The Fire's Edge

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.

 

Tourism Town

KRISTAN UHLENBROCK (OFF MIC): What did you like about the park? Did you like being here? What did you like about it?  

BROOKLYN: I liked the mountains. Yeah.   

KRISTAN (OFF MIC): Did you see any animals when you were here?  

BROOKLYN: We saw some elk. 

KRISTAN: I’m standing at a popular trailhead in Rocky Mountain National Park chatting with a third grader named Brooklyn from Savannah, Georgia. Bus after bus rolls in dropping off people because the parking lot is already filled up. Brooklyn just finished a hike with her mom and dad.  

BROOKLYN’S DAD: We love going to national parks. That's kind of our vacation thing to do. 

KRISTAN: With jagged mountains, clear lakes, abundant wildlife and hundreds of miles of trails, Rocky Mountain National Park attracts people from around the world. Established in 1915, it is one of the most popular National Parks – drawing 4 to 5 million people a year. 

KRISTAN (OFF MIC): Do you live around here? 

MATTHEW McCARTY: We're both in Texas, in Austin. 

ELLIOT MILLER: I think what brings us out is cooler weather, mountains, wildlife, just kind of escaping the heat in the city.  

DAWN: I'm from St. Louis, Missouri.  

KRISTAN (OFF MIC): So what do you love about being up here in the national park?  

DAWN: It's beautiful. It's gorgeous. I mean it's kind of a transcendent feeling. 

MARY: We come from France and it's our first time in Colorado, first time in a Rocky Mountains National Park. So we decided to go to Bear Lake and then Sky Pond. 

KRISTAN: Visiting a National Park can be a bucket list item for many. This creates a robust tourism sector, which injects billions of dollars into the US economy. And in 2023, Rocky Mountain National Park visitors shelled more than $500 million in the local economy.  

There are two towns that provide entry into the Park. Grand Lake on the western side and the very popular Estes Park to the east, where the main park entrance is located.   

Estes has a rustic vibe. Its main street is lined with restaurants, ice cream stands, art galleries, and gift shops selling t-shirts. You can visit a brewery, play a round of mini golf, or even visit the historic Stanley Hotel. 

There are about 6,000 people who reside in Estes full-time – folks who work in the restaurants, schools, and hospitals. But the town is also a haven for second homeowners and retirees who’ve dreamed of moving here all their lives.  

WENDY RIGBY: Estes Valley, to me, is the heartbeat of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado.  

VERN CADEH: I mean, this is like a vacation place. Who wouldn't want to live here? It's beautiful.  

PAUL HALVERSON: It's just so gorgeous and the way the weather changes, you can get all four seasons in a day here. And the people are great. And it's just close enough to, you know, civilization that you don't feel completely isolated from the rest of the world.  

JAN RIGBY: It's hard to explain, but it sometimes feels like we're actually living in the park. 

WENDY: It has not only the most tremendous views, it has fantastic wildlife and beautiful trees and plants and clean air. And when you're here, you just feel closer to God. 

KRISTAN: 2020 strained the community of Estes Park like never before. 

It started with the COVID-19 pandemic, when most businesses, including the national park, shut down to slow the spread of the virus. This cut off tourism, a major source of revenue, which, in turn, impacted services in the community  

On top of that, a very hot summer added to the parched forests – and the town found itself at the center of major wildfires.  

DAVID WOLF: We recognize that on any given day, 60 to 80 percent of the people in the Estes Valley in the summer are tourists. If we have these large-scale wildfires, how will that negatively impact our economy? Will people want to keep coming back? And those visitors that are coming to Rocky to enjoy these beautiful landscapes, are they going to come if it's a big charred moonscape? 

KRISTAN: This is United by Fire, a podcast exploring the hard truths about our landscapes and ourselves. In this episode, we’ll look at how the community of Estes Park responded to the dual threats of a global pandemic and a horrific wildfire season.   

My name is Kristan Uhlenbrock. And from the Institute for Science and Policy, this is episode three. 

 

Organized Chaos 

KRISTAN: On the morning of October 22, Estes Valley Fire Chief David Wolf was reeling from the news that the East Troublesome fire had crossed the Continental Divide and was bearing down on his town.  

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 operations center. 

KRISTAN: He already had his hands full with Cameron Peak, which was barreling through the northern and eastern parts of the valley. It all seemed unreal. 

