Pyrocumulus clouds rise above fires that burn with special intensity. The clouds are multi-colored—shades of brown and grey and white, gilded with silver—as beautiful as they are terrifying. Animate, active, full of turbulence and ice and electricity, they are powerful enough to make their own weather, and they have choices. Some generate enough rain and hail to put the fire beneath them out completely. Others create lightning that ignites more blazes, winds that blow flame into inferno—spinning vortexes called fire whirls, or firenadoes, or fire devils. They can send particulates all the way up into the lower stratosphere, or they can downdraft them powerfully back toward earth, sending embers in all directions. NASA calls them the “fire-breathing dragon of clouds.”
In August of 2020, a pyrocumulus cloud appeared in the sky just as I finished pitching a tent in a state park two hours from my Colorado home. I had left a day early for our last family camping trip before my oldest left for college, a way to create my own wilderness writing residency, so I was alone at the site. The fire was far enough away that I knew I was safe, but close enough that I didn’t know for how long. The rangers told me I did not have to evacuate, not yet, but the direct road home, the one I had just traveled, was already closed, clogged with evacuees and emergency vehicles. I packed up and drove toward Wyoming, taking the long way home. That fire, the Cameron Peak Fire, would become the largest in Colorado history, would burn even as it was buried under fourteen inches of snow in early September. It was not fully contained until December 2 of that year.
Already, that first day, the fire was burning into and around the Rawah Wilderness, where we’d taken our kids on their first overnight backpacking trip in 2014. They were nine and eleven. After only three miles of hiking, we found the Laramie River raging fast and deep, too swollen with snowmelt runoff to safely take the kids across. We made camp close to a game trail on which a steady stream of moose ambled down to drink from a river eddy. We chose the tent site carefully, considering which of the beetle-kill ponderosa pines, death-grey but still standing, might blow down on top of us in a windstorm. The backcountry campsite was well-used, with a fire ring made from gathered rocks in a small clearing. To pass the time, we tested shredded bark and seed pods and twigs to see which most easily caught a spark from a flint.
We took our kids into the wilderness as often as we could while they were growing up—hiking over high mountain passes, pitching tents above tree lines while coyotes yipped in the distance, cooking lean dinners on tiny stoves while constellations burned bright above us. We wanted to map wilderness onto their hearts: the effortless glide of a beaver in the pool behind its lodge, the butterscotch scent of ponderosa pines, the bitter, roaring wind that blows across the tundra and into your ears, swirling through and softening a jumpy modern mind. We taught them to stay on the trail, to leave no trace. In the face of climate catastrophe, we wanted them to love the world enough to work to save it, but we also wanted them to feel, as much as possible, the joy of being alive within it. They believed us when we told them that an official wilderness designation meant the land would be there for them far into the future, that it might be altered by climate change, but it would be intact, more or less untouched. In our defense, until these past years of mega-fires, we believed it too.
We made the entire twelve-mile trip through the Rawah two years later, post-holing through remnant snowfields that hid the trail on north facing slopes, playing cards in the tent when the evening’s mosquitoes became intolerable. On that trip, we did not use the flints, did not start a fire at all, did not want to spark anything we might not be able to control. Our outdoor ethics had shifted. Fire in the backcountry had become irresponsible, and we were only ever playing at survival, after all. Those Rawah trips are some of my happiest mothering memories, and as I drove away from that fire cloud in 2020, I pictured exactly the landscape that was threatened. I felt it, as I felt so many things that first pandemic summer, as a devastating loss. As is typical of my climate grief, it set my climate rage to burning.
