this is heart-wrenching [youtube: timelapse of Boulder wildfire] →[More:]

thirty minute night timelapse shot from the top of Flagstaff Mountain of the devastation being wreaked by the Fourmile Canyon wildfire.

The smoke in Boulder today is really thick and I'm worried about some friends I have who live up in the Lee Hill area, which has been evacuated.

no one knows yet what caused it; being that it was Labor Day around 10AM it could have been anything from a hot diff on a four-wheeler to campers to kids playing to just plain carelessness. They might never know for certain.

they're saying dozens of families have already lost their homes; this is a heavily populated subrural community near town. It's a nasty patch for firefighters being that it's all on very steep ravine-cut terrain that has been heavily hit by mountain pine beetle in the past decade. Meaning: there's a lot of dead timber up there that's just been waiting to go up like this, and lots of crinkly bits for the fire to hide in. Practically every other road up there is called "something gulch", meaning: really tough to get to.

little bit of GRAR for the developers / realtors who opted for cash over timber management, cos they insist that the dead trees somehow "look better" for the property values than clearcutting for safety management / fire control.

and some respect for what was once a beautiful area popular for local cyclists to ride. I've rambled along the dirt roads around this whole area and it breaks my heart to see sections like Poormans and Logan Mill completely gone. We had planned to ride Logan Mill on our cyclocross bikes this weekend; guess that won't happen soon. Most of these weren't McMansion type developments, either, they were cool little homey cabins and family plots full of regular folk that have been living up there since the 1940s and 50s.