DAVID: We get into the Emergency Operations Center, and the information at that point is we had crews on the ground up in Rocky who were able to get up to the fire and confirm that we did have fire over the divide. It took a long time to find because of the smoke, we couldn't see it. It was way up in a canyon, and so we had to get people up there to verify it. We didn't want to evacuate the town over smoke. We wanted to evacuate if there was a fire. And we had identified trigger points for where we would start our evacuations. If the fire reaches here, we're gonna put these areas on voluntary evacuations versus mandatory. And unfortunately, by the time we were able to verify where the fire was, it was already past a few of our lines. So the evacuation started very rapidly at that point  

KRISTAN: Executing an evacuation during a wildfire is no easy feat. Fires behave erratically and visibility is usually poor. Smoke, dense forest, and rough terrain can hide where the fire is...and where it's headed. 

DAVID: We were having a hard enough time keeping our own resources briefed on where the fire was because you have people on the ground who can see it. You have satellite information. Hopefully, you have airplanes up - the multi-mission aircraft that has infrared and can see if the wind speeds are low enough that it can fly.  

KRISTAN: And then there’s the challenge of getting that information to decision-makers and residents who are in danger.  

DAVID: What needs to be evacuated next, where is the fire now, how quickly will it move? One of the tenets in wildland firefighting is that you always want to base your decisions off current and expected fire behavior. And to know what the expected fire behavior is means that you have to know what fuels are between you and the fire, and what the weather system is going to do. So you're constantly talking to people, the National Weather Service. Hey, is this west wind going to continue at the clip that it's going? Are we going to continue to have 30, 40, 50 mile an hour winds?  

KRISTAN: The Larimer County Sheriff issued the evacuation order for Estes Park just after 12 pm. There wasn’t much time to get everyone out. Based on scenario planning David and his colleagues had conducted a few years prior, they figured that a fire up in Rocky Mountain National Park could sweep through town in as little as four hours if the winds were high enough.  

DAVID: Evacuation studies back to the ‘80s tell you that you can realistically move 1,000 people per hour per lane of travel. So all of our evacuation plans took that into account. That means that you're moving at about seven miles an hour on the road. And that's why we felt it was so urgent to get people moving and start that evacuation and start pushing people out of town. 

KRISTAN: About 7,000 people – residents and visitors – began a mass exodus that clogged the main roads out of town. At the same time, emergency responders were trying to get into town to help out.  

DAVID: We only have so many roads in and out of Estes Park. We had already lost the two roads to the west because of where the East Troublesome had already burned through the National Park. 

KRISTAN: That left them with three roads, one of which was turned into a one-way out of the valley, helping to expedite the traffic.   

DAVID: We also staged front-end loaders and snowplows at the top of the canyons. So if any vehicles broke down or crashed or became immobile, we would remove the people from them and then push them off the road because we had to keep the roads open.  

KRISTAN: Services started shutting down too. The gas was turned off, the electricity was cut in strategic areas, and buildings shuttered in order to get people out of town and to keep everyone safe. Because conditions were getting bad. Fast.  

DAVID: So things were hazy. People were having difficulty breathing, you know, it was low air quality that most people up there don't normally experience. The sky was probably our best ally in convincing people that they needed to go because when they looked up at the sky, at 2 p.m. the sky was this dark blood orange, you know, reddish orangish color directly overhead in the middle of the afternoon. And people were easily convinced that this problem was imminent and it was serious and that it was time to evacuate. 

 

The Refugees 

WENDY RIGBY: I would call that day when the East Troublesome Fire jumped the divide the most terrifying day of my life, easily.  

KRISTAN: This is Wendy Rigby, the former editor of the Estes Park Trail-Gazette newspaper. 

WENDY: I had friends from all over the country calling me. Are you okay? What's going on? I heard Rocky Mountain National Park is at risk. You know, there are millions of people around the globe who love Rocky Mountain National Park, and it was just inconceivable to me that these fires couldn't be contained. You would think in your mind, what, why can't they do more? Why can't they stop this thing? 

ABC DENVER 7: The sky is orange, the air filled with smoke and Colorado is burning. Our state's wildfires this season are large enough to fill the state of Rhode Island. There are almost a dozen major wildfires burning statewide tonight. We are focused on the five you see on this map. Cameron Peak, Williams Fork, East Troublesome, Calwood, and Left Hand Canyon  

KRISTAN: In 2020, a big part of Wendy’s job was following wildfires as they cropped up around the state. 

