Days ago, it was the Ouray County Fairgrounds. Now it's a small city.
Nearly a thousand people are working the Gold Mountain Fire, which grew to almost 28,000 acres over the holiday weekend near Ouray and stood at 3% contained as of July 6th. To feed, house and support them, an entire town has sprung up almost overnight in Ridgway — hundreds of tents, streets of office trailers, showers, laundry, a medical unit and its own security.
"We really kind of set up a little mini town," says Tyler Nathie, one of the Operations Section chiefs with the incident management team.
The scale is hard to picture until you stand in it. In the mess hall, head cook Sharamie Bailey serves 900 breakfasts nearly every morning. Each firefighter on the line can burn through 5,000 calories a day, and refrigerated semi-trailers hold days of meals in reserve.
"I do it because someone has to," Bailey says. "People are out there fighting the fires for us, and we've got to serve them. They have to eat."
There are no volunteers in this camp. Every cook, driver and firefighter is a trained, paid professional, drawn from more than 30 states — among them a tribal fire crew from California, the Shingle Springs Band of Miwok Indians. Even the small things reveal the discipline: crews walk single file everywhere, even to breakfast, because on the fire line that's how a crew keeps count of every member.
Reuben Farnsworth, a paramedic from Delta County, has worked fire camps for a decade. "It's a mobile camp, kind of like the camps they set up for military personnel overseas," he says. "Kind of like a little city."
The fire is burning in places locals love — the West, Middle, and East forks of the Cimarron, where families have camped for generations. Nathie, who grew up in Grand Junction, has camped there too.
Near the mess hall stands an information board with the morning's maps. One corner is saved for thank-you notes and was a little sparse on Monday morning. If you want to drop thank you notes for the fire crews call the hotline at 970-355-3286 to learn how to deliver them.
If you want to donate to those effected by the fire visit the Ouray County Community Foundation at wc-cf.org.
