Human remains were found in a home destroyed by the Stone Canyon fire burning near Lyons, the Boulder County sheriff said Wednesday morning.
The fire, which started Tuesday afternoon north of Lyons, had burned about 1,550 acres as of Wednesday evening. It was 20% contained.
Boulder County Sheriff Curtis Johnson said as many as five homes have burned, but that crews were still trying to assess the total damage caused by the fire.
The good news, Johnson said, was the fire didn’t grow much overnight.
“We did not get the strong winds that had been potentially predicted for our area,” he said.
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“We expect air resources to be returning today, dropping both slurry and water on hotspots on the fire,” Johnson said. “We’re really going to push hard today to try to knock this fire down.”
Johnson said Boulder County is sharing resources with the team managing the larger Alexander Mountain fire burning west of Loveland and about 8 miles north of the Stone Canyon fire.
Johnson declined to share more information about the person killed in the fire — “that’s an active investigation,” he said — but the sheriff said his office had not received any other missing person reports.
The cause of the fire remains under investigation.
Stone Canyon fire evacuations remain in place for some parts of Lyons and homes to the north of town and into Larimer County.
Johnson said he doesn’t anticipate more evacuation orders being issued Wednesday and that some people could potentially be allowed to return to their homes.
“Should things get hot and start burning again, we do have a lot of law enforcement resources staged here and also on standby,” he said. “If we do need to do additional evacuations, we can ramp up quickly and get people out of harm’s way.”
The Stone Canyon fire is one of three major fires burning in Colorado this week. The Alexander Mountain fire near Loveland and the Quarry fire in southwestern Jefferson County are the others.
Sheriff Johnson said his deputies went to Larimer County to help Monday morning when the Alexander Mountain fire started. When the Stone Canyon fire started Tuesday near Lyons, Larimer County deputies came to Boulder County to help with evacuations.
“I haven’t been made aware of any issues with the reverse 911,” Gov. Jared Polis said Wednesday at a new conference in Loveland. “The areas under mandatory evacuation have had an extensive door-to-door outreach of every household that’s in those areas.”
Officials at the news conference didn’t specifically say if they made contact with the people who lived in the home where human remains were found, and again declined to discuss the death while an investigation is ongoing.
Polis has called out the Colorado National Guard to help with logistics in fighting the fires on the Front Range. Soldiers won’t be on the front line fighting the fires but will be used to help with support, traffic management and other support roles.
It’s the first time since the Marshall fire in December 2021 that the National Guard has been used to help with fire support.
Colorado Sun editor David Krause contributed to this report.