ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, September 1, 1996 TAG: 9609030020
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
COLUMN: New River Journal
SOURCE: BRIAN KELLEY
We had just sat down on a log to eat a dinner of experimental backpacker spaghetti when the tiny white flakes began drifting into camp.
The dinner was a pasta catastrophe, and not just because of the airborne ash.
But the possibility of a nearby forest fire ruined whatever appetite my wife and I had generated that day two weeks ago from backpacking 12 grueling miles through Colorado's La Plata Mountains.
In years of back-country experience, being near a major forest fire was a first for me.
But this summer, unfortunately, it has been a common occurrence. The West is having one of its worst fire seasons in years (one of my brothers has spent the past several weeks fighting a forest fire in California for the U.S. Forest Service).
The situation is exacerbated by a drought in some areas, such as southwest Colorado's San Juan National Forest. We were trekking there along 70 miles of the Colorado Trail between Durango and Silverton.
But the bigger picture was the last thing on my mind as the fine white ash coated our tent and as the acrid smoke grew thicker on that spur of a mountain called the Cape of Good Hope.
The dinner was unpalatable, and after I buried it away from camp, I hiked out onto a rocky, open ridge far above a long-ago clear-cut mountainside to try to get a better view. I looked to the west, where the smoke had turned the sunset into a blood-red display. The wind was coming from the southwest. There was no glow or sound to indicate a fire was near, but the smoke seemed to be getting thicker. I walked back to camp.
It was 8 o'clock, normally the time to read a bit, write an account of the day and begin to settle down for the night's welcome sleep. But we were too nervous. As the light faded, we both reached the same decision after a look at the topo map: better to pack up and move on to the north, closer to a dirt Forest Service road that led seven miles out to a highway to a small town. If there was a fire nearing, we figured, firefighters would be on that road.
So in 20 minutes, we were on our way, backpacks slung on again. We were both frazzled by the 12,000-foot altitude we'd huffed and puffed through that day, but with adrenaline surging and a headlamp on me and a flashlight on my wife, we moved out and down the Cape of Good Hope.
We'd walked no more than a few minutes in the dark when a pair of bright-eyed Cyclops approached from the other direction. Two other late-night, headlamp-wearing backpackers, also suffering from a case of the willies because of the smoke and ash.
"We figured we'd just keep moving until we got to a higher place to see if we could see anything," said one of the young men.
I told him we'd just been on a promontory, and there was nothing to see but smoke. He agreed heading for the road might be a good idea. But since they were southbound anyway, and we were northbound, we both stuck with our respective plans and parted company.
Nearly 90 minutes later, my wife and I halted. We'd pushed ourselves as far as we could for that night; the dirt road was only another two miles away. We pulled out a groundcloth and our sleeping bags and dropped off to a restless sleep under the stars.
At dawn, we awoke to a smokeless sky. The wind had shifted. We ran into a half-dozen southbound backpackers and mountain bikers, some of whom had just started on the trail that morning. Nobody knew anything about a nearby fire.
Had we imagined it? I felt silly for prompting our night-flight. The rest of the week, as we continued on through the Rico Mountains and reached Molas Pass, no one had an explanation. Finally, in a taxi driving back to our car in Durango, the driver clued us in.
Mesa Verde National Park, which we'd intended to visit before heading back to Virginia, had burned for most of the week. Several lightning strikes the day before we'd seen the smoke had started a 4,700-acre forest fire, about the same size as one that scorched part of Craig County in April 1995. The Park Service had evacuated 4,000 visitors and 400 employees from the park, which is famous for its ancient Anasazai Indian cliff dwellings and ruins. By the time we'd finished our weeklong hike, some 650 firefighters from across the West had put down the blaze, but the park was expected to remain closed until after Labor Day while archeologists assess the damage.
The smoke and ash we'd seen on the Cape of Good Hope that night had come from 40 miles away; we'd fled the smoke of a distant fire.
I've been going on these backpacking adventures in the Rockies and the Sierras for the past three years. Maybe next year we'll take a safe, sane trip to the beach. Where the only smoke comes from a barbecue grill.
LENGTH: Medium: 84 linesby CNB