COALDALE – The Hayden Pass Fire now has forced a church camp in Custer County to be evacuated as a precautionary measure. In addition, two other blazes are causing issues in Colorado, one blaze west of Boulder and another fire near the Wyoming border.
Moments after a media briefing at 5 p.m. Tuesday, Custer County Sheriff Shannon Byerly received word from the U.S. Forest Service that the Rainbow Trail Lutheran Camp was to be evacuated after the fire had reached a trigger point.
Byerly said that about 118 campers and 65 staff members are at the camp, and they will bused out and taken to the high school in Westcliffe.
From there, he said, parents will be able to reach their children, who are all mostly from out of state.
The fire itself is about 1½ miles from the camp. Byerly said he would prefer to get campers out now rather then later if the fire were to continue moving toward them.
Trigger points, he said, are set for this type of reason, so they know when to evacuate a particular area if needed.
The camp has been evacuated before and has contingency plans in place for this scenario.
The Hayden Pass Fire has not destroyed structures in its path, but officials are confident it has grown substantially more than 12,000 acres, with one U.S. Forest Service official guessing it to be around 15,000 acres.
An infrared plane was scheduled Tuesday night to get an official idea of the fire’s size. The last official size was 12,193 acres.
Kyle Sullivan, public information officer for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, said that crews have continued to be successful at keeping the fire away from any structures.
Crews working structure protection have been determining which houses in the area are defensible, and firefighters are going onto people’s property to remove any items that could potentially fuel the fire, such as propane tanks.
Two Type 1 helicopters continued their air assault on the fire to keep the fire away from structures near Coaldale, including Cutty’s Resort.
Mike Smith with the Cañon City Fire District said that those helicopters are carrying about 800 gallons of water at a time.
Every day that goes by, he added, the fire is being pushed away from Coaldale and that those residences are not immediately threatened at this moment, but they are under pre-evacuation if the wind were to shift and change the fire’s direction.
He said he expected the fire to continue climbing up the mountain over the Continental Divide, and if it did, then embers could begin to fall in the San Luis Valley.
Meanwhile, Sullivan said that conditions Tuesday were similar to Monday, and that the fire is at zero containment.
“It’s a little more drier today, but the wind is less strong, so we have two balancing factors,” Sullivan said. “We will continue to see an active fire.”
Sullivan said again that they are expecting this fire to burn for a long time and their main focus is structure safety, public safety and firefighter safety.
Monday evening, a Type 2 team took over the fire, Sullivan said.
Elsewhere in Colorado, two other fires were causing problems for firefighters.
To the north of the Hayden Pass Fire, a 566-acre fire near Nederland, west of Boulder, had destroyed eight homes, Boulder County Sheriff Joe Pelle said. Firefighters hoped to have it 25 percent contained by late Tuesday.
Investigators believe the fire, called the Cold Springs Fire, began Saturday when two campers failed to douse a campfire.
Another blaze, Colorado’s largest current wildfire, has blackened more than 30 square miles of beetle-killed timber in the northwest part of the state near Wyoming.
The fire near the Wyoming border began June 19, and it was 5 percent contained after charring federal and state lands about 25 miles north of Walden. The cause is under investigation.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
