Rethinking Fire

United by Fire is a nine-part narrative podcast series that takes you inside the harrowing 2020 wildfire season in Colorado through the voices of those who witnessed it firsthand. Hear from firefighters and residents who found themselves in the path of the flames, as well as ecologists, land managers, community planners and entrepreneurs who are working to build a more wildfire-resilient future. 

The series is hosted by Kristan Uhlenbrock, Executive Director of the Institute for Science & Policy. For more information and resources from this episode, check out the episode summary page. Enjoy the transcript and to listen to the audio version visit institute.dmns.org/united-by-fire.

 

The Red Flag

KRISTAN UHLENBROCK: Colorado was blistering hot in the summer of 2020.   

ASHTON ALTIERI/CBS NEWS: Hey there. It's Thursday. It's August 13th. I’m meteorologist Ashton Altieri. We did it again yesterday. Temperatures well into the nineties. We had 97 degrees yesterday, our 52nd day this year with temperatures in the nineties.  

KRISTAN: Across the state, wildfires had been breaking out. The Pine Gulch and Grizzly Peak fires were billowing smoke – sending it across the state. The Pine Gulch Fire would hold the title for largest wildfire in Colorado’s history… but not for long.  

ASHTON: No surprise, red flag warnings for the northwest corner of the state. Wind gusts to 35 mph, low humidity, dry soil, means new fires could start today and the existing fires could grow in size. Really tough situation for the firefighters out west.  

KRISTAN: A red flag warning signals officials to be on the lookout for extreme wildfire danger – the kind where even a tiny spark can become an inferno, fast.  

It could be caused by something as simple as a lightning strike. The blade of a lawnmower grazing a rock. A vehicle chain dragging on the pavement. Or an ember from a campfire.  

On a dry, windy day in mid-August, hikers reported seeing smoke pouring out of the Arapaho & Roosevelt National Forests. The fire spread quickly through dense trees, guided by rugged terrain.  

CBS COLORADO: Breaking news tonight out of Larimer County. A wildfire now being called the Cameron Peak Fire is burning in the Poudre Canyon started this afternoon around 2:30. It has since grown to more than 1500 acres. There are some evacuations in place. Cameron pass is closed. Larimer County Sheriff says it is likely that more evacuations will be ordered.   

KRISTAN: Monte Williams, the forest supervisor at the time, was leaving a meeting in Boulder when he learned of the fire. Ironically, he’d just signed off on a plan to help re-route future wildfires.  

MONTE WILLIAMS: So, I got word that we had a fire. Um, and I didn't get very far down the road, and I realized my phone was going nuts with texts. And what I was seeing was dispatch very rapidly starting to dispatch a lot of people and I went, yikes, uh, it looks like they didn't catch it. And it's, it's rolling.  

MONTE: By the time I got back to Fort Collins, it had come out of the wilderness and had crossed the road and now was in a chunk of ground that we had known for a long time, there's not much we can do in there. I would say 70, 80 percent of the trees were dead, had died as long as 20 years ago, uh, we had a big beetle epidemic, and not good access. Uh, a lot of what we think about is if somebody gets injured, how do we get them out? And there just wasn't good options. It was a very dangerous place to put firefighters. And so I realized at that point we were going to be in it for the long haul.  

KRISTAN: The Cameron Peak Fire burned for nearly four months and became the largest wildfire in Colorado’s history. But it was just one of many intense blazes. 2020 was catastrophic. We saw our three largest fires smash all previous records for acres burned in Colorado.  

And across the western US, millions of acres went up in flames, dozens of lives were lost, thousands more died from smoke-related causes, and countless homes and buildings were destroyed. Costs were in the billions of dollars. And that doesn’t even take into account the massive wildfires and devastating losses that happened around the world that year, in places like Australia, Brazil, and the Arctic.   

This is not only a Colorado story… it’s an all of us story.  

In this episode, we’ll hear from people who stared into the Cameron Peak fire and the difficult choices they faced.   

This is United by Fire, where we explore hard truths about our landscapes and ourselves. My name is Kristan Uhlenbrock. And from the Institute for Science and Policy, welcome to season four of our podcast, Laws of Notion.

  

In the Fire’s Path   

ANNIE BOYD: I don't remember now how long the Cameron Peak fire was going before it came here. It seemed like a long time.  

JIM BOYD: And at that point we had no idea that it was even remotely possible that fire was going to be on our doorstep within what a month or so.  

