The Gold Mountain Fire is 90 percent contained and has grown by about an acre in ten days. Evacuation zones in Montrose and Gunnison counties are standing down. But 229 people are still assigned — and much of their work now is undoing what firefighters did in June and July. (Figures as of Aug. 6.)
"Long after the smoke column is gone, there's still a lot of work being done," said Brandan Hogeland, a lieutenant with South Metro Fire Rescue outside Denver, working this fire as a heavy equipment boss trainee.
He stood at a stretch of line above Owl Creek Pass — "about 1,000 feet of control line that was put in," a strip wider than a two-lane road, bladed to bare dirt so the fire would starve when it reached it. It worked, and then the line itself became the problem. Abandon firelines cause erosion, become unwanted ATV trails or ad hoc roads.
Undoing it is its own assignment, called suppression repair: smooth or roughen the bared ground, then pull the brush back over to slow erosion. That isn't the operator's call. Resource advisors write the specs — specialists who, Hogeland said, "usually have some kind of a background in biology or environmental sciences," and who decide what keeps the ground "from being a scar, minimizing the impact as much as possible."
The same obligation follows onto private land, where landowners who hosted crews get their torn-up roads regraded before the fire crews leaves.
None of that, though, makes the country safe to walk.
"A recently burned area is a dangerous place," said Kevin Sweeney, the information officer with the complex incident management team on the Gold Mountain Fire. Flash flooding is one reason. Hazard trees are another, and the dangerous ones don't always look it: soil burned near a trunk, then soaked by monsoon rain, can leave a tree green on top and failing underneath. "The tree might look healthy, but its root system might be damaged," Sweeney said.
The Forest Service will clear hazard trees along roads before reopening them, but "they won't get to all of the hazard trees for the whole forest. They'll focus on the roads, then they'll focus on trails."
At an overlook halfway up the pass, Sweeney stopped this reporter from walking to the edge of a burn for a photo. A snag overhead was flagged, and the flagging, he noted, "literally says killer tree." He wouldn't walk under it either: "I don't want to walk up in there. I got kids."
His advice for hunters, hikers and Christmas-tree cutters this fall: on a windy day in a burned area, watch for that "hairs on the back of your neck" feeling — and leave.
Closures remain in effect, and Sweeney asked for patience with them — catching himself mid-sentence as he did. "Those closures aren't in place because we want to keep folks out of here. Well, they are in place because we want to keep folks out of here." It isn't that people shouldn't enjoy their land, he said: "there's some pretty serious hazards back here, and there's a reason that that area is closed."
As Hogeland put it: "The folks are still here working, even though there's not a lot of smoke in the air." ...at least from the Gold Mountain Fire.