* * *
In her 1998 book, All My Rivers Are Gone, Katie Lee, the bawdy folk singer/river rat/activist, details her ultimately unsuccessful efforts to block the construction of the Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River, which created Lake Powell. Lee fell in love with Glen Canyon on a series of boat trips she took down the river starting in 1953, and, convinced that anyone who saw the beauty of the canyon for themselves would be against drowning it under a reservoir, her first efforts to protect it centered around sharing it. She wrote and performed songs about the beauty of the river and the canyons, invited friends to join her on her adventures through it, much in the same way I led my kids up mountain summits, the same way I take everyone who visits me to Rocky Mountain National Park. I share Lee’s belief that the more people fall in love with open, wild spaces, the more people will fight to save them. Ideally, anyway. In 2020, the governor of Colorado issued “Safer at Home or in the Vast Great Outdoors” orders for Covid safety, which led to a 23% increase in visitation to state parks and almost certainly at least that much in the backcountry, where such statistics can’t be reliably collected. Many areas saw double or triple their normal amount of use, and not everyone was well-behaved. Volunteers and rangers reported increased vandalism, overwhelming amounts of human and pet waste left in the backcountry, and illegal fires. Lee came to call this problem the ecological Catch-22. “Saving a wilderness,” she wrote, “takes enough people to ultimately ruin it.”
* * *
At least four of Colorado’s 2020 fires, Cameron Peak, East Troublesome, Grizzly Creek, and Williams Fork, were almost certainly human-caused, and my anger about this specific carelessness has merged with the permanent dark ball of rage I carry in my chest about our society’s overall lack of care—for climate, for human diversity and biodiversity, for, as the pandemic revealed, life generally. Of course, sometimes you can get away with it. Not every campfire becomes a wildfire, and I’m sure that must be the reason some people won’t stop lighting them, despite fire bans and air quality alerts and all our recent lived experience with devastating fires.
I don’t know how to share the wilderness with people who can watch a fire burn over 200,000 acres, burn 224 homes down to ash, and still insist on some sort of “right” to light a campfire any more than I know how to share the planet with climate deniers. I certainly don’t know how to answer the pointed, accusatory questions my teenagers have for me about how we let the world get to this point. Their climate grief, like mine, also morphs into rage, but they have cultivated a sort of resigned pessimism about their future. They approach their climate activism and advocacy with a grim sort of fatalism, an awareness that their efforts, while essential, may not change anything. This too is a source of grief and rage, that I can’t assure them otherwise, that I am no comfort at all.
* * *
I was 23 years old when All My Rivers Are Gone was published, and when I read it for the first time, just a few years ago, I wondered who I might have been if I’d read it sooner, if I’d carried Lee’s fierce voice with me all this time. Lee was most joyful in nature when she could experience it “free, bare, naked, tout ensemble, buckass, nude, birthday-suited, in the altogether.” In a photo taken in 1957 titled ‘The Pagan,’ she stands back to the camera, naked, surrounded by sandstone walls so varied and beautiful the color changes are obvious even in black and white. I recognize Lee’s sense of ease in that space, her sense of communion, her sense of celebration—I experience nature this way too, and I want these experiences to be available for everyone.
By 1963, though, the Glen Canyon Dam was built, the diversion tunnels closed, and Glen Canyon, inundated, was becoming Lake Powell. Lee went back in a boat she named Screwdriver, or Screwd river, and for the next few years, she mourned the places she had explored and loved, serving as a witness as they disappeared underwater. When asked if it wasn’t a form of torture to watch the canyon disappear, Lee responded: “Do we leave the bedside of our loved ones while they’re dying? No. Most of us watch over…until they go. And when they’re gone, we grieve—grieve long and deep…”
* * *
Just before the biggest fires erupted in 2020, my father died of cancer. We nursed him at home with masks on. As he grew weaker, my children helped us transfer him from wheelchair to bed and back again, in and out of the car, to and from the toilet. We were in the room when he passed, heard the ragged cadence of his breathing change, then stop. It was peaceful. We held his funeral online.
What I know to do with my grief is rub nature all over it, wait for solace to soak in, so a week later, my husband and I went on an eleven-mile trail run through Bobcat Ridge Open Space.
The sky was hazy with smoke from earlier fires, which hadn’t yet begun to drop ash, like rain, over hundreds of miles of land, hadn’t yet tinted the bright blue summer sky to the smoke-fueled yellow-pink hue it carried for much of August. The trail, with its ankle-breaking rocks and ample rattlesnake habitat, required vigilance. The scar of a years-old fire had left it unshaded save for a lovely wooded section on the far end of the loop. Even in the arid interface between the short-grass prairie and the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, there are slopes like this that hold moisture longer, where trees and shrubs filter and modulate the relentless summer heat, and they feel as rare and necessary as oases in the desert. We stopped to rest in the cool shade, and once I started weeping I couldn’t stop. My father, who used a wheelchair, could not access this place while he was alive, and I realized in that moment that he would never see it.
