By Maya Daurio, University of British Columbia §
“Welcome to another day in paradise,” said the man introducing that week’s visiting pastor to the congregation at the Poudre Canyon Chapel. The chapel, a beautiful, vaulted building constructed with local rocks by the community and visitors, was built during the 1950s. The construction culminated in the first service in 1959. Outside the windows, the Cache la Poudre River coursed its way through the canyon, shimmering in the sunlight just beyond the thickened trunks of ponderosa pines surrounding the chapel. Within its wood-paneled walls, a worshipper in the chapel is shielded from the view of the ridge above the river, where fire reached its long fingers over and torched some trees a couple of years before in Colorado’s largest wildfire in state history, the 2020 Cameron Peak Fire. Standing outside the chapel, the scale of the wildfire is more discernible. Scars from the burned earth are visible in every direction, entire mountainsides now covered in singed skeletons of what were once densely distributed living pine, spruce, and fir trees.
What does it mean to live in paradise following a disaster of this magnitude? Given the ways the Poudre Canyon has been transformed as a result of the wildfire, how do people make sense of these rapidly occurring landscape-scale changes? What can an engagement with the different temporalities of the material formations made visible by the wildfire and its aftermath help us understand about the ecological, geomorphological, and climatic histories and futures of this place?
This essay shows that time, agency, and knowledge structures are recalibrated by “assemblages” (Tsing 2019: 232) of human and other than human relations that emerge in the wildfire’s wake.
Converging Temporalities
The Cameron Peak Fire started roughly thirty miles from the chapel in the Arapaho-Roosevelt National Forest and burned structures in the upper Cache la Poudre Canyon in two different periods of rapid firespread. The story of wildfire is narrated by numbers. The number of days, weeks, or months until it is contained. The numbers of homes and structures destroyed. The number of acres burned. The lens through which we evaluate the relative severity of wildfire is a kind of tally sheet, disconnected from the stories behind the lives affected and the ecological manifestations of fire on the landscape. The Cameron Peak Fire destroyed comparably few structures in this area—around ten homes in this rural mountain community, one of sixteen communities affected—but its effect was no less profound. In a wildfire in which over 200 homes—and over 450 structures—were decimated, focusing on the number of homes lost in the canyon obscures the complex and layered losses associated with wildfire and illustrates the limitations of listing quantitative assessments of damage to characterize a wildfire’s impact on a community.
This limitation of an approach that only counts destroyed structures is that it temporally binds the effects of wildfire to the dates associated with its ignition and containment. This serves to obfuscate the convergence of human and non-human material temporalities that create the conditions for a wildfire to emerge in particular places and moments. For the Cameron Peak Fire, important factors specific to the year 2020 included unusually and persistently hot temperatures and a lack of rainfall throughout the summer. Other variables were years in the making. More than a century of federal policy that favored the rapid suppression of any wildfires in the western U.S. resulted in the prolonged absence of fire in many of the areas that burned. Much of the vegetation in the Rocky Mountain West is ecologically adapted to live with fire, and some, like the serotinous pinecones of the lodgepole pine, require heat to release their seeds. Trees that were killed by beetles in major infestations as a result of drought fifteen to twenty-five years before generated excess, dried out fuel (Goodland 2020) in the higher elevation zones where the Cameron Peak Fire ignited and spread. As Boyd Lebeda, formerly with the Colorado State Forest Service, explained to me, many of these trees had fallen to the ground, where they present a more efficient form of fodder for fire and also decrease the wind reduction offered by standing trees. The periods of largest growth during the Cameron Peak Fire were driven by strong winds.
A loss of a home to wildfire is but one [important] measure of its impact on a community. Some people in the Poudre Canyon experienced the temporary loss of their homes alongside a lack of agency and control over their lives when they were evacuated for 72 of the 112 days of the wildfire. One person’s home was severely damaged by a bear that broke in following the scent of defrosted food that had melted onto the floor from the freezer when the power was shut off during his evacuation. It took this individual sixteen months to fully repair his home. For many who live “up the Poudre,” as it is locally called, the effects of the wildfire emerged months after it was extinguished, in an amalgamation of various ecological, geomorphological, and anthropogenic temporalities and material formations.
