Beyond the Embers

Living in southwest Colorado means the risk of fire and flood is never far from home.

First responders and firefighters are currently fighting the Rio Blanco Fire, located 12 miles south of Pagosa Springs. The lightning-caused fire started on Tuesday, July 28, and as of Thursday evening, it has grown to 781 acres with 0% containment. 

Nearly a year ago, communities just west of town experienced a similar threat: the Oak Fire, fueled by dry conditions, quickly outpaced on-the-ground resources with its extreme behavior. Sixty days later, historic, climate-fueled floods resulted in the third-largest flows on record for the San Juan River. These forests are increasingly defined by cycles of extreme multi-year droughts and wildfires interspersed with catastrophic precipitation in a warmer atmosphere. 

Beyond the Embers, a new short film produced by local filmmaker, Christi Bode, reflects on 2025 events and expresses the continued need for community preparedness before the next natural disaster. The film was produced with support from the San Juan Headwaters Forest Health Partnership, Wolf Creek Ski Area and Best of Pagosa Springs Real Estate.

By Christi Bode

Watch this story at LNN.news

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:10

We're realistic about the fact that we could lose a lot and timing can be instantaneous as the oak fire was.

SPEAKER_04 0:19

We get complacent in the area where we have not had major fires. We see it around us, but we need to realize that it only takes one little amber and it can change everything.

SPEAKER_03 0:30

I've lived here my whole life and I've certainly never seen anything like this. It was a good wake-up call to the power of what the river can do. We're certainly going to see more of these type of events moving forward. There's no reason to think that this is kind of a one-and-done. In August 2025, it was unusually hot and dry. Flows in the San Juan River were close to single digits, if not just right around 10 CFS.

SPEAKER_04 1:06

We used to have a fire season. Now it's pretty much a fire year. There's been just a huge increase of fire behavior. Fires doing stuff that we never thought it would do before, and it's breaking records. I think right here with Ghost of Springs itself, we have a lot of people living in the forest. The whole area is within the wildland urban interface.

SPEAKER_01 1:28

We decided we wanted out of the city. So we just uh thought this is a good place. And we wanted to start ski business, which we did. And then we built our house and in this exact spot right here, this house. So that's how we came to be in Pagosa. The forest here was very thick, which it still is, but we loved the privacy factor. Back then, I don't think we thought much about fire. Obviously, 40 some odd years had been a lot of changes.

SPEAKER_00 2:02

I think that that kind of increased knowledge as time went on. We saw there was more fires statewide, and uh insurance was starting to apply pressure.

unknown 2:12

We can break off that tree.

SPEAKER_00 2:14

Probably 25 years at least, I would say, we've been doing some mitigation. We did thinning out in the front, you know, trying to make it a healthier Honderosa forest.

SPEAKER_01 2:25

The thing about mitigating oak brush is that it is tenacious. You know, you can get out there and cut it, and then it just springs back up.

SPEAKER_00 2:37

The prevailing winds come from the west and up that hill, and I always feared the hill over here because it would climb the hill naturally and then be aided by the wind. And so we got rid of those oaks.

SPEAKER_01 2:52

We definitely were trying to be proactive on it.

SPEAKER_04 2:58

When I first pulled up on scene of the fire, we could see that this wasn't a normal wildland fire. The fire activity had already turned quarterline extreme. The fire started in property that had no mitigation done, which allowed the fire to quickly move into the trees. It was starting to go into the canopy, 100-150-foot flame links in a residential neighborhood. Immediately that prompted a call for aircraft to start coming. There's a lot of things that all came together at the right time. We were able to get four to five large hair tankers rolling at the same time and being able to hit that fire. That was key to us being able to get some control on that fire. You know, the suppression efforts, us having crews available, ready to go. We had a great volunteer response who was able to get out there. Our relationship with the Forest Service, where they immediately diverted the crews that they had coming this way. And then we did have help from the Sheriff's Department being able to help reach out even further for mutual aid stuff. So initially, when the fire blew up, threw a bunch of embers into the air, and within half an hour to an hour, we had multiple spot fires going, being 10 foot diameter or even bigger. We did have people scouting ahead for additional fires. We found one in the next drainage, which was half almost three-quarter miles away from the last part of the fire. And that's when we immediately called for the evacuation of Elk Park. We had a lot of good mitigated properties up top, but if it made it through those properties and dropped into Martinez Canyon, that's just a straight shot right into a populated portion of Pagosa Springs. And that was a huge concern of ours. I really think that if we did not get the aircraft, there's a good possibility we would have been fighting it here in town. There's a good chance this fire happened again, the same way we could have half, even quarter of the resources and be able to put this out.