KRISTAN: Meet the Boyds.   

JIM: I'm Jim Boyd. I spent my career at YMCA the Rockies in Estes Park for 43 years and Annie and I were supposed to both retire in January of last year and I did, and she didn't.    

ANNIE: I'm Annie Boyd, and I'm married to Jim, we've been married almost nine years, I'm a semi retired speech pathologist at Estes Park Hospital. What else would you like to know? I'm a grandma. We have two grandchildren, uh, five children between the two of us.   

KRISTAN: They live in a place called the Retreat – a community of a couple hundred homes located in the small mountain town of Glenhaven, about 30 minutes east of the more prominent town of Estes Park. And the Arapaho & Roosevelt National Forests are their backyard.  

Once you leave the main highway to drive up to Jim and Annie’s home … it takes some time. Unpaved roads curve and wind, and you’re maybe driving 15 mph at best. It’s so narrow, it took a multipoint turn to get into their gravel drive.  

JIM: Well, why don't we go inside first and get the important stuff over with. You probably need to go to the bathroom.  

JIM AND KRISTAN: Hello! It's been a long, long drive, so Hi, can we come in here? You bet! Shoes are okay? Shoes are fine.   

KRISTAN: They greet us with a plate of chocolate chip cookies. And I immediately notice family photos everywhere.   

KRISTAN: You know what I saw over here, which is a, a staple, I feel like, of having kids grow up, Jim? Is the kids' height on the wall   

JIM: Mm-hmm. Those are our grandkids. Yeah.   

KRISTAN: Oh, these are your grandkids heights? who's the tallest grandkid?  

ANNIE: Oh, Jack. Jack is growing like a weed. He is, yeah. He's eight.  He's like, he's up to here on me.  

JIM: Growing up, our family had a cabin out in the country and I've always enjoyed living around wildlife. And the mountains just takes it up a notch. Both of my parents died early in my life, in my twenties. And so this was their final gift to me. I took my portion of the inheritance and bought the lot and then got a loan for the construction and for the house.   

Built this house in ‘86 and moved in at the end of that year and first part of ‘87.  

And it is my dream.  

KRISTAN: Jim is no stranger to wildfire. Several have burned in the vicinity over the years, including the Big Elk fire in 2002 that cost the lives of 3 pilots trying to put it out.  

JIM: Shortly after I moved in here, um, I joined the Glenhaven Volunteer Fire Department, so I was a firefighter EMT, and fighting wildfires was my least, um, enjoyable part of that but I was well aware of the risks of wildfire  

KRISTAN: So when the Cameron Peak Fire started, Jim began tracking it – tuning in nightly for updates.  

JIM: these guys were doing a really good job of broadcasting every night what the fire behavior had been like that day, what they were doing with the resources,  how far the fire had spread and what they were expecting for tomorrow. So I was impressed, and it was, it was kind of addicting, um, to watch it.  

JIM: There were, were days when it was smoky here and days when it was crystal clear just like it is today. It just depended on the wind direction and the temperatures.  

ANNIE: I do have a memory though of frequently we couldn't have windows open.  it was, smoky, burned your eyes, but it wasn't constant. Even though it was a reality, it's like, okay, that's far enough north. We're okay. We're okay.    

KRISTAN: And then it became not okay.   

ANNIE: Then it became not okay.  

 

The Big Runs   

KRISTAN: On long holiday weekends in Colorado, the populous cities get a little quieter as people escape to the mountains. And in the summer of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic pushed many to find solace in our great outdoors. But COVID was only one of many stressors... Smoke-filled skies were ever present.   

MONTE: Labor Day was interesting but not uncommon and not unexpected.  

KRISTAN: In 2020, Monte Williams was the Supervisor for the Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests and Pawnee National Grassland in north and central Colorado  

MONTE: There seems to be times during the summer on these bad years where conditions align that the fire is able to blow up and run for large acreages. It has to do with a whole bunch of stuff. The fuel needs to be dry enough. Uh, they had a number of days where everything came together, but the smoke had generated such a cloud over Cameron Peak that the fuel stayed wetter. It didn't get dried out by the sun that day. So it just wasn't able to get up and get running. Other days everything else was right, but they didn't have the wind in the right direction. So there was just a variety of weather and kind of different types of conditions that were happening. But once those aligned, then it sets the stage.  

And that thing ran, I think, around 60,000 acres. It was, uh, a good 20 miles, roughly, I think, from start to finish. It was something else. Folks in Fort Collins will remember that day, because it was dark. I saw in town most people driving around with their lights on.  

