Kathi Arnold was doing chores around her log house Saturday afternoon on County Road 318 when a neighbor called her, warning that a wildfire was putting up smoke behind her house. She had been on the phone for no more than a couple minutes when she saw smoke rising from the top of a ridge across a small meadow from her home.
Within minutes, she said, flames erupted atop the ridge in the juniper, pinon and sagebrush. In no time, the fire raced down the hill toward her house.
Arnold knew she had to get out of there, and fast. So she threw clothing into her suitcase and a couple of valuable items into her car – fully expecting her house would burn.
“I grabbed as much as I could before I left,” Arnold said. “I had no real deep hopes that my house was going to be able to make it.”
The fire became known as the Rim Road Fire. It was one of three wildfires that ignited last weekend. The other two were the Elkhorn Fire on Missionary Ridge and the Teelawuket Fire near Vallecito Reservoir.
Between the three fires, hundreds of acres burned, 52 homes – including Arnold’s – were evacuated and dozens more were placed on pre-evacuation notice.
Just as Arnold was preparing to flee the advancing blaze, help miraculously arrived.
“Everything happened so fast,” Arnold said. “Slurry planes started coming immediately, one after the other, and they stopped it halfway down the hill on the backside of my property.”
Tanker planes carrying loads of fire retardant roared in over Arnold’s property, dropping their payloads ahead of the advancing blaze. Moments later, she said, police officers raced up her driveway, asking her to evacuate the area as fast as she could.
“They (firefighters) were so on it so fast that it stayed on that side of the hill,” Arnold said. “It was definitely a magical thing.”
The fires were able to spread with ease because of the dry vegetation, said Lorena Williams, spokeswoman with the U.S. Forest Service.
But, she said, firefighters from the Los Pinos Fire Protection District, La Plata Fire Protection District, the Bureau of Indian Affairs Fire Division, Southern Ute Indian Tribe and hotshot crews from across the country were well-equipped to respond to the blazes before they got too far out of hand.
They were able to quickly contain and extinguish the Teelawuket Fire, which posed the largest immediate risk to homes in the Vallecito area. With that done, more resources could be allocated to the larger Rim Road and Elkhorn fires.
“Because we have so many resources queued up to act immediately, we caught the Teelawuket Fire at half an acre,” Williams said. “That’s the fire that we all went, ‘Oh, no,’ because it had so much potential. But because we had aircraft, engines and people hiking in so fast, they were able to get on scene and catch it.”
With the Teelawuket Fire officially contained Sunday, more resources could be allocated to fighting the Elkhorn and Rim Road fires, Williams said.
Scot Davis, deputy fire chief for the Los Pinos Fire Protection District, responded to the Rim Road Fire at 3:30 p.m. Saturday afternoon. Because the fire was technically on Southern Ute Indian tribal land, the Bureau of Indian Affairs Southern Ute Agency had already started containment work by the time Los Pinos firefighters arrived. They immediately began working under the command of the BIA, Davis said.
“On Saturday, they got the fire boxed in, got established lines, and then on Sunday and through this week, the goal was to put out any spot fires and get the whole thing cooled down,” Davis said.
The multiple agencies used a combination of slurry dropped by tanker planes and fire breaks dug by bulldozers and hand crews to stop the spread of the fire, said Dan Dosch, wildland captain for Los Pinos Fire. With the fire boxed in, he said, crews were working Tuesday to feed water to the north and south lines of the fire.
According to a Tuesday afternoon news release, the Rim Road Fire was brought down from 114 acres to 97 acres, bringing the containment of the fire to 35%. Davis said the main concern firefighters have now are ground fires in the layer of dead organic matter above the topsoil.
Evacuation orders for the area effected by the Rim Road Fire were lifted Monday, and Arnold said she was able to return to her house, which was unscathed.
The Elkhorn Fire was reported at 5:08 p.m. Saturday when an under-construction house caught fire and spread to the surrounding scrub oak hillside. It had grown to 321.5 acres as of Tuesday afternoon. The blaze prompted the evacuation of 41 homes in the Elkhorn subdivision and pre-evacuation notices for the Celadon area.
On Monday, Williams said the Elkhorn Fire was moving northeast of the initial burn zones, into the San Juan National Forest and away from residences. While homes in the area are no longer under immediate threat, the Elkhorn Fire will likely become a long-term problem.
“Elkhorn is going to be on the landscape for a while,” Williams said. “We’re planning long-term.”
On Monday, Williams said embers from the fire blew into the Bear Creek drainage, a densely-vegetated canyon on the north end of Missionary Ridge. Because of the steepness of the terrain and how thick the forest is on the ground, Williams said getting firefighters on the ground could prove challenging. Because of that, she said, containing the fire could take longer than the Rim Road or Teelawuket fires.
“It's dangerous to have firefighters in there,” Williams said. “We're bringing hotshot crews in to see if they feel safe inserting into the canyon, and canyons come with a lot of hazards for fire. This fire is not going to be out for weeks.”
Williams said fire crews will continue to keep the fire from spreading into the residential neighborhoods near the burn zone. With that in mind, she urged people to be aware that fire danger will remain heightened, that the monsoon rains have not arrived yet and that people should make sure to adhere to the Stage 1 fire restrictions in place throughout the Four Corners.
“The one thing we don't need is humans to contribute to more fires,” Williams said. “That starts to stretch our resources really thin. We are in Stage 1 fire restrictions for the San Juan and most adjacent jurisdictions. We haven't gotten substantial rain. Fire danger is really high.”
