The second fire ignited in late March in the hills west of our Boulder home. The fire blew the flames at sickening, inconceivable speed-away from us. Our house was close to the ignition point but upwind. Some who’d been away couldn’t get home to save beloved pets. It spread so fast, fanned by winds gusting up to 100 mph, that people fled their homes without even grabbing their phones and computers, kids still in pajamas, leaving photo albums, mementos, documents. In a period of six hours, the Marshall fire burned 1,084 homes to the south and east of us. The first came just before New Year’s, near my home in Boulder, Colorado, 400 miles north of Hermits Peak. Photographs courtesy Hannah Nordhaus When fire becomes normalĬalf Canyon is my fifth brush with wildfire in as many months. By April 19, the blaze was almost entirely contained. Not wanting to tempt fate, we canceled the meeting, and breathed a sigh of relief when the Hermits Peak fire, as it came to be called, moved northeast and away from our land. In 130 years, a fire had never come so close to us. But on April 6, a prescribed burn at the base of Hermits Peak-set, ironically, to protect the land from fire-grew out of control. A dozen cousins now share ownership of four houses and 700 forested acres. When we heard about the fire in early April, we were planning a Zoom call to discuss the future of the place. He decided to build a house there instead. But then he traveled up the steep river-canyon and saw the ancient ponderosa pines and the lush meadows that climbed toward a granite-faced mountain called Hermits Peak. It was 10 miles from his home in the small city of Las Vegas, New Mexico, where he ran a business selling goods hauled by wagon along the Santa Fe trail. CSS.My great-grandfather bought the land in the 1890s, in order to log it. Enver Hoxha: The Lunatic Who Took Over the Asylum. Suspicious Minds – Enver Hoxha & Albania: A Cult of Capriciousness. Turkmenistan: the central Asian hermit state ‘teetering on the edge of catastrophe.’ South China Morning Post. Opposition leader says Belarus has become “North Korea of Europe.” Reuters.
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