WENDY: I was intimately familiar every day with the map and where the fire was and where it was going. There were fires in Boulder. It was all around us.  

I remember in those couple of days when the East Troublesome first started. Lying in bed at night and hearing the wind roar at 70 and 80 miles an hour, and just praying to God to stop, stop the wind, stop the weather, because I was feeling shaky on the inside, thinking [about] this beautiful place where we moved to spend the rest of our lives. We've sold everything, moved a thousand miles to be here. It may not be here in a few days. 

KRISTAN: Wendy and her husband, Jan, had just moved to Colorado from Texas in 2020. Jan had recently retired, and they were leaving behind a place where they had raised their children and built careers in journalism. After decades of visiting Estes Park on vacation, they finally took the plunge and bought a home.  

But the wildfire threat caught them off guard.  

WENDY: We know about floods from South Texas and hurricanes and tornadoes and drought, but the thought of wildfires never crossed our minds because in all the times we've been coming to Colorado, this is not where the wildfires were. The wildfires were in California and West Texas and other places. That was not on our radar at all. Even when we started looking at homeowner's insurance, this was not something we worried about. We'd heard the tales of the two big floods in Estes Park and seen the pictures and we were aware of the flood history, but we live on a hill here. Flooding's not really a risk at our home. Never thought about wildfires.  

JAN RIGBY: And then when it did pop up, it was, oh there's a wildfire, but I'm sure they'll take care of it. Everything's going to be fine. 

KRISTAN: Wendy and Jan aren’t alone. Research shows that it’s common for those that live in the wildland-urban interface, or WUI, to not have all the information about the wildfire risk they face. 

And the actual risk isn’t easy to calculate. A communities’ wildfire risk is based on multiplying the hazard by the vulnerability. 

And there are many factors that go into it: the likelihood and intensity of a fire – known as the hazard part of the equation – along with someone’s exposure and susceptibility – the vulnerability part. Again, not easy things to assess.  

And even if someone has thought about the risk in detail, there’s still the human element of choosing what to do.   

WENDY: I'm not one of those people who believes what doesn't kill you makes you stronger or anything, but I do believe that we have a choice. And with choice comes risk…and reward. 

KRISTAN: Leading up to the evacuation, there were warning signs to get prepared.   

WENDY: For days on end, the wind coming from west to east would gain steam as it came over the divide and would whip down into this valley, 60-mile sustained winds for hours on end gusting to more than hurricane force, 80 or 90 miles an hour.  It was unreal. 

JAN: And we knew all it was doing was fueling the fires. 

KRISTAN: Driven by that extreme wind, the East Troublesome Fire exploded. It devastated Grand County before heading into the western side of Rocky Mountain National Park where it burned park housing, offices, entrance stations, campsites, and more. 

JAN: After seeing photographs of what was really going on, I realized it was just, it was just massive. I mean, trees literally exploding from the heat.  

KRISTAN: Wendy and Jan finally got word about the mandatory evacuation.   

WENDY: The sky turned a deep dark orange, ash was falling from the sky. It smelled like smoke. It looked like the end of the world. 

I had friends texting me and they would say, should I take my wedding album? What should I do about this? And I'm getting on my phone saying, it doesn't matter. Get out.  

Things are just things; people are the most important. I don't care about my furnishings. I don't care about my photographs. I care about my husband and my dogs. And we literally threw some clothes, passports, and three dog cages into the car and left.   

KRISTAN: Once on the road, they ended up in bumper-to-bumper traffic.   

WENDY: You would see people with their kids, with their horses and the trailers. And I just kept telling Jan, I just feel so lucky that we don't have to worry about any of that. We just have to worry about ourselves and we're going to be fine.  

KRISTAN: The couple found a hotel in Fort Collins. It was packed with weary firefighters and evacuees. Once they got settled, Wendy got back on her computer to edit the newspaper and its Facebook page. People were counting on it for critical information. 

WENDY: So I really had to concentrate and work and not really process what was happening at my home. 

KRISTAN: Jan describes being in a daze walking the halls of the hotel. 