SPEAKER_00 5:18

Most of our 12 acres of Ponderosa were burned.

SPEAKER_01 5:21

Obviously, you start out numb, you're in shock. You cannot believe that, you know, this has happened. And then you start with the papers and the gathering information and talking to adjusters, and the insurance companies do what they do, and you have to do what you do, which is try to protect your interests, your own interest. When you talk about smoke damage from a fire like that, you basically have to replace everything.

SPEAKER_00 5:49

The thing that helped me quite a bit was to try to line everything, all the jobs that I was going to need done, from construction to painting to the overall mitigation. Sometimes you have to network into other areas, you know, maybe public adjusters, hopefully not lawyers. But there's people out there that can help you navigate this without having it all come crashing down on you. We were out for six months. It's interrupted lives and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

SPEAKER_01 6:24

I don't wish this on anyone in terms of the difficulty of it. You don't want your life to be all about the fire. It takes your time. And that's kind of precious. It's precious to everyone.

SPEAKER_03 6:43

Then I think a month and a half later, remnants of a hurricane in the Baja just kind of worked its way up in that southwestern flow and targeted the San Juan watershed. I think over five days it dropped over 12 and a half inches of water and created some severe flooding in the San Juan River through Pagosa Springs and down into the Navajo Reservoir. It was a really quick change in the matter of a few days. It went to 20 CFS all the way up to 8,500. I think it was estimated it's between a 25 and 40 year event. So substantial, but not 100-year event. The misconception of the 100-year flood is that you have a 100-year flood once every 100 years. But really, those statistics are that every year you have a 1% chance of a 100-year flood. So it could happen back-to-back years, certainly in the realm of possibility. And then I think the other thing that complicates it is it's a changing climate. One thing that became clearer, and I saw it all through town, places where homeowners or landowners had cleared the bank so they could see the river better or have better access were more vulnerable during the flood event for massive erosion. So I think that's important to remember the importance of the riparian vegetation. In some ways, it's the opposite of fire mitigation where you're trying to thin out fuel for fire risk. In the river corridor, you want to maintain as much bank vegetation as possible for the stability. This event was actually really fortunate in the way that it kind of displayed the power of the river and the space that a river requires. It wasn't the biggest flow we could have, but it was significant to let everyone know that who's really in charge. So I think it's important to think about that moving forward as a community, the benefits in the long run of giving river space and thinking about the potential of flood events in the future and how we develop in the active floodplain. There's no reason to think that this is a kind of a one-and-done. We're in a time of more extreme events.

SPEAKER_04 8:49

Definitely the thing is we need to be prepared. Complacency is always the key thing.

SPEAKER_02 8:55

I think you have about two years after an event that people are still thinking about things. I really feel that it's imperative to get the word out there. Tell your neighbors and friends, because they could save your home by doing work on their property.

SPEAKER_04 9:13

Mitigation can be very daunting. Start small. Keep the brush trimmed around your house. Don't have tree limbs touching your house. Keep grasses, weeds, and mowed down. Obviously, if it if we do have time to be able to look at houses and do structural protection, the people who did more were more likely to help. If we have to commit a firefighter for three hours to make a house safe, we're not going to do that if we can make 10 others safe during that time.

SPEAKER_02 9:41

It can be expensive to hire somebody to do the mitigation. I would like to be able to convince more people to do some volunteer time to help others, those that can't, such as our elderly neighbor. We're trying to make it easier.

SPEAKER_01 9:59

You know, maybe there's something to be said about what neighbors maybe could do for each other, even it is about community.