Months later, the Cameron Peak Fire reached Bobcat Ridge and burnt through those patches of haven forest, and I felt certain I’d never see them again either. The trails were closed until further notice. Scientists are discovering that increased heat and drought, driven by climate change, are preventing some of Colorado’s forest species from recovering after intense fires like these, that they don’t always grow back the same way they grew before.
* * *
In April of 2022, the Department of the Interior announced that they would reduce the amount of water delivered to California, Nevada, and Arizona in an emergency effort to keep Lake Powell from dropping below the levels necessary for the Glen Canyon Dam to produce hydroelectric power. Climate change in the region will cause even hotter temperatures, even less precipitation. We are most likely experiencing permanent aridification, not a temporary drought. Most available science predicts that the water will deadpool behind the dam as early as next year. Or, as Katie Lee would almost certainly see it, we killed that canyon for nothing.
My oldest child, now a college sophomore, studies Ecology and Sustainability and Geographic Information Systems. She texts me screen shots of the maps she creates, maps that show where American beaver habitat might support Gunnison sage-grouse recovery, maps that show the distance between her college campus and local outdoor recreation areas, maps she hopes might one day reveal climate solutions, paths that lessen human impact on the environment. For her 20th birthday, somehow only months away, I’m gifting her Lee’s book. The fires have already destroyed many of the places I taught my daughter to love, and as the climate catastrophe shapes the trajectory of her life, I worry that she will lose many of the things she fights hard to save. In the face of this hard and enraging truth, I hope she can find moments in nature, as Katie Lee did, “…when I didn’t have one minute of anxiety or trepidation, didn’t do or say a single thing that didn’t come naturally. No holding back, no showing off…feeling the right and wrong pressure, the angle and balance with the balls of my feet, letting intuition tell me where solid footing is.” I hope Katie Lee will help her remember that the fight is always worth it.
* * *
Even after these years of losses, even facing a future of climate losses, I am, by nature, in nature, a hopeful person. And there are reasons for hope. Land managers are listening to indigenous methods of forest management and fire suppression. The water crisis in the West is forcing compromise and creativity that may well lead to meaningful conservation. The trails and wildernesses I love are still full to bursting with humans who feel…I don’t know how they feel, exactly, but I hope it’s a sense of ease, of communion, of celebration. Katie Lee, despite all her misgivings, concludes her book about the pain of losing Glen Canyon by sending readers into nature to find a place they themselves can love as deeply:
Let me urge you (no matter the odds) to seek out such a place. Why? Because you need it, whether you know it or not. If and when you find it, tell no one else where it is. Keep it as long as possible, and, like a loved one, cherish it, being aware that love is also pain, discovery, joy unrealized, and—sooner or later—loss.
Katie Lee in All My Rivers Are Gone
The trails at Bobcat Ridge re-opened, and on Thanksgiving Day 2021, we ran that same eleven-mile loop into the forested grove where I’d grieved my father. The low bark of the ponderosa pines was blackened where fire scorched them, but it did not burn past that outer layer, had not damaged the heart wood. Those trees are still alive, as are the Rocky Mountain maples we thought we’d lost forever, which seem to have been spared completely. Cloven tracks in the trail mud indicated a herd of elk had been through the area, as had a large bobcat (or a small mountain lion). As we rested among all this resilience and strength and grace, my grief and my rage regulated themselves, my fear became muted as my breathing slowed. I cried under those ponderosas that day, too, for everything they’d managed to survive, tears of gratitude as well as grief.
Despite Katie Lee’s warning, I have told you where my cherished place is. I am inviting you to find it, hoping you will love it as deeply as I do, because keeping it a secret won’t keep it safe. Like every other beautiful place on this earth, we already share it. We are, all of us, already making our own weather, and we have choices, and there is still time.
