Today's Denver Post has an excellent graphic that ties together causes and sizes of this year's Colorado wildfires (38 of them in all). Of those, 21 are confirmed to be human-caused and another 6 are undetermined. The Weston Pass fire is the only fire of over 4000 acres that is identified with a natural cause (the 416 fire is still listed as undetermined).

I've seen several articles that state that more than 50% - even 87% - of fires are human caused. I pick up calls on my fire scanner for the area between 470 and 43. Every week, 20+ calls come in that are for smoke investigations. Some of those turn out to be illegal campfires. A couple are usually campfires on private property (some illegal), the rest are on public lands like state parks. On one Saturday evening, three illegal campfires had to be extinguished by firefighters, just in the Maxwell Falls area. One of them required extra time for the firefighter to hike into the location.

Are these people who need to be educated, again, on the law and reason for it? I find it confusing as to which forests, and which counties have bans and at what levels. Is it possible to simplify that and change it less often? Is that too unfair to law-abiding campers?

How many of these people believe their campfire will go unnoticed or will be the exception to the danger? Are they people who just don't care about breaking the law? Can they be reached in any way?

This summer on FB, ParkCo has been announcing the dollar amount in fines they've written tickets for illegal fires every week. I think this could be very effective. It certainly got my attention! You have to "like" them before you see notices like this, however. How could we (or they) get more people to see information like this?

A lot of transplants have never heard of a fire ban before. But still, even fires not caused by humans directly i.e. lightning strikes, we should probably take the blame for too considering the unprecedented levels of climate change humans have caused without a doubt. I think the radio said this past June was the 3rd hottest on record with like 27 days over 90 in Denver. Can't wait for August! :-(

That's right! and it leaves even less of a margin of error for humans or for nature to cause one.

Last night, a man burned some papers outside in an area exactly like ours. Steep terrain all around, many dead standing trees, extremely dry. It was extinguished before anything caught and it did not start a fire, but..... I'm speechless.