By way of example, areas burned in wildfires often become more susceptible to debris flows because there is no vegetation to intercept rain before it hits the soil and because the soil itself is sometimes hardened by fire, preventing it from absorbing water at all. Increased vulnerability to debris flows can persist as long as ten years in a burn scar. Thirty-two miles along the Cache la Poudre River burned in the Cameron Peak Fire, along with nearly 600 miles of its tributaries (‘Cameron Peak Fire’ n.d.). In the Poudre Canyon, the consequences of this wildfire are largely expressed through water. The centeredness of the river in this physical and cultural landscape draws our attention to particular human and other than human material relations and conveyances of risk, where the river reflects “the cumulative historical effects” (Wohl 2001: 7) of everything in its basin. Prior to the wildfire, people understood the river’s tributaries differently, as more benign bodies of water. The association of water with risk was limited to the river itself.
A few hundred feet upriver from the chapel are the remains of a bridge condemned and demolished by the county in July 2021 after logs unleashed by a debris flow in Black Hollow Creek, one of the river’s tributaries upstream from this bridge, kicked out the middle abutment. The controversial removal of this bridge left people stranded from their own homes on the other side of the river.
Nearly two years later, the residents who own homes here still have no bridge, stymied by cost, burdensome county regulations, and disagreement among some residents about whether or not the county should bear some liability. One couple in their 70s has fashioned a kind of zipline to get themselves across the river. Another couple in their 50s park on the other side of the downstream neighbors’ bridge and walk along the river over a scree field to their home. Other homeowners are too elderly to make either kind of journey and have not been able to access their homes since the bridge was taken down in early August of 2021.
Brita LaTona’s family had a cabin that was washed away into the river in the Black Hollow debris flow. She recounted wading in Black Hollow Creek with her sister as kids, now a fifteen-foot-wide, cobble-lined creekbed. She described how her sense of home was tied to a specific topography that is no longer there, how strange it is to reconcile the memories from her childhood with a landscape that does not exist anymore. Where once there were six houses, Brita’s among them, there now sits a massive pile of boulders, a colossal reminder of the four people who lost their lives when they were swept into the river.
Throughout the summers of 2021 and 2022, multiple landowners in the upper Poudre Canyon experienced flooding or debris flows that threatened their lives, properties, and damaged access roads. The familiar creeks and drainages near their homes gained an unfamiliar agency, and like the Cameron Peak Fire itself, transformed the environment around them. These successive disasters introduced new temporal horizons — a ten-year window in which tributaries and drainages are susceptible to debris flows, for example — accompanied by new ecological and geomorphological material realities. As the vegetation, soil, and water that comprise this environment are acclimatizing themselves following wildfire and flooding, people are recalibrating their relationship to this landscape and to the different temporalities associated with fire, debris flows, and plant recovery.
Like other scholars before me who became disaster anthropologists as a result of either personal experiences with disaster or disasters at their field sites (see Anthony Oliver-Smith, Susannah Hoffman, Sara Shneiderman, and Roberto Barrios, among others), I shifted to studying disaster following my own family’s loss of our historic home and more than 95% of the mixed conifer, aspen, and cottonwood distributed across our land, our adjoining neighbors’ land, and adjacent Forest Service land. I am currently in the middle of my dissertation research “in the field,” which in my case is in my extended family’s new house on our land, built in a different location because of the vulnerability of the old homesite to flooding. My dissertation research explores how lived experiences of disaster and its unfoldings shape how people relate to the social, political, historical, and environmental landscapes in which they live. Just as my research focus emerged out of the charred emotional and material remains of my family’s home and land, like the shards of Blue Willow plates protruding from the ashes of the rubble, the contours of my fieldwork are etched by my being on this land, in this canyon.
