strong winds in the area. As of Monday afternoon, the wildfire was estimated to be burning on 1,200 acres or 1.9 square miles with no containment, according to Lake County’s Office of Emergency Management.
Forest Service officials said the fire was burning “in steep and rugged terrain” in a remote area of San Isabel National Forest, below Mount Massive.
The fire forced mandatory evacuations for all residents in an area including Turquoise Lake and bordered to the south by Rock Creek, to the west by Hagerman Pass, to the north by Galena Mountain and to the east by Leadville, according to the Lake County evacuation map.
The cause of the fire remains under investigation.
The state’s most aggressive fire on Monday was the Aspen Acres fire west of Pueblo near the town of Beulah. In 12 hours, it went from a small spot fire of around 40 acres to 23,000 acres, according to the Pueblo County Sheriff’s Office.
Winds of around 100 miles per hour drove the flames eastward and blocked critical aerial support. The fire is moving so rapidly that authorities urged ranchers and residents to cut their fences so their animals might have a better chance of surviving.
Residents were evacuated from Beulah, Rye, San Isabel and the Bishops Castle area, while local highways leading into Colorado City and Pueblo were closed.
The fire has destroyed power lines in the area, which, along with planned outages, left about 1,500 households without electricity, according to the San Isabel Electric Association.
An incident command team is reportedly being flown from Alaska to Colorado to help fight the fire.
Aspen Acres is now the second-largest active fire in the state, surpassing the Ferris fire, which started as three individual wildfires in the San Juan National Forest’s Glade area near Narraguinnep Canyon, north of Dolores.
By Monday evening, the wildfires had converged into one and consumed 15,888 acres with no containment, according to San Juan Incident Management Team Eight, which is leading the fire response.
Residents north and east of the wildfires were ordered to evacuate, according to the Dolores County Office of Emergency Management. The evacuation area was bordered to the north by Disappointment Road, to the south by the Glade Ranch community, to the west by the fire and to the east by Road 30, according to the office.
Montezuma County officials also ordered evacuations for private lands in the lower Dolores River corridor, from the dam to Bradfield Bridge, Ferris fire officials said.
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