KRISTAN: I remember seeing the plume of smoke from Denver. Ash was falling out of the sky. By the end of that long weekend, the fire had almost tripled in size and was only 4% contained.  

Then on Tuesday, September 8th, an unexpected snowfall across the mountains helped slow things down… but only a little.   

MONTE: That run stopped not because of the snow. it ran into a burn called Dad Gulch.   

KRISTAN: He’s talking about a prescribed burn, which is a planned fire set by experts to help manage the forest.    

MONTE: And they had burnt, over a period of around five years, around 20,000 acres in there. All of these prescribed fires, when we go out and we burn the surface of the earth, we remove fuel.   

KRISTAN: That fuel is flammable stuff blanketing the ground – shrubs, leaves, twigs, dead plants.  

MONTE: The fact that we haven't had fires in over a hundred years or better there's a large accumulation of stuff that normally wouldn't have been there.  

KRISTAN: All of that stuff can make fires burn hotter, larger, longer, and faster. Plus, climate change-driven droughts are creating drier conditions.   

That’s why Monte and others are leaning into prescribed burns and other fire mitigation work in these really high-risk areas.  

MONTE: To be honest, this stuff is new for us as an agency and I think really out there in the world. We know some things work, but we're learning as we go. And I think Cameron actually tested this work that had been going on for so long. I wouldn't say that we were surprised, uh, maybe relieved and hopeful, but not a hundred percent sure that it, that it worked.  

KRISTAN: The fire didn’t spread much after that first big run. But then in early October, the weather conditions lined up again. This next big run was threatening the Colorado State University - Mountain Campus – a remote learning environment nestled high up in the Rocky Mountains in an area known as Pingree Park.   

MONTE: There was no safe place for firefighters in there. It's down in the canyon. It's steep. It's ugly. And so they pulled everybody out.   

KRISTAN: Once again, earlier fire mitigation work, including a prescribed burn on the campus grounds, offered some relief.   

The Pingree Park burn was critical for catching that second run. When we came back after the run was over, the fire had run into Pingree and it went about 300 foot and dropped and died out. And, and that was it. That was the end of it.  

KRISTAN: Luckily there was no damage to the campus and Monte says it’s a real-world example of how fire mitigation can prevent disaster.    

But the Cameron Peak fire was still alive and spreading in other directions. Its last major run happened in the middle of October. With winds gusting 70-80 mph there wasn’t much that could be done.   

MONTE: The last run went a different direction. And again, it was about alignment of wind and temperature and all that. And it rolled over the top of the wilderness and headed towards Glenhaven and Estes Park. And I forget how many homes total were burned in there, but it was a fair lick.

  

Over the Saddle  

JIM BOYD: When it came over the saddle, that was like, okay, this is real and it probably is going to come. Um, then, you know, I got out and I mowed all the grasses that I could mow and had my son and our son-in-law come up and help haul brush away.  

KRISTAN: News of a mandatory evacuation for the Retreat came on October 14th. At the time, Jim was on duty at the YMCA of the Rockies in Estes Park.   

JIM: Things just started going off: my office phone, my cell phone, um, email and text messages popping in mandatory evacuation for the retreat in Glenhaven area. It was like, jump up from my desk and I gotta go and I hightailed it down here. I was fully expecting there to be a roadblock at the top of the switchbacks. And there wasn't. So I was very thrilled. And then I was worried there was gonna be a roadblock and Glenhaven there wasn't. But the Glenhaven fire Department was a buzz with all the guys coming in.  

KRISTAN: Jim and Annie gathered their most important possessions and tried to keep their wits about them.   

JIM: We had lots of totes. We had packed away, um, file folders for tax information, all of our pictures and stuff like that. And we'd talked through, okay, if we have to evacuate, what are our priorities? we packed up Annie's Subaru completely and talked to some of our neighbors about what our plans were and  Annie took off with her car filled to the gills with our most important things.  

And I stayed in. Made sure everything was working the way it should.    

KRISTAN: Annie went to stay with her daughter in Arvada, an hour and a half away. But she kept imagining Jim back at the house, alone.  

ANNIE: So when I left for the mandatory and he stayed here, that was really hard. We stayed in good contact. Knowing what he was doing, sitting in his Lazy Boy at night and setting his alarm for every hour to look up and to see where the fire was, it was surreal. It was very difficult. I just wanted him to leave, but yet I understood why he wanted to stay.    