JAN: It's kind of an empty feeling. Usually, when you're in a hotel, it's because you're on vacation or you're getting to go someplace new. People were just glassy-eyed. When you would pass them in the lobby, you know, oh, good morning. Oh, good morning. You know, how long have y'all been here? Oh, I don't know, you know, three days. Oh yeah. We've been here a week.  

WENDY: Everyone was exhausted.  

JAN: People were tired. And then of course the firefighters and the EMS that were in the hotel with us, you could tell they were flatlined. They had no energy left.  

 

A Deep Fatigue 

KRISTAN: There were so many fires that it was hard to keep up. It seemed like every week brought news of another ignition, another big run, more houses burned.  

First responders were feeling the strain. Including fire chief David Wolf.  

DAVID: A lot of it was just trying to figure out who was going to work on which incidents. So, Loveland Fire, as the local fire agency, was really focused on Cameron at that point. And Estes was really focused to the West on East Troublesome. And then of course we had all of the thousand firefighters that were part of the incident management team and the overall incident. We also utilized a part of that statewide mutual aid plan to try and start calling as many friends as we could to come up into Estes Valley. 

KRISTAN: And COVID-19 was changing the game for fire departments across the country. 

DAVID: Instead of everybody coming back to the same base camp and getting the same briefing, we'd be doing briefings over Zoom, we'd be doing briefings over the radio. Crews would be camped out all over the fire line instead of coming back to a central hub, and it was a new way of approaching fires that we hadn't dealt with pre-COVID. 

KRISTAN: Volunteer fire departments often operate with limited financial resources, relying on donations and local taxes. For example, nearly half of the funding for the fire district in Estes comes from sales tax. 

During the pandemic, many of those funding sources dried up, and budgets took a hit.  

Responding to emergencies became harder and harder.  

DAVID: Most of the summer had been thinking about how are we gonna balance the books? Do we need to start thinking about you know, what discretionary costs can we cut? How do we make sure we don't impact services? How do we make sure we don't impact people? 

Most of our people were volunteers and they, in order for them to be on the engine helping us, they had to not be at their job. We were now a tourist community that had been impacted by COVID for the last six months, decreased in visitation, decreased in sales tax, decreased in all of those things that are the economy and the base of our community. And now we're, we're having this fire happen to us.  

KRISTAN: Catastrophes – like wildfires and pandemics – stretch people and communities to the limit - where they experience burnout and crisis fatigue. Our minds and bodies can only bear so much. 

DAVID: 2020 was obviously an incredibly tough year for so many things and so many reasons. And I think a lot of us felt that fatigue for years afterwards.  

KRISTAN: There is immense pressure from the public for emergency responders to get it right. David says he’s always looking for new ways to communicate both uncertainty and rapidly evolving information. 

DAVID:  The scientific process requires that we ask questions, we do experiments, we learn from them, and then we modify what our worldview is based on what new information we have. And when people who aren't familiar with that process see it, they look at it as, Oh, you never knew. And now you're just lying to me or you're misleading me. And it's like, no, I'm like, we are learning. We don't know. And it is an incredibly hard thing to balance in the fire service to both want to be that rock that your community can look to and say, Hey, we're here for you. And we've got you. And we are great problem solvers. That is what makes the fire service who we are. But we don't always know because some of these experiences are totally new and it's the first time we've encountered something like this or it's the first time we've encountered something of this scale.

 

The Last Ones Out 

ESTES PARK HEALTH COMMERCIAL: ” Estes Park Health, nestled in the Rocky Mountains, is more than just a hospital...” 

VERN CARDEH: I’m Vern Cardeh. I’ve been CEO here at Estes Park Health for a little more than four years now.  

KRISTAN: Vern Cardeh moved to Colorado in March of 2020 And he swears he didn’t bring COVID with him.  

VERN: It was already established I moved here right during when everybody in the world kind of started shutting down. It impacted the community a lot. For a while, I mean, the hospital stopped taking patients, but basically the world stopped. Everybody stayed home. 

KRISTAN: Estes Park Health serves about 15,000 patients a year, a lot of them are tourists who’ve had bad experiences with the altitude, the rugged terrain... and the wildlife. 

VERN: I'd wish they would know that the elk are not pets. They go right up to them and take selfies. One of our big injuries in the summer is elk tramplings, you know. Falling off a rock or elk injury, yeah. 

