From Wednesday June 27, 2018 through the middle of July 2018, a wildfire raged in over 100,000 surrounding south of the Sheep and Little Sheep mountains.

Josh could see the smoke right away.  It raged and devoured and blew what appeared to be mainly to the west.  It became known as the Spring Fire, then the North and South Spring fire as it divided into two blazes.

At night he could see flames over the ridge between the Spanish Peaks and the Sheep.  It still seemed quite far from us, but got huge, immediately joining the top 10 list for big fires in Colorado.  Over the next week it grew to threaten communities in all directions.  In the July 5 map below, Sheep Mountain is the bump that grew on the northwest corner of the red outline.  Little Sheep Mountain is on fire as I write this (actually it wasn’t).

 

 

As of July 5 our place was several miles north of the northernmost fire line, but we were nervous.  It would have had to cross fields and roads and destroy many structures in between to get to us.  The firefighters did an amazing job and the community response was supportive and thorough.

As you can see from the photos, the outline of the fire didn’t change much after July 5.  The black lines went further and got thicker as the percentage of containment increased.  The fire was downgraded from a level 2 to a level 4 incident on July 16 and different firefighting teams moved in to manage the remaining burning areas.

 

Firefighters are the most heroic people on this planet.

Sources:

The fire maps are from the official incident management site https://inciweb.nwcg.gov/incident/5875 and from the official FaceBook @SpringFire2018.