JIM: I just wanted to do everything I could. I, I love this home and our property and this has just been my life. And I didn't want to lose it if I didn't have to.  

ANNIE: I made him promise that if it got, um, close, that he had to get out. But had he not promised that, I don't think he would have left.  

JIM: Yeah. I knew that if this house was going to survive it would be with whatever efforts I put in.

  

A Terrible Trade   

KRISTAN: Life is all about tradeoffs — moments where we must give up one thing to get something else. These decisions often reveal a lot about our values, especially in times of crisis.  

So how do we find the right balance between keeping ourselves safe, looking out for each other, and protecting the places we love?  

DAVID WOLF: I'm not sure we at a collective level have agreed on what success looks like. I think if you ask fire chiefs, you'll get an answer. If you ask forest management professionals, you'll get a different answer. And if you ask John Q. Public on the street, you'll get a third answer.    

My measure of success is that you don't die. That's my goal during an evacuation. Everything else is, is a bonus.  

KRISTAN: This is Fire Chief David Wolf. In 2020, he was the head of the Estes Valley Fire Protection District, which is responsible for six different mountain communities. And he was there at the very start of Cameron Peak.   

DAVID: We loaded up a crew, including myself and took an engine up to Highway 14 to start helping on the first night of the fire.  

We knew that Cameron Peak was going to evolve. Once the fire jumped Highway 14 on the second day, we knew that there wasn't much to catch it to the south. It's almost all wilderness and National Park that way. So we knew it was going to be a long, long summer.  

KRISTAN: David’s been fighting fires for nearly a quarter of a century.   

DAVID: I started in the fire service when I was 17, when I was convinced I was invincible so I didn’t worry about this stuff.  

KRISTAN: Like the majority of firefighters, he served as a volunteer for many years, while also working a full-time job and building a family. They were living in Houston, Texas, when he took on a part-time role overseeing a volunteer fire training program and then he started to think about what he really loved and how he wanted to spend his time.   

DAVID: Something had to give. I used that opportunity to switch full time into the fire service. And that's when I landed the job in Estes Park and moved up here as the fire chief.  

KRISTAN: David and his family moved in 2016.   

DAVID: I'd been to Colorado many times for both work and for personal reasons and enjoyed being outdoors. I was really excited about the opportunity to live more in the mountains and, and in the forest and those places. And it was the right size agency for me at the time, you know, coming from an agency that was running 25,000 calls a year to an agency that was running 700, being able to be involved at that level. And it was a great opportunity for my family, just a spot to raise my kids and again, have access to the things that my wife and I enjoy doing being outside.  

KRISTAN: David will be the first to tell you that living in these landscapes isn’t without risk.   

DAVID: We have homes amongst the trees, you know, and there's, there's more trees than people and there's more trees than houses and the homes are built out of trees. So, they're going to burn if the conditions are right.   

KRISTAN: Wildfires in Colorado's mountain areas are notoriously unpredictable and tough to put out due to rugged terrain, dense forests with dead or dry vegetation, and weather that can change on a dime. Now more and more homes are tucked into these areas, creating a challenging situation for wildland firefighters.    

DAVID:  The longer I've been in the fire service, the more I've seen that success has to be defined differently because we can't stop every fire from happening and then the ones that do start, how do we keep that damage as minimal as possible?   

We recognized that setting a goal of no loss of life was probably an unrealistic target. As much as we wanted that. We never want to lose a life. We realize that minimizing loss of life was probably the right metric to be striving for. Minimizing acreage burned, minimizing homes lost, not preventing all homes from being lost.  

KRISTAN: He says we need to have frank conversations with people about the risks of living in wildfire-prone areas – and the limitations of an emergency response system.  

DAVID: The only way to keep people safe from wildfires is to not build in the mountains. That's not a viable path. People want to live in the mountains. I love living in the mountains. I love living around trees. And we recognize that that will come with some risks.  

I can't guarantee that your home will be safe if you build up here. We are going to put all these systems in place to do our best to notify you and get you out, but whether or not your home survives will depend on other factors beyond our control.   

KRISTAN: Mandatory evacuations help emergency responders focus their efforts on things like protecting structures and re-routing fires. But when residents stay behind in their homes, things get really complicated.   

DAVID: It is entirely an individual's right to stay, if they choose to, and we do our best to try and communicate our understanding of the situation, what we foresee the risk being, what we think the impacts to that individual could be, and give them the information they need to be able to make a choice. And many people choose to evacuate when we ask for that evacuation, and some people choose not to.  

