I used to love the wind. I remember childhood afternoons on the sandy beach of Lake Michigan, being cooled by the breezes coming off the lake. Or summers at my family’s cottage in northern Wisconsin, listening to the wind through the birch trees, the waves softly lapping the shore.
When I got to Colorado I discovered the music made by the wind through the aspen leaves and through the pines: a sound that evoked something wild: winds that streamed from the Pacific Ocean, across the Sierras and the empty desert basins, arriving in full force at the foot of the Rocky Mountains.
Here, in Boulder, where strong winds are common, especially in winter, I also discovered wind’s destructiveness. A few years after I moved here, wind gusts of 80 mph tore off a roof in southern Boulder and sent it down the hill, where it landed in someone’s yard. Over the years, telephone and electric poles were constantly being replaced by tall metal towers that could withstand high winds.
But I was never afraid of the wind until last December when 100-mph winds carried flames across dry fields into suburbia, destroying 1,000 homes in Louisville and Superior. (Photo above shows the aftermath, with plastic head that someone stuck on the emergency fence.) Up to that point, no one imagined that a fire could start in December, burning so hot that it leapt across a four-lane highway to obliterate not just homes but a strip mall and hotel.
And in the last month, strong winds have started small fires up down the urban Front Range, burning fields as well as pine-covered mountain slopes, invading both mountain and suburban subdivisions. We’re learning that no place is safe. Last week, a wildfire burned several homes in Monte Vista, a southern Colorado town surrounded by farmlands and near the sandhill crane refuge I visit every spring.
None of the fires this past month has reached the destructiveness of the December fire, but everyone knows it’s just a matter of time. Everyone is holding their breath, especially when the wind comes up, like it has for the past week.
At the cabin, many of my neighbors are already making their evacuation plans for what looks to be a dry and warm summer: what to pack and which route to take when the alarm sounds; who to call for information. One neighbor told me he can’t stop worrying, that he feels the hand of doom on his shoulder constantly. Right now, the fire danger is greater on the plains, because the snow has just melted at the cabin, and the ground is still moist. But as temperatures rise, the snow that covered Mount Meeker last week is quickly melting, and no measurable precipitation is forecast for the foreseeable future.
When I arrived at the cabin this week, the winds were strong, almost too strong to walk in, and the trees swayed violently in the wind. Unlike in the past, I didn’t find the winds comforting. It felt like some unknown and unseen force had been loosened. What’s scarier is that there is no safe shelter anymore.
It is the same here in Northern California where we've been ravaged by fires year in year out. I haven't lived here long enough to know but it seems to me that it is windier than it used to be as well. Not a good combination, drought and wind.
Posted by: Julene A Bair | April 30, 2022 at 06:43 PM
Good story writing and photography.
Posted by: Brent | May 09, 2022 at 04:15 AM
Thanks, Brent.
Posted by: Kathy Kaiser | May 11, 2022 at 10:23 AM
Julene, I think I read that climate change is making the winds worse, but I'm not sure why.
Posted by: Kathy Kaiser | May 11, 2022 at 10:24 AM
So nice to see the new growth and I think a lot of things really aren’t dead but in shock and seem to come back! But around here they start logging everything right away🤔. Yes, I too have noticed way more wind 💨 and that is seriously what drives these fires 🔥!
Posted by: Sally Hanson | May 15, 2022 at 11:20 AM