ROCKY MOUNTAIN NATIONAL PARK — The nearly 4-month-old Cow Creek Fire has crawled over rugged terrain and chewed through 1,100 acres of forest that hadn’t been touched by a major blaze for nearly four centuries.
No people nor structures are threatened by the fire, which burning about 7-miles north of Estes Park, just below the tree line in Rocky Mountain National Park.
For now, fire managers are content to keep it boxed in and let it burn, reaping the environmental benefits of a blaze that may continue until the first major snow.
“Right now, it’s just creeping along the ground, doing its job,” said Mike Lewelling, the park’s fire management officer.
Most people along the northern Front Range have not been aware of the Cow Creek blaze until the last few days, when fire crews began starting their own fires to widen the containment lines on portions of the fire.
Those blazes have been seen from Fort Collins to Denver, sparking worried calls from people already edgy from a summer dominated by destructive wildfires, park spokeswoman Kyle Patterson said.
“A lot of folks are calling in and wondering what’s going on up there,” she said.
In the first few days after a lightning strike started Cow Creek on June 24,, officials worried they were dealing with another major threat to life and property.
High winds fanned the flames and pushed the fire toward the east, threatening structures and communities that lie just outside the park’s boundaries. Both Estes Park and tiny Glen Haven were in its path, Lewelling said.
(The fire is actually not in the Cow Creek Drainage, he added, but that’s where spotters believed it originated.)
Handcrews and helicopters worked to keep the fire from spreading to the north, south and east. By early July, much of Cow Creek had been contained and heavy rains through July and August slowed its march westward, moving uphill toward the tundra, Lewelling said.
But by early September, the timber and grass that fueled the fire began to dry out, raising more smoke. The fire is being allowed to slowly burn on its western flank with 10-member crews monitoring its advance.
“The area is steep and rugged with lots of heavy fuels and downed timber,” Lewelling said. “It’s moving really slow and burning hot.”
Meanwhile, it’s creating a natural fire break which will slow the intensity and spread of large fast-moving fires in the future. The fire is also consuming downed logs and debris, allowing nutrients to be recycle back into the soil, said Nate Williamson, fire ecologist for the park.
Already, Williamson said, aspen trees are springing up in the areas first burned by the fire. Wildlife will also have improved habitat because the area is open to sunlight, he said.
Surveys of the area determined that the last major fire in that area occurred about 370 years ago. “So you can understand why there is such thick growth the fire is working through,” said Williamson.
Letting Mother Nature take her course is also a lot easier on the bottom line, say fire officials, who say fighting Cow Creek has cost more than $3 million.
“It’s a lot cheaper, having firefighters on the ground rather than having airplanes flying over and dropping retardant,” said Mike Johnson, fire information officer for the Cow Creek Fire.
Monte Whaley: 720-929-0907 or mwhaley@denverpost.com.