KRISTAN: Whether or not someone stays during an evacuation from a natural disaster is a critical research and public policy question. Things like people’s perception of danger, their economic or physical ability, or the information made available to them are all factors that can influence a decision. And sometimes, people just want to do anything they can to protect their homes.    

So emergency responders want to make sure people are aware of what’s going to happen.  

DAVID: Like, once the fire gets to town, we will shut off the electricity. So if you are counting on water from your well that's fed by an electric pump, you're going to lose that. And if that's part of your calculus on whether or not you should stay, we want to make sure you understand that. We need you to understand that you're not going to be able to open your garage door with electricity after we shut the power off. We wanna get people information so that they can make better informed decisions.  

I think we've seen more of that in the Gulf Coast when it comes to hurricanes, where communities are being very clear, like, hey, after this date and time, there are no emergency services. You can call 911. We will answer your call. No one is coming. And that's a really hard line to take, right? That's not what a lot of us feel like we signed up for. We signed up to say, Hey, we're gonna help no matter what. But there is a tradeoff once we start getting into that limited staffing or high-risk situations.  

KRISTAN: David operates in an environment governed by two unpredictable forces: fire and people. And with that, he’s learned to see risk and success as gradients.   

When Cameron Peak ripped through the Retreat – where Jim and Annie live – David was faced with tough decisions.   

DAVID: I think one of the hardest situations that I faced during the Cameron Peak Fire related to this was, we were doing a series of airdrops through The Retreat of Glenhaven because there's about 200 homes through there and we were doing water drops, very large volumes of water. And we knew that we evacuated all of our firefighters. We knew that we made notifications and we thought everybody was out and as we had planes on approach, we could hear a chainsaw running out in the distance; in the areas where we're anticipating dropping water. We're assuming that person doesn't know that this plane's coming, that they don't know that they're there. And we know that it could be really bad for them if we drop water on them. We also know that if we don't drop this retardant, then we are not protecting these 200 homes.  

We did send, uh, some runners back in there to try and see if they could locate and notify again, people that were in those potential drop zones to minimize the risk. Um, but we needed to keep doing these drops and we had done our notifications and we've done what we could.

  

Armageddon  

KRISTAN: Jim was hunkered down at his property when Cameron Peak ballooned in size to 158,000 acres. Passing the threshold to become the largest wildfire in state history.    

JIM: That second afternoon, they sent in some slurry bombers, some heavy tanker aircraft that dropped fire retardant.  

It was just west of where our barn was, and didn't get on our house, got a little bit on the barn, but it was impressive to watch. I don't know how they missed those trees. They were flying those great big planes so low.    

But it didn't do any good. It's like throwing a glass of water on a haystack that's on fire  

KRISTAN: The electricity had been cut off, and so had the phone service. Meanwhile Jim had devised his own irrigation system. His property depends on an electrically powered well for water, so he connected a generator to the well’s pump – allowing him to set up sprinklers around the property.   

JIM: I figured I had 21 hours worth of generator time to keep the water running, to keep our well pumping and the sprinklers on the roof that were nailed down, creating kind of a curtain of water all the way around the house.  

KRISTAN: Days after the mandatory evacuation order had been issued, Jim finally left home –– when the fire was just a quarter of a mile away.  

JIM: This is the video I took just before I left.    

You can hear the wind, and you can hear the generator, and it's just coming in like a hurricane. It's just crazy. Lot of black smoke and clear blue skies. It was so ironic. I mean, sky just as blue as it can be that way, and you couldn't see anything but smoke to the west and the north.      

KRISTAN: Racing against the clock of a fast-moving fire, Jim wound his way down the narrow, gravel roads of the Retreat.  

JIM: I got through Glenhaven, stopped at the fire department and told them I was leaving because they were not real happy with me for staying in. And wanted them to know, don't worry about trying to get in to save me. I'm out. And then when I got to the top of the switchbacks and looked back, that's when it really hit because it was like Armageddon. It was incredible.  

That's when I called Annie and let her know that I was out. And, just a real feeling of uncertainty. Not loss, yet, because I wasn't going to give up. But, just feeling so hopeless.  

KRISTAN: Jim united with Annie and their family in Arvada. In the strange calm, away from the fire, they set up a picnic.   

