The East Troublesome Fire and the Night Grand Lake Nearly Burned

In the autumn of twenty twenty, this town came within a breath of disappearing. The East Troublesome Fire started on October fourteenth, in the driest stretch of weather ever recorded at the Grand Lake climate station, in records going back more than a century. For a week it smoldered and grew through beetle killed lodgepole pine.

Then, on the evening of October twenty first, high winds turned it into something almost beyond belief. The fire raced northeast at a rate of roughly six thousand acres an hour, and in a single day it burned more than one hundred thousand acres, jumping the Continental Divide itself, something firefighters had rarely seen. Grand Lake was ordered to evacuate in the dark as walls of flame closed in.

The town itself narrowly survived, but hundreds of homes on its outskirts and across Grand County did not. In all the fire destroyed five hundred fifty five structures, including three hundred sixty six homes, and it became the second largest wildfire in Colorado history, burning nearly one hundred ninety four thousand acres. Two people died, an elderly couple who lived outside town and chose not to leave.

Investigators later determined the fire was human caused. Years afterward, some residents still had not found permanent housing. Look at the scorched slopes above town and you can still read the story of that terrible night.