KRISTAN: Even I’ve taken advantage of the hospital, when my mother-in-law was visiting from out of town and had a medical issue while we were out hiking. We had to get her to a hospital quickly. Luckily, Estes Park Health was there.  

It’s what’s known as a “critical access hospital,” because it offers emergency services in a rural community. And like many rural hospitals, it was hit hard during the pandemic from supply shortages and massive operating losses to lack of information. 

VERN: There were days as an independent hospital where it felt a little lonely just because of, you know, we didn't have the system. Like, some of the big systems, you know, think about a Cleveland Clinic or a Mayo Clinic or even a UC Health. They have these enormous set of resources, both intellectual resources and financial resources. We didn't. So, we spent a lot of time together figuring out how we were going to solve problems that ordinarily didn't exist in our world. 

KRISTAN: When the Cameron Peak Fire ignited in late summer, Vern was curious about it but not necessarily worried. He would drive to watch the firefighters in action.  

VERN: So you'd go up through the mountains and curve around and you'd travel for 45 minutes or an hour, it seemed like a long way away, didn't think much of it. It'll stop, right? I lived in one of these little apartments right up here on the campus for a while. And I can remember sitting out on a Friday night, it kind of starting to smell, the air changed a little bit. 

KRISTAN: From Estes Park, you could see Cameron Peak looming over a ridge to the north. The flames created a neon-jagged edge across the horizon.  

VERN: It wasn't frightening. It was something out of a movie. It was distant. And it kind of burned by us, if you will. I kept watching my clock thinking, I wonder if I'll get a call tonight. 

KRISTAN: When Cameron Peak ran across the northern side of Estes Park and made its way to the neighboring town of Glenhaven, Vern realized the hospital needed a plan.   

VERN: That's when I think everybody here started sitting up, taking notice and we really got busy with putting together a pretty active plan. There's something there, it's way bigger than life, it's way bigger than us, and it's dangerous. We've got to figure this out. There's a lot of people here on a day-to-day basis, people that can't take care of themselves, and you're thinking about, how are we going to get everybody out quick? 

KRISTAN: When talking about this, Vern goes into operational mode, taking inventory of things like medications, charts, transport, and alternative care facilities for their patients and nursing home residents.  

VERN: I've got to be ready for 60 or 70 people to move quickly that don't want to move quickly. What do we need in terms of transportation to get them out of the town or out of the area? What do we do with our emergency room? There will be firefighters. There will be people here that are on the front line that will undoubtedly get hurt somehow. How do we care for those people? 

KRISTAN: But even if you have a plan, it’s hard to control for one very important factor...   

VERN: It doesn't account for the human emotion in it. It just doesn't. 

KRISTAN: When the East Troublesome Fire exploded toward Estes Park, it was a race to get everyone out. Vern says he became completely focused.  

VERN: It went from voluntary evacuation to mandatory in, I don't know, it felt like two minutes, but it was probably longer. It was probably 10 or 15. I kept thinking, Here we go. And the minute that we made the decision to move everybody to evacuate, I mean, that whole plan kind of fell out the window. The fire was coming so fast and the sky went orange and it started raining ashes. Well, I didn’t think I’d be emotional today. 

VERN: So, the Denver Fire Department showed up with these big engines and the chief came and, you know, he assured me it's going to be okay, get everybody out. We couldn't see what was over the horizon, but boy, we could feel it and smell it. The trucks were lined up and then they were spraying the building down. I was worried that we weren't going to be able to get everybody out.  

KRISTAN: He felt the responsibility deep. And so did his staff. These were their neighbors. Their community. 

VERN: One of our physicians was caring for a patient that was actively in the process of dying. It happens in a hospital, and it's a tough thing. But he wasn't going to leave the patient. I remember standing next to the nurse's stand and saying, No, no, we're going to get into an ambulance, and you're going to be safe. And so, I mean, there were a lot of those decisions. 

KRISTAN: Despite the chaos, they finally got everyone evacuated. 

VERN: And we walk out, I lock the front door and hand the keys to the fire chief.  And I kind of walked away thinking, well, I was the shortest CEO tenure in the history of mankind. You know, I was thinking, thing’s burning down, we're never coming back to it. 

And it's a really weird feeling, you know. A hospital operates 24/7, I'm on call or we have somebody on call all the time. And there was nothing really to be on call for, so you're walking away thinking, Now what? What do I do tomorrow?

