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This summer's forest fires haven't come near Salida, but we're inside the Red Zone, and the forests here are no more fire-proof than any others. Thus life takes on a strange day-by-day quality beneath a hazy sky that sometimes becomes dark and smoky, inspiring plenty of worried gossip.
It happened last Saturday. Sitting in the living room with an open window behind me, I felt the wind arrive from the east, and suddenly the air smelled like a back-draft from our parlor stove, which of course wasn't burning.
We went outside to see clouds of black smoke roiling behind Tenderfoot Hill. The phone soon range, with the caller saying she'd heard there could be a wildfire at the head of Badger Creek, maybe a dozen miles from town.
That sounded quite possible, and the TV news wasn't going to tell us anything, since there was a much bigger fire closer to the metro area. We drove down the Arkansas to the mouth of Badger Creek. We saw no smoke plumes, , though we did see some fire-fighters and their trucks standing by, along the highway.
Apparently, the wind had just shifted for a few minutes, giving us a whiff of Hayman smoke.
While we were out, someone told us that there was a fire near the ghost town of St. Elmo, which lost its old city hall and other historic structures to a fire in April. Indeed there was a fire. But it was just a grass fire that spread over only a tenth of an acre, and it was quickly extinguished.
Wednesday evening brought another round of smoke, along with a lot of air traffic beneath an eerie orange half-moon. We began to wish there was a 24-hour Colorado Fire News cable channel, but since there wasn't, we guessed.
The light wind was from the south and southwest, so could it be Missionary Ridge smoke from the Durango area? Probably not, since winds from that direction earlier in the week had not carried that aroma. Must be something new and closer, we decided, but not real close like Saguache County, or it would smell worse.
We guessed it would be in the mountains near Monte Vista, and we were close -- the Forest Service said the smoke was from the new Million Fire at nearby South Fork.
Friends tell us that such speculation happens at their households, too, every time the wind shifts or the sky changes its tint or a new sooty aroma wafts in.
So far, it's always been somewhere else, but that could change in an instant.
That's what we've been telling people who call,
said Bonnie Swyers, director of the chamber of commerce
here. That it's hazy here, and you can't have campfires
or smoke outdoors, but the forest is still open. And
that's at the moment -- it could change quickly.
Tourism is a difficult industry to quantify, partly because there are different forms of tourism. There are the general-outdoors people who just want to camp and enjoy the mountains, and they're probably the majority of our visitors.
There are also festival tourists who come for an event, and Salida was plenty busy for last weekend's FIBArk celebration -- it's based on a kayak race to Cotopaxi, though it has grown to include plenty more, including a carnival and parade.
We also have a lot of artists and galleries, and those I've talked to say that business is fine this summer, though to me our downtown appears to be in a feast-or-famine mode, either really busy or almost empty.
River traffic -- primarily commercial rafting -- appears
to be down about 20 percent this summer, according to Rob
White at the Arkansas River Headwaters State Park. We
don't get counts from the commercial outfitters until
fall,
he said, so that's just an
observation.
And it's just speculation as to whether the downturn is caused by drought (no big water in the Arkansas this spring, but still a steady 400 cusecs to support rafts), fire fears, the customary Colorado recession when a Bush is president or the effects of 9-11 on travel in general.
Thus there's plenty of reason hereabouts to feel nervous about this summer, even if the wildfires don't get any closer. The flanks of the Sawatch and Sangre de Cristo ranges are dry and full of fuel, but they're miles from town. Such forest as there is near town is pinon-juniper, and those small trees are widely spaced. On account of the drought, there doesn't appear to be enough grass between them to sustain any combustion. And in town, many of us have been wasting water on our yards to make them green and less flammable.
But the Iron Mountain Fire in early June was in pinon-juniper, and Thursday morning's edition of the local paper had a warning from the sheriff and fire chief that Salida residents should start gathering papers and the like, since we might be forced to evacuate with little notice sometime this summer.
So we keep the windows open, and with every shift of the wind or its scent, we step out to scan the sky for clues. This summertime, the livin' ain't easy -- it's edgy.
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