JIM: And I remember we went to this one park where there was a was it a trombone quartet and sat down and listened to them and my two grandkids, they sat down on my lap and that was the best medicine I could ask for. That was, that completely shifted my gears and got my mind off of possessions and things like that and back into what's really important.

  

Another Monster  

KRISTAN: By mid-October, more than a thousand wildland firefighters were battling the massive Cameron Peak fire. With wildfires burning across the state, resources were constrained.   

ED LEBLANC / PBS AMERICAN PORTRAIT: Cameron is Priority. Yeah, affirmative, we’ll go ahead and monitor with light helicopter. And we understand that Cameron is the priority.   

KRISTAN: The skies were hazy and reddish yellow. Smoke was thick in the air. Evacuations and road closures were happening all over the place. Fatigue was setting in.   

And if all that weren’t enough, another wildfire emerged on the western side of the Continental Divide.   

Its growth was explosive – and its behavior left many people scratching their heads.  

DAVID WOLF: So the East Troublesome Fire started in the East Troublesome River Drainage October 14th, the same day that we evacuated Glenhaven.  

KRISTAN: Fire Chief David Wolf was busy fighting Cameron Peak on the eastern side of the Divide when he learned about East Troublesome. At first, he wasn’t too worried.   

DAVID: At that point, it was a small fire up in the wilderness.   

KRISTAN: The Continental Divide was a natural fire break – high elevation and rocky tundra.   

DAVID: Conventional wisdom was that fires aren't going to jump the divide and those kinds of places. So we are mostly focused on our side and worrying about the problem in our backyard.  As East Troublesome continued to grow, really October 21st was the day that they had the most growth and then late in the day on, I think it was around 5, 6 PM the fire made its big run, you know, ran 18 miles, gained 100,000 acres over the course of an evening and that is when we were starting to recognize that this fire on the west side may have impacts on us beyond just smoke pushing into our valley.  

KRISTAN: The East Troublesome fire ripped across Grand County, burning down the home of Julie and Paul Knauf, who were in our last episode. Within one week it grew from a spark to the second largest fire in Colorado history. It devastated the small mountain community of Grand Lake, destroying hundreds of homes and taking the lives of two people. A mushroom cloud of smoke formed, creating its own weather. It was chaos.  

DAVID: So on the morning of the 22nd, I was at morning briefing, and I got a phone call saying, Hey, one of the satellites has picked up a heat signature on our side of the divide. And it's like, Oh, well, you know, like, could that just be embers and smoke? Like, is it a fire on the ground? Do we know what's happening yet? And we weren't sure. I think we were all still very skeptical that the fire could have jumped over the divide where it did, because it is a mile to a mile and a half wide of tundra and no fuels available.   

KRISTAN: David headed to Glenhaven for the day’s shift. But in just a short time, East Troublesome had done the impossible.   

DAVID: And it was sometime late morning, 10:30, 11. I got a call on the radio from the emergency manager up in Estes Park saying, Hey, we need you to come back to the emergency operation center and it's over the radio. So everybody heard it and everybody's ears are perking up over what that could mean. And as we drive back up out of Glen Haven into Estes, the temperature rises 20, 30 degrees and the wind's blowing and it's hot and warm and dry. And just this feeling of this is probably not going to be a good day for us.  

KRISTAN: This is United by Fire. Where we explore the hard truths about our landscapes and ourselves.   

In our next episode, we’ll look at what happens to the popular tourist town of Estes Park when confronted with the state’s two largest wildfires...    

DAVID: We only have so many roads in and out of Estes Park.     

JIM: As much as I love living in the mountains, it comes with responsibilities, and it comes with some tradeoffs that you have to take seriously. And if you don't take that seriously you may not have time when fire is knocking at your door.  

KRISTAN: ...and what it means for the town’s future.   

DAVID: If we have these large-scale wildfires, how will that negatively impact our economy? Will people want to keep coming back?  

 

Credits

KRISTAN: Laws of Notion is a production of the Institute of Science and Policy at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. 

I’m your host Kristan Uhlenbrock. This episode was produced by me, Carson Frame, and Tricia Waddell with support from Nicole Delaney, and fact-checking by Kate Long. Sound design by Seth Samuel. Original music by Ryan Flores. For a full list of credits, check out the show notes.  

To listen to the audio version, or for more information and additional resources on wildfires in Colorado, please visit institute.dmns.org/united-by-fire.

Check out all the seasons of the Laws of Notion podcast at lawsofnotion.org. 

  

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