Five subdivisions that include 575 homes were evacuated overnight and early Wednesday morning in south Jefferson County because of a growing wildland fire in an unincorporated part of the county.
"This is really hard territory for our firefighters. It's very steep. It's a lot of timber, it's a lot of scrub oak. We had scrub oak flaming up last night, 30 to 50 feet at night," said Mark Techmeyer with the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office at a media briefing early Wednesday morning.
The fire was 200 acres as of 4:27 p.m., according to the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office. It is zero percent contained.
David Minton, 38, lives in Watson Gulch with his wife Kelly and two dogs, about a mile from the site of the fire, he said. On Wednesday afternoon, they had their pickup truck and camper parked at the evacuation center at Dakota Ridge High School.
“Our neighbors saw [the fire] on their way back up from dinner [on Tuesday night],” he said. “We’ve got a pretty tight knit group of neighbors. So a lot of us were coming up on the neighborhood group text and Facebook message and kind of getting prepared.”
Minton and his wife were ready to go, with the camper packed, by the time they got the evacuation order on their cell phones at 2 a.m. It was an oddly calm experience, he said, compared to the usual stress of leaving on a trip.
Other evacuees didn’t get the message until much later, since the gulches often have poor cellular reception. One 79-year-old man, who declined to give his name, said he only found out when he saw a sheriff’s deputy outside his home on Wednesday morning.
Minton watched from the shade of his camper as a dark belch of smoke rose up from behind the ridgeline, slowly blending into hazy gray skies. Many of his neighbors had come to the same evacuation center, and some 50 people had gathered for an informational update a few minutes earlier, he said. Working on only an hour of sleep, he was ready for a stay that could last days — or longer.
“It's kind of ironic, because you would expect to be a lot more twisted up, really, but there's nothing I'm gonna do to change what's going on over there,” he said. “So, you just kind of have to roll with it.”
Techmeyer said if the Quarry fire were to enter residential areas, firefighters would shift priorities from suppressing the fire to protecting structures.
"I will be very blunt. Every neighborhood in this facility is at risk. This fire is not an easy fight," he said at a second press conference later in the day.
The sheriff's office and firefighters have been working to get hundreds of people evacuated from the Deer Creek Mesa, Sampson, Maxwell, McKinney, and Murphy subdivisions, going door-to-door and using LookoutAlert emergency notifications.
The Silver Ranch and Silver Ranch South subdivisions were also under pre-evacuation orders Wednesday morning, and there are road closures in the area.
There’s an evacuation center set up at Dakota Ridge High School in Littleton for residents and their pets. From the school at the base of the foothills Wednesday afternoon, a stream of yellow and brown smoke was rising up over the ridge. Large animals are being evacuated to the Jefferson County fairgrounds.
South Valley Road south of Ken Caryl Ranch, Deer Creek Canyon Road at South Cougar Road and West Ranch Trail, Pleasant Park Road and Kuester Road are closed.
The blaze was first noticed by a sheriff's deputy on patrol and was considered a vegetation fire around 9:30 p.m. Tuesday.
The cause of the initial "10 foot-by-10 foot" fire is not known, but Techmeyer paused when asked during a late morning press conference whether the event seemed suspicious.
"The investigation hasn't even begun yet, but I think anytime you see a small fire in the middle of an area like that at 9 o'clock at night, it makes you scratch your head a little bit," he said.
Just hours before the Quarry fire started, West Metro Fire Rescue reminded residents that fire restrictions were in effect.
“It's dry and fire danger is VERY HIGH in West Metro's district,” the agency tweeted.
Techmeyer said officials were worried at first that they would not be able to get air support into the area, especially with the Alexander Mountain fire burning near Loveland and the Stone Canyon fire spreading near Lyons.
However, a large air tanker and four helicopters have been dumping fire retardant and water on the flames throughout the morning. That water is coming from Chatfield Reservoir, which is closed to recreation due to those operations, though people were still hanging out there midday Wednesday.
Firefighters also have to contend with high temperatures, which reached into the 90s Wednesday, and rattlesnakes.
"There's an area in there called Rattlesnake Gulch. It's not called that to be cute," Techmeyer said.
“Fires like this that ‘stand up’ after the sun goes down and humidity goes up show just how dry the fuel (vegetation) is, and how receptive it is to fire,” tweeted West Metro Fire Rescue in the early hours on Wednesday.
"It's hard because there's so much history and family experiences there, too. But experiences like this make it a lot more challenging [to stay]," he said. "It's a lot more difficult to want to, but it's our home."
For Bill Hickman, a member of the board of directors for the White Deer Valley neighborhood, it's hard not to think of disasters like the Marshall fire when a blaze sparks so close to home. He said this week's fires illustrate why communities must be proactive about managing potential fuels.
"Coniferous trees are just full of sap, right? So you add the dry conditions that we've had for the last three, four weeks — you've got a tinder box there," Hickman said.
This is a developing story and will be updated.