 

Again  

KRISTAN: Across town, the YMCA of the Rockies was managing guests while becoming a critical support center for the growing number of first responders rolling into town, and it also had become a home for Cameron Peak evacuees.  

JIM BOYD: Anytime there was any kind of disaster, we always opened our doors to the local community and said, the YMCA is here. It won't cost you any money. 

KRISTAN: This is Jim Boyd. He spent his career at the YMCA. He and his wife Annie were in our previous episode.  

You may remember that they had to evacuate their home when Cameron Peak swept through. Well as it turns out, after a few days of staying with family, they relocated up to the Y in Estes to be closer to their jobs and community.  

Jim was still worrying about the fate of their home when he came across a friend. 

JIM: I had been talking to one of my buddies who was a sheriff's deputy in Estes, and he asked me if my house was okay, and I said, well, I don't know for sure. And he said, you haven't been back in? And I said, no, I can't go back in, they won't let me. And he goes, well, I'll take care of that. He actually drove to the house and took pictures from the bottom of the driveway up and texted them to me. 

And so that was pretty emotional to see that our house was still standing and everything around it was burned. I mean, we literally had fire within 25 yards, 360 degrees around our house. And so, everything around the house was burned, but the house was still standing. And so that was, that was a real high. Um, but it was also really emotional because we knew that many of our neighbors had lost everything. 

ANNIE BOYD: I remember experiencing survivor's guilt that we still had our house. That, that was hard.  

KRISTAN: But the emotional turmoil wasn’t over yet for Jim and Annie. Now the East Troublesome Fire was closing in on the Y, spewing black smoke that blocked the sun. 

ANNIE: You didn't know what time of day it was. And the police or the sheriff was driving through the Y with a bullhorn saying it's mandatory evacuation, you must leave. I didn't know how close it was. I just remember such a gut-wrenching feeling, because I didn't know exactly where Jim was. I knew he was somewhere in the Y property, and to hear that, just trying so hard to remain calm to get things in the car and to get out. 

I don't think there are words to describe when you have to leave someone that you love the most and you know the fire’s coming. 

KRISTAN: Once again, Annie fled to her daughter’s home in Arvada. And Jim followed shortly after. 

 

A Haunted Stronghold 

KRISTAN: John Cullen remembers when he got the first call from the incident command chief asking for help. Firefighters were streaming into town, and they were running out of spots to put them.  

JOHN CULLEN: He called me at about 11 in the morning and said, hey JC, can I get 25 to 30 rooms? And I go, you got it.  

KRISTAN: John, who goes by J.C., owns the iconic Stanley Hotel.  

JC: He calls back at about 2 o'clock and says, Hey, I need 50 to 60 more. And I go, sure, okay, I'll make that work. He calls back a third time and tells me we're going to evacuate the town and wants to know what our automatic power generation is at the Stanley. And he goes, John, we're going to fall back from the YMCA and we need 500 beds and I go. Okay, battle stations, we'll get it done. 

KRISTAN: The Stanley is a beautiful, colonial-style, white building with a red roof. It sits atop a hill overlooking Estes Park. Granite cliffs and mountains rise up behind it. Visiting the hotel feels kind of like stepping into another world. Some people say it’s haunted.  

Steven King stayed at the Stanley in 1974, and something about the eerie hotel sparked his imagination, leading to the novel The Shining. Some may remember it better as the 1980 horror film with Jack Nicholson’s creepy smile as he stalks the property.  

JC has proudly owned the Stanley for the past 30 years. 

JC: I've owned 51 hotels in 17 countries, and Stanley's the last one on my list. And, Stanley's never failed me. Uh, floods, fires, financial disasters. Stanley always performed. 

KRISTAN: As the evacuation orders rolled through town, JC and his partner Paul Halverson scrambled to figure out how to evacuate the hotel and get ready to support the incoming firefighters.  

PAUL HALVERSON: We said to the staff, you know, anyone with kids, get out. Anyone caring for someone elderly or someone with needs, get out. But we'll take any volunteers that want to stay behind, because we've got about 500 firefighters coming to the hotel. So, about 15 housekeepers stayed, a couple of our maintenance staff, and then me, John, and the CFO. So the firefighters come in, and we have, there's a picture, oh, right here, so this picture. They come into the main lobby, right, and they're lined up, and we're like, great, we're doing a great thing, we're gonna help, and we're gonna do everything. We got the kitchen set up, we're ready to feed them, and we realize, oh my god, we sent all the desk staff home. So, we have all the higher-ups, housekeeping's ready to go, kitchen staff's cooking, and no one knows how to make a key to let these people into the room. 

