Sean Gillies (Posts about fire)

Cameron Peak Fire at two months

Sean Gillies — Fri, 16 Oct 2020 17:17:10 GMT

The Cameron Peak Fire began two months ago and is the largest fire recorded in Colorado. It has burned over 167,000 acres (67,000 hectares). 30,000 acres burned on Wednesday in a 15-mile run that appears as an uncontained eastward-stretching red lobe in the map below.

Fire map for morning of 2020-10-16

The limber pine groves around Signal Mountain and Donner Pass that I ran through on June 7 burned on Wednesday. I know people who are getting evacuated near this new run. Horsetooth Open Space and Lory State Park are closed. High winds are expected again today and according to the incident commander more crown fire runs may be possible. It's a bad situation.

Cameron Peak Fire update

Sean Gillies — Mon, 07 Sep 2020 21:30:09 GMT

The Cameron Peak Fire exploded this weekend, growing to almost 40,000 acres on Saturday and nearly 60,000 acres today. Ash has been falling at my house all day and the smoke plume has almost entirely blotted out the sun. At 1 p.m. it looked and felt like 45 minutes after sunset. I grabbed plots of solar irradiance, the density of solar energy reaching the ground, and temperature from the CSU weather station, a half-mile northeast of my house. The effect of the smoke is dramatic. It has absorbed or reflected most of our expected sunshine and we're stuck in the low 60's while other cities on the Front Range are still roasting in the 90's.

Graph of the density of solar energy incident on the ground.

Ground level temperature. In Denver it's another hazy 90 °F day.

A winter storm is forecast to arrive early tomorrow morning, bringing rain and snow, and hopefully some relief for firefighters, mountain residents, and the rest of us downstream. It may get below freezing tonight and Tuesday night, so Ruth and I went out in the gloom to pick our basil and green tomatoes. I'll be making pesto and stashing in it our deep freezer for the rest of the afternoon.

Update (2020-09-07): InciWeb now reports 96,000 acres for the Cameron Peak Fire.

Too smoky to run

Sean Gillies — Mon, 24 Aug 2020 18:01:37 GMT

I haven't run since the 19th of August because the quality of our air has been so poor. Like much of the Mountain West, we're under a plume of smoke from California fires. The Cameron Peak Fire, 50 miles upstream, continues to grow. And on the 21st a new fire started about 5 miles from my house and has grown to 165 acres. Yesterday afternoon the CSU air quality station measured a maximum air quality index (AQI) for fine particles smaller than 2.5 micrometers (PM2.5) of 199. That's bad. Three hours outside installing a new chicken coop yesterday has given me itchy eyes, stuffiness, and a cough. I wore a mask, but still inhaled too many particles.

Trail Runner has an article that looks at issue around running and PM2.5 exposure. It has me thinking that I should stay in today even though the PM2.5 AQI is 72, only moderately bad. But this may be the best we get for a few days; I see forecasts of PM2.5 AQI 140 for Tuesday and Wednesday.

Cameron Peak Fire

Sean Gillies — Fri, 14 Aug 2020 17:38:42 GMT

In the things are continuing to get worse department, a wildfire erupted near Cameron Peak in the Roosevelt National Forest yesterday and has grown to over 2000 acres in size. As you can see in the loop below, the smoke plume is affecting Fort Collins, 50 miles downwind.

GEOS 17 loop by Dan Lindsey

The Cameron Peak Fire is only a few miles from the Never Summer 100k course and is burning forest I know and love well. I'm going to be staying inside today. No running.

Chiles and fire

Sean Gillies — Sun, 15 Sep 2019 20:55:48 GMT

The sound and smell of charring chiles is a big part of the Colorado farmers market experience in September. The roar of propane burners and rattle of crisped peppers. The sweet, smokey, aroma of burned chile skins and roasted fruit. It's an end-of-summer ritual.

I've bought many a bag of charred chiles at the market, but these days I prefer to buy them fresh and take them home to give them the personal touch over a hot charcoal fire. In my experience, a gently charred chile that is not tumbled is much easier to peel. The blistered skins come off in big pieces and there's no need to rinse them or peel them under water, which would dilute their sublime flavor.

Yesterday I brought home a bag of green poblano (when red ripe and dried, this is known as ancho) and Big Jim chiles, 10 of each. The Big Jim is a New Mexico chile hybrid developed at New Mexico State University. It's the largest of this kind of chile and has a thick skin. Poblanos have a much thinner skin. It would not be a good idea to roast these together in a cage using propane burners: the tender poblanos would be destroyed. It's easy to do them together on a grill.

Short, wide poblanos and long Big Jims on the grill

A week ago, I gave a bunch of Pueblo chiles the same treatment. The Pueblo chile looks a lot like a New Mexico chile, but is quite different. It's a large Mirasol chile that develops pointing up towards the sun. It seems to be a relatively recent import from Mexico. The New Mexico chile points down towards the earth and is derived from chiles grown by Pueblo people of Southwest North America. The Hatch chile is a New Mexico chile grown in the Hatch Valley along the Rio Grande River upstream of Las Cruces, New Mexico. Hatch is a distinguished appellation like Champagne or Napa are for grapes and wine and Palisade is for peaches, and is way ahead of the game in comparison to Colorado's Pueblo chile growers. New Mexico also has an official State Question: "Red or green?" In other words: do you want red chile or green chile on that? Colorado's climate is cooler and red chiles are less often found at market. I love all of these chiles, green or red.

I could move to New Mexico just for the plates

It doesn't take long over a hot fire for big blisters to form on the Big Jims and smaller ones to form on the poblanos. The technique is basic: turn them until the blistering is fairly uniform and then put them, whole, in a dry, heavy pot with a lid to steam for a few minutes. This will let the skins continue to loosen as the chiles cool.

Flipped chiles

Here are the skinned chiles. The poblanos took about twice as long to peel because the thinner skins come off in smaller pieces. I don't sweat the little scraps of charred skin and never rinse the chiles. You wouldn't rinse a steak or a sausage, would you?

Big Jim chiles, skinned

Poblano chiles

The final steps are trimming the stems, scraping the seeds from the inside, and putting them in freezer containers with the juices on the plates and in the pot. I will use the Big Jims in fall and winter stews and use the poblanos as a condiment with tacos or eggs or grilled steak.