Learning to See
That land is where I now sit writing, gazing across at the tall white skeletons in the aspen grove, a flurry of new growth at their feet. In two years, some of these new aspen shoots, stimulated by the fire, are already taller than I am. The steep mountainsides framing this land were green with growth all last summer, native raspberries, fivepetal cliffbush, and sticky geranium sprouting between the shale and boulders.
All this new growth was not enough to stop the mountainside from eroding in spectacular ways multiple times in July and August of 2022, sending rocks and water down its steep channels in a roar, depositing cobble and sediment over existing mounds where the channels meet the flatness of the valley floor.
Karin Riley, a research ecologist with the Rocky Mountain Research Station who studies the relationship between climate and wildfire, had told me the summer before to look for the fans of deposits from old debris flows as an indication of where they may happen again in this post-wildfire landscape.
Aspens and cottonwoods are water-loving trees. I never gave much thought to how the aspen grove came to be where it is, nor how the smaller groups of cottonwoods nearby grew in a location far from any creek or river. It is only now, two years after the wildfire, as a direct result of watching the rush of water and rocks and sediment tumble out of the large drainage off the steep mountainside in view of the front door that I understand more. The geographic distribution of aspen and cottonwood on this land exists in relation to established patterns of flow, previously imperceptible to my undiscerning eye and now resuscitated by the conditions created by the wildfire to reveal processes of erosion and deposition in real time.
Others up the Poudre have had similar revelations. Dan Bond, a survivor of what is known as the Black Hollow Flood—the debris flow in the summer of 2021 that swept homes and human beings into the river—explained to me that he learned that the residential settlement of Black Hollow, named after the creek that flooded, sits on an alluvial fan. Alluvial fans are areas of deposition created by flowing water that fan outward where steeper channels meet a flatter surface. Dan also said that most of the rocks around his house are rounded, and that one of the geologists who visited after the flood told him rounded rocks are an indication that the river used to flow in that location. Thus, the settlement of Black Hollow is both on an alluvial fan and also used to be part of the river’s meandering path in the days before a highway was built alongside it, straightening and constraining it. Recalibration is both about reorienting to new temporal, ecological, and geomorphological landscapes and learning to see and understand landscape histories in the context of ongoing changes.
Learning to see alluvial fans reveals that in a narrow, steep-walled canyon like the Poudre, many homes are either built on these relatively flat depositional mounds or in the river’s historical floodplain when it operated under its own agency, meandering from one side of the canyon to the other.
These patterns of settlement reflect not only the physical constraints of the canyon—there are only so many places to build—but also the spatiality of land ownership. The river corridor itself is made up of 85% federal lands, with only 2,000 out of 25,000 acres in private ownership (‘Cache La Poudre Wild and Scenic River Final Management Plan’ 1990). This does not account for land adjacent to the river corridor, which is overwhelmingly owned by the federal government. While the majority of acreage burned in the Cameron Peak Fire was on federal land, it is these private landholdings along the river and its tributaries where much of the post-wildfire damage and destruction is felt most acutely. The history of colonial settlement in this area has shaped the distribution and composition of forests and the very contours of the bodies of water which cascade and rush and meander their way along. These practices shape how wildfire and its compounding influences affect human and other than human ecologies.
Living in the burn scar of the Cameron Peak Fire opens up a temporal awareness of this landscape, unveiled by the rapid transformation of its ecologies by wildfire and by geomorphological processes drawing our attention to how certain undulations across the landscape came to be. Some changes are less perceptible to the human eye than others, less dramatic than the erosive properties of a denuded and scorched mountainside. Former forester and fire behavior analyst Boyd Lebeda pointed out a ponderosa pine visible from my family’s new house that had survived the fire with a charred trunk and its upper branches full of living pine needles. These needles were now yellowing, a sign that it had been attacked by Ips beetles, Boyd said, which target stressed trees. They are common visitors in post-wildfire environments. I would have otherwise attributed its eventual death to the fire, not beetles, whose work is silent and gradual. The tree seemed fine the whole summer and fall, and now with winter upon us, its jaundiced appearance portended its certain death. In the week following Boyd’s visit, a woodpecker knocked incessantly away at the same tree for days, presumably feasting on the Ips beetles. Boyd’s observation opens up a way for me to understand how these three species—the ponderosa pine, the Ips beetle, and the woodpecker—exist in relation to each other, a form of relating made possible by the wildfire. How many other processes are unfolding before me that I don’t know how to see?