KRISTAN: That problem got sorted after a few phone calls. And being the hospitality people they are, Paul and JC pulled out all the stops to ensure the firefighters felt welcome – including opening the Stanley’s world-renowned whiskey vault.  

PAUL: The first night they showed up, we were like, let's treat ‘em. You know, they're helping us. We don't know the rules. They're supposed to know the rules. So we're sitting in the whiskey bar with $500 shots of some of our best whiskey. We don't know what's what. I'm looking up how to make a Manhattan. I'll make you whatever. He gets a call from the chief the next day. What the hell? Because they're posting on Instagram, taking shots at The Stanley.  

JC: I have not gotten in that much trouble since my father in fourth grade.  

PAUL: Yeah, and then we were like, yeah, you know, that kind of does make sense, huh? 

KRISTAN: For the firefighters, the hotel provided a much-needed distraction from the extreme demands of the summer. 

PAUL: They're all calling their families, you'll never believe where I'm staying! You know what I'm saying? Just that was the happy silver lining of the experience, right? That we got to offer them something super cool, that's just different and exciting and calling their families, and their kids are asking, are you seeing any ghosts and that kind of thing. So it was great.

 

Snowy Relief 

KRISTAN: Estes Park stood on the brink as the East Troublesome Fire raced through Rocky Mountain National Park and down into the valley. But just as the fire reached the outskirts of town, conditions started to shift. Here’s Fire Chief David Wolf. 

DAVID: The best asset and the best teammate you can always have is the weather. We knew snow was coming, but something's always got to blow the snow into town. 

KRISTAN: A cold front began moving in – the wind creating a race between the fire and the snow.  

DAVID: And I do remember feeling some relief when the snow finally started to fall and feeling like, okay, the wind event is over, the snow has come.  

KRISTAN: On Sunday, October 25 [2020], upwards of a foot of snow fell across parts of our mountains, with 4-6 inches in Estes Park, helping slow the fire’s march. 

DAVID: I went home and I finally, I probably fell asleep for the first time in three days. We were really fortunate to have the fire end up stopping on the west side of town. 

KRISTAN: As people watched the news about the snowstorm, some relief set in. The town of Estes Park was spared from any direct damage. The East Troublesome Fire had made it within a mile of the YMCA. 

The evacuation, however, had some consequences.  

DAVID: Anybody who had gas heating wasn’t having their home heated and we had just saved their home from fire. And now we were at risk of having all their pipes burst and having water damage in their homes. And people understandably were quite anxious to get back into their homes and come back to their community and businesses wanted to reopen. 

KRISTAN: David and the town administrators had their hands full. It takes a lot of coordination to get the gas turned back on, the sanitation up and running, and to make sure the town can handle people returning, especially during a pandemic.  

DAVID: You can't just flood the town back with people and hope it works out. 

KRISTAN: About a week after the evacuation, residents were allowed to return. The Stanley Hotel and hospital reopened their doors. But the Cameron Peak and East Troublesome fires were still not contained.  

That meant firefighters had to keep going.  

DAVID: I don't think either of those fires were called out until December or January. We were pretty on edge through all of that. There was not a lot of sleep going around.   

KRISTAN: 2020 was a year like no other. A global pandemic. The state’s largest wildfires. Things within our control. Things completely out of our control.  

Devastating losses, moments of respite, and depths of resilience. It was a year that left us with important lessons, and a lot of fatigue.  

But it also left us with questions about what we thought we knew and how we might do better next time. Because the fact is: there will be another pandemic. And there will be plenty of fires.  

Fire is a natural part of our world and was here long before us. Our future with fire depends on how we view it and what we do with it.  

In the coming episodes of United By Fire, we’ll explore what happens after the fire is out.  

KATIE DICKINSON: People who have just lost everything are facing an enormous amount of uncertainty. And so anything that can be done to reduce that and give folks a sense of this is how we are concretely here for you and going to support you. That is really badly needed. 

Credits

KRISTAN: Laws of Notion is a production of the Institute for Science and Policy at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. To learn more visit lawsofnotion.org. 

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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