The Hayman Fire - 10 Years Later

The weekend that wasn't supposed to be but WAS!!  We didn't get to go camping the weekend before as planned because the pickup was STILL broke down with the transmission!  I'll spare you all the lovely details we've had with the truck by just saying Glenn has taken out the transmission to be fixed, then reinstalled it after it was rebuilt - didn't work - took it out ONCE again and the guy worked on it - STILL DIDN'T work - and as I'm writing this (2 weeks after we started dealing with this truck), the guy is here AGAIN trying to get it to run!!

Needless to say, that's why we didn't get to go the last weekend so we put off our little trip for the Memorial Day Weekend, just knowing the truck would be done and you guessed it, it wasn't!  By this time, Glenn was pretty fed up with the whole situation so he said we would take the white work truck and MAKE it work with the camper and ATV trailer - and it worked just fine!!

Our plan was to leave work at 1:00 last Friday - well you can guess that didn't happen but we did manage to get out of here by 3:30 and head for home to hook everything up and get on our way!  We chose to go someplace close and went back to the Pike Nat'l Forest where we had hunted mushrooms the weekend before!  Glenn figured it wouldn't be busy - WRONG!!

I think the white truck looks quite nice with the white camper!!

We found a place to camp right off the main road and got set up - the night was beautiful but by the time we had a drink and appetizer and then cooked dinner, it was getting dark!  At that point, we really hadn't decided if we could even have a fire or not as the website we had looked at didn't explain it very well.  So I told Glenn that we would hop on the ATV and check out a couple of campsites and if they had a fire, it would be OK for us too!!  We checked and they did have a fire -but it was so late we didn't start one on Friday night - and that was a shame because it was the ONLY night we could have had a fire with the windy weekend we had!!

Saturday morning dawned COLD and WINDY!!  But we were excited to ATV (first time of the season) so we cooked a great breakfast, packed a lunch, donned our warm clothes and headed out!

The first thing we noticed when we went outside was the smell of smoke!  I figured it was from campsites - Glenn figured it was just the burned smell of the trees from the Hayman Fire, 10 years ago!  BOTH of us were wrong - as we got to higher ground, there was a complete smoke haze on both sides of us - kind of creepy in fact!!  So as you can see in this next picture, it's pretty hazy in the background!! (We never did figure out where all the smoke came from!!)

The following pictures won't look like my usual Colorado pictures of our beautiful mountains and our fantastic lush forests of pine and aspen trees!  They will show the aftermath of the fire from 2002 that burned up 138,000 acres and completely burned up 133 homes!  The fire started on June 8, 2002, and was finally contained on July 2nd - wow - I had forgotten how long of a time it took!!

Even though there were thousands of burned trees, the aspen trees have come back and are about 5 to 6 feet tall now and quite thick!!  The little pine trees though have years and years of growth before they'll get to be their usual height!

This is a large quartz rock that must have fallen off this mini mountain that was pretty white!  There were quartz rocks all over the place!

The wind got so bad that we just headed back to the camper for lunch and the afternoon - I spent the rest of the day reading and Glenn took a nap and then went out digging for rocks (not my idea of fun).  The wind kept blowing and blowing and even cooking outside on the little gas grill was a chore!  It didn't stop either which meant no campfire for the night!  I retaliated by just eating the marshmallows right out of the bag!

Usually the wind stops blowing during the night but Saturday night it didn't - it was a tough night sleeping!  And I just knew that when we woke up Sunday morning the wind would stop and we would have a perfectly lovely day - wrong again!  The wind was just as bad and it was probably around 30 degrees out when we got up - brrrrrrr!!

I didn't dress warm enough that day - I should have had one extra layer on because I was cold all morning!  My mistake!

This is a neat shot - I didn't even know if it would take because of shooting into the sun but it was a neat backdrop with those dead trees!

Glenn went out by himself in the afternoon and came back to tell me that there was a mini pond/mud hole on one of the trails he was on and that an ATV was stuck in it and another one was trying to pull it out!  Guess what - the 2nd ATV got stuck too!!  I made Glenn take me by it and it was so funny I had to shoot a picture of it!  Now what dummy would even TRY to get through that - obviously not a very smart one!!

Even though most of our riding was through the burned area, it was still interesting to see and nothing like I had ever seen before!

Sunday night once again proved too windy for a campfire - it just wasn't meant to be on this camping trip!!  But we still had a good time and even did some riding on Monday, since we didn't have to be home at any particular time!  Coming back to the campsite, Glenn said we had company and sure enough the forest service people were there - they advised us that we had camped too far in - you are only supposed to be one car length off the main road - REALLY?????  I've never heard of that before!!  As we were walking away, I looked at Glenn and smiled because of all things to forget, we FORGOT to put the new tags on the ATV and they hadn't caught it!!  But then - BUSTED - she walked back over and said, by the way...............I explained that yes, we had bought the tags but had forgotten to put them on since it was our first time out this season and she let it go at that...........

I'll leave you with this last picture - mainly because I can't get it to scoot up so I can write underneath it!!