Recalibration
One of my neighbors stopped by one morning for a cup of coffee mid-summer. He was here to view the ruins of his family’s house for the first time which also burned in the wildfire. I described how I had been experiencing the landscape as something both deeply familiar and also strange and new in the way it looks and acts, almost like occupying an alternate reality. “Like a thin spot,” he responded, referring to the thin places of Celtic mythology representing the liminal border between two worlds. In the months and years following wildfire, human and other than human agencies, relations, and materialities exist in a kind of in betweenness. Making sense of the enormity of changes and ongoing processes of transformation requires constant recalibration.
In the middle of the Black Hollow flood from the vantage of what he calls “the shelf,” where he had scrambled to reach higher ground, Dan Bond remembers watching an expanse of water fifteen feet deep and twenty feet wide rush by below him. “I was just trying to figure out where all this water was coming from,” he told me. Even now, when all the water has receded, and the creek is back to being a foot deep and four feet wide, it is hard for him to process what happened. There are reminders in markers on the land, like the pile of boulders which towered above us as we walked around it. He pointed to a tall ponderosa pine tree with branches only toward the very top. It is dead now, killed by debris in the flood, the absence of lower branches demarcating the extraordinary height of the water at flood stage.
My family and our neighbors are all still trying to make sense of how all this destruction came to be at the same time that we are reorienting ourselves to new ecological and geomorphological actualities.
These realities have always existed as possibilities, certainties even. Wildfires have and will continue to cycle through this flammable, fire-adapted environment. The mounds of alluvial fans were there before, signifying the existence of flowing water in the past and portending the possibility of future erosion and deposition. At the same time, ‘we inhabit a world of history—by the primal criterion of uniqueness, based on temporal context, for each phenomenon’ (Gould 1987: 167). Recalibration is a process by which, through cataclysmic moments of change, we come to understand the contingent histories and futures of our human lifespans as entangled with other than human temporalities.
Works Cited
Cache La Poudre Wild and Scenic River Final Management Plan. 1990. Larimer County: United States Department of Agriculture. https://www.rivers.gov/documents/plans/cache-la-poudre-plan.pdf.
‘Cameron Peak Fire’. n.d. Coalition for the Poudre River Watershed. Accessed 15 March 2023. https://www.poudrewatershed.org/cameronpeakfire.
Goodland, Marianne. 2020. “FIRE LINES | Dan West, State Entomologist, on Why Wildfires Are so Intense and Last so Long.” Colorado Politics, 29 October 2020. https://www.coloradopolitics.com/denver-gazette/fire-lines-dan-west-state-entomologist-on-why-wildfires-are-so-intense-and-last-so/article_8da6f0e2-1951-11eb-a032-c35a51de0269.html.
Gould, Stephen Jay. 1987. Time’s Arrow Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Tsing, Anna. 2019. “When the Things We Study Respond to Each Other: Tools for Unpacking ‘the Material’.” In Anthropos and the Material, edited by Penny Harvey, Christian Krohn-Hansen, and Knut G. Nustad, pp. 221–43. Durham: Duke University Press.
Wohl, Ellen E. 2001. Virtual Rivers: Lessons from the Mountain Rivers of the Colorado Front Range. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Maya Daurio is a is a PhD candidate in sociocultural anthropology at the University of British Columbia. Her research explores lived experiences of wildfire and its ongoing, cascading consequences. She is currently conducting doctoral fieldwork in a rural, mountainous area of Colorado researching how residents, fire managers, and scientists are making sense of the state’s largest wildfire, subsequent flooding, and response and recovery efforts.
This post is part of our thematic series: Ecological Times.
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