The Cameron Peak Fire burned 326 square miles near my home in 2020.* It started August 13th and was finally declared controlled in January of 2021. All four of the trails I backpacked prior to August 13th in 2020 burned as did every other trail near home on my hiking bucket list. The forest is closed in most of the burn area and likely will remain so for a very long time as the dangers to people, the land, and the watershed are many. Regeneration will happen but the fire burned very hot in places and the soil was destroyed. That means things won’t grow back there any time soon and that soil will erode and negatively impact our water supply and the habitat of everything that lives near this zone.
If you followed me during the worst months of the fire, you know how much grief the loss of these places in the form I knew them brought up for me. I wove four small tapestries about the fire and will probably weave more in the series. These are small 3 x 3 inch tapestry diary pieces. All four are woven as if I’m standing in the same place looking at the same mountain in the Rawah Wilderness. But they could represent any of the hundreds of miles of trail that existed in the burn area.
The first two I wove on the same warp. The initial weaving was from an image I took on a hike just north of where the fire started. I took this image on my birthday which was just a few days before the fire started. As I left the wilderness the next day, I distinctly remember thinking, 4 days in this wilderness wasn’t long enough, but I’ll be back soon. Less than a week later, the Cameron Peak Fire started in a place I could have seen from where I took this picture. (Not all of the Rawah burned. The beginning of the trail to get to this place burned but I don’t believe the spot where this photo was taken did. This tree may still be standing and since it is probably many hundreds of years old, I hope it is. One day when it is safe, I will go and check.)
Image I used for the tapestry but I flipped some things around and modified the scene from my memory. These krummholz trees are very very old. They’re just so high and subjected to such harsh conditions that they grow very very slowly. This tree could be many hundreds of years old.
Cameron Peak Fire Before the Burn, Rebecca Mezoff, tapestry, wool, cotton
The second image was something I wove as I watched the images of the fire day after day on local television and Facebook posts. This fire was fierce. There were a couple days where it ran 10-20 miles in one day. Those were the worst days. Most days the fire creeps along eating the forest a bit at a time while the fire crews make plan after plan of where to create fire breaks and when to use particular weather events or when to pull the firefighters off the line because it is too dangerous. I checked the fire statistics every day for several months and will use some of those fire maps for another tapestry one day soon.
Cameron Peak Fire, Rebecca Mezoff, tapestry, wool, cotton
The third and fourth tapestries are about regeneration. In the third one which I wove while the fire still raged, I was thinking ahead to regeneration. I was imagining how in a year or two the wildflowers would be riotous in the burn area.
Cameron Peak Fire, Regeneration 1, Rebecca Mezoff, tapestry weaving, wool, silk, cotton
In the fourth tapestry I used an image of one of the funky cone flowers I took on one of those backpacking trips and superimposed it on the mountain.
Cameron Peak Fire, Regeneration 2, Rebecca Mezoff, tapestry weaving, wool, silk, cotton
Cone flower common at high altitudes in Colorado.
Tapestry diary
I call these small tapestries my tapestry diary. They aren’t the sort of diary I work on every day, but the small tapestries do speak to events in my life. I found that these tapestries were a healthy way for me to process the grief of watching this fire destroy a massive swath of the places I love the most in so little time.
The grief hasn’t gone away, but it has been tempered at the end of the fire by thoughts of experiencing the landscape in different ways. I have not had the courage yet to return to the burn area. I went hiking last week in a place just a few miles from the edge of the fire and deliberately drove around the burn in a route where I couldn’t see the scar. But one day soon I will drive up there and start to explore the magnificent changes that fire has wrought. Forest fires are important to the life of a forest. Cataclysmic fires are not what should be happening however. There are portions of this fire area that will recover faster because the fire was largely in the crown of the trees and the soil wasn’t burned. Those areas will eventually be home to beautiful wildflowers, then aspen forests, and eventually the pine trees will come back. Some of this will happen in my lifetime, but it will never be the same for me.
This is about climate change. Humans seem incapable of assessing their impact on the planet and everything else living on it and modifying their actions to help life continue. When will we become better stewards of the only planet we have? Before or after it leads to humanity’s extinction?
I will be weaving more tapestries in this series when I gather the courage to at least drive through the burn area. Since it isn’t open to the public, I likely won’t be able to experience the recent burn directly until further safety assessments are done and they open up more of the forest. But when I can, I will go there and witness the change. And then I will weave something about that.
The two blog posts I wrote about the fire while it was happening are:
https://rebeccamezoff.com/blog/2020/8/19/tapestry-diary-weaving-about-the-cameron-peak-fire
https://rebeccamezoff.com/blog/2020/9/9/weaving-about-the-cameron-peak-fire-part-2
Details about the tapestries:
Each is about 3 x 3 inches. The first two are connected. If you watch Change the Shed, you’ll know that the first tapestry is not one I am happy with due to errors in value choice. I do like how the tree branches turned out and may reweave this tapestry to better depict the tree and the path.
Warp: 20/6 cotton seine twine
Weft: 2 strands of 18/2 weaversbazaar wool
Sett: 12 epi
The gallery below contains images from my four backpacking trips last summer before the fire started. Colorado is a beautiful place. There are captions about each place if you click on the photos to enlarge them then hover your mouse over the images.
*2020 was a big fire year in Colorado. The largest fire ever in the state, the Cameron Peak Fire, started about 50 miles from my home and in the end, burned to within 5 miles of where I live in Fort Collins. The fire was just declared controlled last week after being in contained status for about a month. It started August 13, 2020 west of Chambers Lake. The final acreage burned was 208,913. That is 326 square miles. Hundreds of structures and scores of campgrounds were destroyed or damaged. The firefighters managed to protect our infrastructure (water and electric) and they did an unbelievable job working on this incredible fire. There were thousands of firefighters working it for many months.
Here are some statistics from the Fort Collins Coloradoan this week. Cameron Peak Fire impacts.
208,913 acres burned, 325 mile fire perimeter (they helpfully told us that is how far it is to drive from Fort Collins to Grand Junction which takes about 8 hours). 80% of those acres burned.
More than 1,050 river miles, including nearly 600 miles in the Poudre watershed. (This is where we get our water which is, after all, necessary for life.)
32 miles designated Wild and Scenic river corridor burned.
Three watersheds affected, Poudre, Laramie, and Big Thompson
At least five reservoirs impacted that store water for the Front Range’s agriculture and drinking water
124 miles of trail including 95 miles in the Poudre watershed (can you hear me crying through the computer?)
More than 41,700 acres of designated wilderness area burned
16 mountain communities affected
461 structures destroyed
Source: Fort Collins Coloradoan, Sunday, January 17, 2021