Never Wake a Sleeping Dragon

Dragon legends play a powerful role in mountain folklore. In European tales of yore, a dragon often dwells in a remote lair, which is nestled deep in a timbered and rugged landscape that towers high and secluded above town. However, when provoked, the dragon uses its power to fire scorch the lands below his domain, consuming everything that dare cross his path.

On Monday, the dragon that sleeps in the mountains above my town of Boulder, Colorado awoke with a vengeance. Most days, even most years, he sleeps peacefully and lets us live, play and love in the thickly wooded mountains that ground our place in space and time. However, officials confirmed this morning that he ravaged at least 95 structures, consumed more than 7,000 acres and is still uncontained.

I live on a mountain a few miles south of the Four-Mile Canyon Fire. My home is surround on 3 sides by 4,000 acres of open prairie, lodgepole and ponderosa pine. On Monday night, with the fire uncontrolled and the weather uncooperative, my community recognized we were spared from wildfire evacuation only by a strong north wind blowing it in the opposite direction. My neighbors and I watched with blaze from the hill above our homes with bleeding hearts and trepidation. We knew if the fire had started a canyon closer, or had headed south, that our structures, also nestled in the timbered mountains, could just as easily be consumed.

Click here to see my CNN photo journal of the fire just after it started.

We understood the power of a mountain community and its ties to the land, and what the loss might mean. We made a neighborhood evacuation plan and slept with our doors unlocked. When pondering what we would take, one neighbor confessed to keeping irreplaceable items in a “fire box” for quick exit during the summer months. We vowed to help each other if needed, but also recognized the important things, friends and family, we already had. On Tuesday morning, we awoke to find that while many other communities were not spared and would continue to be at risk, ours were well out of the dragon’s path.  

During the initial 36 hours after the wildfire outbreak, what I most craved was maps. I wanted to visualize the actual evacuation zone, the active burn area and the mountain topography between it and me. When I asked my colleagues, geospatial experts, for mapping resources related to the Four-Mile Canyon fire they pointed me to excellent geospatial and satellite imagery of the fire: Wildfire Today and the U.S. Forest Service Mapping Program. A site called the Weather Underground also publishes real-time maps that combine fire perimeter, temperature and topography information.

In the initial hours of the incident, a citizen-driven GIS effort resulted in a hand digitizing Google Map all of the information transferred over the police repeater and other news sources. The Daily Camera, the local paper displays this map adjacent to news updates. Because the Google Map resource provides a street grid and open space descriptions of the greater Boulder area it allowed me to see where the City of Boulder and my community are oriented in relationship to the Four-Mile Canyon fire.

I turned to Data Basin to explore the possibility of digitizing my own maps of the incident location in relationship to the greater Boulder area. When I overlaid the Arc street grid with my hand digitized fire perimeter, I stepped back in horror. While I had read the addresses of homes lost in the evening paper, the map provided a visual orientation that resulted in a personal frame of reference. Within the fire perimeter, I could see the footprint of a friend’s childhood home. Seeing its proximity to the road network representing the homes of dear colleagues and friends let me to conceptualize those in my circle who required calls and emails of support and maybe an extra prayer. I could see the city’s water treatment plant within the perimeter of concern and my sister’s upcoming wedding site closer to the west of the burn area than we would like. I could understand that the slurry bombers flying overhead were working with the natural fire break of the Boulder Canyon and Boulder Creek to hold a line of safety for my own mountain community and the other neighborhoods nestled south of the blaze. The topological base layer I used allowed me to see the alarming proximity of the blaze to the City of Boulder proper, as the active fire perimeter resides along the final ridge about 1,000 ft above town.

You can view my map of the Four Mile Canyon fire (linked photo above) or create and share your own maps in Data Basin. Please note there is up-to a 12-hour delay in information transference.

Last night at twilight, I traveled to an overlook above my own canyon to watch the still uncontained blaze. I sat on a rock next to homeowners from the next valley over, whom kept watch on their homes with binoculars: “Why is our house glowing? Did we leave the lights on? No, honey, that is not possible. The utility company turned the power off. That is flames reflecting in our atrium windows.”  In the legends of yore, the only way for a community to defeat a fire-dragon and save its town was for brave and often common citizens, to join together and slay it. In closing, I’d like to thank the dragon slayers of the four-Mile Canyon fire: the firefighters, Red Cross and Community Officials. I also appreciate their work to keep the rest of us out of harms way. And my heart goes out to those who have to watch the fate of their homes through binoculars.