On the trail - April 1, 2012

April showers bring May flowers.  Let’s hope so.  Our recent relatively warm and dry winter in Colorado has transitioned into a warm and extremely dry spring.  This weather has put us in a very vulnerable position.  With the pine beetle epidemic turning the once green hillsides reddish brown, the stage seems set for a disaster.  Our landscape currently is the perfect storm for wildfire.

Smoky the Bear says that only you can prevent forest fires.  Even if we all never light a single match this upcoming hiking and camping season, we will still be at risk from something out of our control, lightning.

One of my favorite folk songs is “Cold Missouri Waters” by Cry, Cry, Cry.  It is a song about the tragic Mann Gulch Fire in Montana in 1949.  13 smoke jumpers were killed by this forest fire that was started by a lightning strike.

The main character in the song, the crew chief Dodge, survives by setting a small fire in front of the main fire and lying down in the middle of it as the firestorm roars over him.  The panicked crew thought Dodge was crazy when he asked them to step into the fire he’d set.  He told them it was the only chance they’d get.  They cursed him and ran for it instead.

It was a decision that cost 13 of them their lives and haunted Dodge until the day he died.  Like the phoenix, Dodge rose from the ashes of his fire and found only one other survivor.  When more help arrived, the two survivors helped carry the bodies of their fallen comrades to the cold Missouri river.  They placed crosses on the hillside where the men died as well.  It is a really sad story.

How did this happen?  How did these smoke jumpers get caught in a situation that cost them their lives?  When they arrived from the air onto the scene, they were in a good position to fight the fire with the river at their back.  Unfortunately, the fire crowned and jumped the valley, blocking their escape route back to the river.

The conditions were ripe for a disaster that year.  The song says it was the hottest day on record and the forest was tinder dry.  In Colorado, we had a similar tragedy back in 1994.  The South Canyon Fire on Storm King Mountain, near Glenwood Springs, Colorado, killed 14 firefighters.  Once again, the fire was started by lightning.

In nature, fire can renew an area, but it takes time.  I never visited Yellowstone National Park before the horrible fires of 1988.  I wish I had, because when I saw it in 2000, the park was still recovering from the fires.  Even though it was 12 years later, the scars of the fire were still plainly visible.  Decades of a forest management plan that suppressed wildfires had created a fuel supply, that once ignited, burned so intensely that the resulting fire was uncontainable until the first snows of fall arrived.

March statistically is the snowiest month of the year in Colorado.  That did not happen this year.  While I do not want to jinx us and see 3 feet of snow in April, an occasional soaking rain would be nice.  All I am asking for is that it rains say every Tuesday in April; so that we can see those May flowers.