Golden Gate Canyon
Deanna Lyn simply could not believe it. Stuck in construction traffic on the narrow, twisting mountain road to her home, she glanced in her rear-view mirror just in time to see the driver behind her flick a cigarette into the parched grass.
Lyn hopped from her car, fished the cigarette butt from the dirt, and stormed up to the stopped car.
“Don’t you have an ashtray?” she demanded, handing the cigarette back to the astonished driver. “This is a fire area. I have animals up here. Do you know what you’re doing?”
“Oh, sorry,” the young woman muttered.
A week or so later, by coincidence, Lyn passed the same woman on the same road tossing another lit cigarette to the ground. This time Lyn summoned a Jefferson County sheriff’s deputy. The deputy wrote the woman a ticket. Such tickets during high fire danger can carry a fine of up to $600.
Tucked into the foothills between Golden and Boulder, the 450 or so families of Golden Gate Canyon have made the choice of nature over easy pizza delivery.
Within their havens and hideaways they live here for the beauty, the quiet, the independence. Old-timers say the ranks can quickly be divided into two camps: those who get fire danger and those who don’t. Most do.
“If you want to live up here you have to preserve the area, to respect it. Otherwise go live in Cherry Creek,” says Lyn, who, two years ago, moved from a fire zone in California to one in Colorado.
The summer of 2006 – even with recent rains – is being called the most potentially disasterous fire season in Jefferson County history.
“It’s as bad as I can ever recall,” says Rocco Snart, wildfire mitigation specialist for the county.
He talks of the longstanding superstition among firefighters that even years are always the worst. He worries by summer’s end, 2006 may top even 2002 and its infamous Hayman Fire.
Already this summer, Jefferson County has seen close to 90 wildfires. Just within the relatively small 49 square miles of the Golden Gate Canyon area, there have been eight fires, compared to one last year.
Debbie Johnson moved to a small subdivision in Golden Gate Canyon from Wheat Ridge in late May. In her old neighborhood people’s thoughts were turning to landscaping, and the talk was about the great winter snowpack and how there would be no mandatory watering restrictions this summer.
Little did Johnson know how different things were less than an hour uphill.
Within a month the pond behind her house was dry. Her yard was the consistency of talcum powder. The wildflowers that usually wash the fields in color were nowhere to be found.
Neighborhood watch groups formed, looking not for crime but for lightning strikes and threads of smoke.
While the western side of the Continental Divide – the side that pumps water to Denver – got plenty of snow last winter, the eastern side got devastatingly little.
Vegetation did not die as it should. Instead it continued to grow and then parch under an unusually hot May and June. Trees and underbrush did not thin. It all added up to a tinderbox just waiting for the spark.
“We moved up here because we like the outdoors and the birds and the deer,” Johnson says. “Even the livestock are cool.”
But she worries. Her family takes shorter showers and does full dishwasher loads to conserve their well water. They’ve put a bucket in the shower to collect run-off to moisten the trees near their house. Gardening is a distant memory.
On the alert
Most afternoons, when the big thunderheads roll across the foothills, 71-year-old Mary Ramstetter is outside scanning the sky for lightning. At night she sniffs the air for smoke.
“You don’t have to see anything,” she says. “It’s just a sense you have that the air has changed. You do it automatically.”
Ramstetter has lived on the 600-acre C Lazy 3 Ranch for 40 years. Her husband, Charlie, 68, was born on a ranch nearby. His great-grandfather homesteaded in the canyon shortly after the Civil War.
“I can’t imagine living anywhere else,” she says as she sits on her porch, listening to the wind rustle through the trees like petticoats beneath a ball gown.
Her husband says it is the driest he has ever seen. They bought an old fire truck, fixed it up and rolled it close to the house. They filled the tanker with 1,000 gallons of water. They also have two buried tanks of water on their property holding a total of 18,000 gallons.
They run about 20 head of cattle but probably will have to sell them off this summer. The lack of rain has meant no grass for grazing and no winter hay.
They have never lived through a big fire in Golden Gate Canyon, never even been evacuated. But they know it could happen anytime.
A few weeks ago, up the road from the Ramstetters, Jayne Ruesch watched a lightning bolt hit a tree in her neighbor’s yard. The tree burst into flames.
Although the fire burned itself out without spreading, Ruesch, her husband, Grant, and their neighbors still smelled smoke. They drove to a lookout point and saw a a single column of gray rising about a quarter-mile away. Apparently there had been two strikes.
While waiting for help to arrive, the four neighbors took matters into their own hands, working furiously in the dark, shoveling dirt onto flare-ups and digging a small trench around the perimeter.
The Ruesches have lived in their dream home perched atop the canyon for seven years. They have 20 acres. They keep their trees, especially those nearest their house, “laddered,” or thinned on the bottom. They clear underbrush and pine needles. They placed lightning rods on their roof and rocks around the foundation. There are 40,000 gallons of water in storage nearby. “It just becomes part of your chores,” she says.
Even the brochures from Jefferson County admonish residents: “Protecting your home from wildfire is your responsibility.”
“If there’s ever a big fire, we’re going to be down in Golden praying,” says Ruesch. “It’s going to be up to the firefighters. We have to give the firefighters the resources they need.”
Election stirs unrest
Two months ago, Don Angell, the volunteer fire chief of the Golden Gate Fire Protection District, quit. So did the fire marshall.
The fire marshall’s resignation came just before a contentious election that saw a slate of reform candidates elected to the fire district’s board.
Some see the election as a metaphor for the changes happening in the area. Today about 450 homes are in the canyon, approxmiately 150 more than 10 years ago.
The demographics also are shifting. Larger, expensive, magazine-cover homes are appearing on large plots of land. Many homes come with keypads and access codes to pass into gated driveways.
For months, tension had polarized canyon residents over what usually is a routine election. At issue was the recommended implementation of a tough fire code that potentially could cost homeowners anywhere from $10,000 to more than $100,000 to comply, depending on who you talked to.
Angell insisted the code was necessary to help firefighters in case of a disastrous fire.
But some property owners complained the code was too intrusive and trampled their individual rights to build and protect their homes as they saw fit.
G.C. Hans, the district board’s new president, was one who found individual homeowner compliance “onerous.”
While he says some measures, like individual water supplies for homes, are good ideas, Hans does not think they should be forced. He says most people already try to protect their property.
Hans does not yet live in Golden Gate Canyon but is building a new home in the North Ranch subdivision. He hopes to move in this summer.
Angell resigned as soon as Hans and the new board took power. He has not been replaced.
While clearly irritated by the turn of events, Angell has fought fires in Golden Gate Canyon for 27 years. If a fire broke out tomorrow, he would be there to help.
As a long-time resident of the canyon, Ramstetter watched the acrimony of the past few months with dismay. This summer is no time for bickering.
“We really are a close-knit community,” she says. “It’s important that we trust each other. We have to.”
Staff writer Jenny Deam can be reached at 303-820-1261 or jdeam@denverpost.com.
This story has been corrected in this online archive. Originally, due to a reporter’s error, it stated that a fire code that had been proposed for adoption was a state code. It is the Urban-Wildland Interface Code. It also incorrectly described Don Angell as a longtime volunteer fire chief. He had held the position for several years. It also stated that the fire marshall quit just after the contentious election. The marshall quit before the vote. And a caption incorrectly reported that a fire code was changed after a contentious election. It was not changed.
