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6: Encouraging News from the Wildfire Danger Zone
- University of New Mexico Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Our neighbors were letting their yards be natural, and so there were enough things on the ground that our neighbors on the east side, both houses burned down. Tom McDonald, Los Alamos Fire Survivor Not all the news is as bad as at Los Alamos. There are more positive examples. This chapter shows what imaginative citizens, land developers, and government officials can do to address the problems of the Wildfire Danger Zone. Bent Tree in El Paso County, Colorado El Paso and Douglas Counties form part of the urban corridor that stretches betweenDenverandColoradoSpringsalongInterstate.Myfamilyhomesteaded around Parker in the s. Life was better out on the plains southeast of Denver than it had been in Austria and Germany, but death still came quickly and in many strange, new forms. My paternal grandmother, born in , could remember how people would burn wheat stubble and ditches for weed control, hoping to beat the much larger prairie wildfires to the punch. Her vivid stories about prairie fires illuminated the nights of my childhood. Her brothers added riveting accounts of the doors of the family’s underground “soddy” storm cellar. They were metal, not just to ward off tornados and hailstones, but to resist the flames of wildfires. “We lost trees as fast as we planted them,” my great uncle remembered. Today, Parker still grows weeds, but now it cultivates subdivisions rather than wheat. It is close to the heart of the Wildfire Danger Zone. The Parker Fire SIX Encouraging News from the Wildfire Danger Zone Protection District is in the southeast corner of the Denver metropolitan area. It covers a -square-mile area. It is fifteen miles east of the Rockies in the rolling, forested hills of Douglas County, one of the fastest-growing counties in the country . Recently, Douglas County wisely hosted the Wildland Interface Academy, a firefighting school specific to the Wildfire Danger Zone. Until or so, Douglas County and El Paso County had few elk east of I-. Now, according to the Colorado Division of Wildlife, it has , out of a region-wide herd of ,. Historically, elk were plains animals, but hunting and ranching forced them into the mountains by . And now they are back, following the returning forest that the old Germans dubbed “The Black Forest” after the Schwarzwald of their homeland. Little did they know how true that term might prove, for now the Black Forest is part of what fire analysts called “The Red Zone,” the high-risk, forested subdivisions of Colorado’s Front Range. Colorado’s,-acreBlackForesthaspuzzledecologistsforyears.Itisperfectly positioned to catch the upslope summer storms from the Gulf of Mexico. Underlain by impermeable sandstone, the Black Forest is a very good—if improbable —place to grow trees. The Air Force Academy is on the western edge of the Black Forest. Most of the Black Forest lies east of I-. Shaped like a large triangle ,itextendseasttowardKansasformileafterrollingmile:along, ,-foot-high ponderosapeninsulaawashinundulatinggrasslands.Theelevated,thirty-mile-long ridge separates the Denver and Colorado Springs watersheds, and it catches upslopemonsoonsinthesummerandspring .DuringColorado’sgoldrushfrom through , sixteen sawmills operated here simultaneously. The pioneers cleared the useable timber of the Black Forest, leaving second and third growth for today’s developers and subdividers. Before the advent of Europeans, frequent fire was always a factor, whether set by lightning or by Indians. Bent Tree is acres of wooded, custom homesites ranging in size from . to acres (figs. through ). The gently rolling, wooded land provides ideal building sites with spectacular views of Pikes Peak, the Air Force Academy, and the Front Range. As the sales brochures proclaim, “the best of close-in country estate living among the finest stand of Ponderosa Pines remaining in the Black Forest.” All utilities are underground. Individual water wells and septic systems are the responsibility of each homesite owner. There are some fire-related water storage tanks. The Tri-Lakes Fire Protection District has a station located on the northeast corner of Bent Tree, at the intersection of Highway and the wellnamed Rollercoaster Road, and next to one of the ,-foot water wells required to augment the water for individual wells in Bent Tree. Initially, the Colorado State Forest Service thinned in the Black Forest to suppress beetle outbreaks in the s and to modify fuels for fire management. They left telephone-pole-type trees, both because they selected the tall and straight characteristics foresters habitually associate with good timber, and also because they removed all lower branches to a height of twenty feet to eliminate CHAPTER SIX [3.15.221.67] Project...
