The Marshall Fire
Near Boulder, Colorado
This marker remembers a neighbor lost in the Marshall Fire, the most destructive wildfire in Colorado history.
On the thirtieth of December, twenty twenty-one, what began as a grass fire south of Boulder turned, in barely an hour, into a suburban firestorm. Wind gusts reaching more than one hundred miles an hour drove a wall of flame straight into the towns of Louisville and Superior and the open county between them. Investigators later traced the blaze to two ignition points, one from embers of an earlier fire on private land, the other a power line.
When the wind finally died, more than a thousand homes were gone, two people had died, and the damage topped two billion dollars. It was a grass fire in winter, in the suburbs, a warning about how fast fire can move when drought and wind line up against a place no one expected to burn.
