BLACK CANYON OF THE GUNNISON NATIONAL PARK
Two archaeologists clad in neon yellow shirts with notebooks in hand moved through the wildfire’s path, taking notes as they navigated around charred oak trees and pockets of ash.
Inside a nearby campground, the steel frames of picnic tables remained intact, but not much else survived the lightning-caused South Rim fire that started July 10 and tore through more than 4,000 acres in the national park near Montrose.
Now, nearly three weeks later, the firefighter count is about 150, down from 500 for the initial attack, and a new team of biologists, hydrologists and soil specialists have moved in to assess post-fire risks and map out the park’s road to recovery.
The team of specialists, who make up the Burned Area Emergency Response, are looking to see if communities or properties, including prehistoric sites or endangered species habitats in the park, could be at risk of being damaged by a debris flow or flooding if a storm rolled across the scorched soil. They are documenting the loss of native plants and taking inventory of damaged, and potentially dangerous, trails.
“It’s like a Band-Aid to help them recover after a big event,” Jennifer Gibson, post-wildfire coordinator for the National Park Service said of the team’s work Monday.
The team has 14 days to get to the park and complete their assessment before moving on.
“There’s a lot of pressure on the parks service to open the campgrounds, get their trails open. Visitors love their parks,” Gibson said.
But time is also critical for the BAER team to evaluate the park’s safety. They must identify the values at risk, run models and collect data, before providing a plan for the national park to implement. Hydrologists, for example, can suggest techniques that can help stabilize the soil and deflect flooding down a burn scar.
“The flooding in Ruidoso, New Mexico, was in a burn scar and that’s the sort of event that you get, and it’s very, very dangerous,” Gibson said of the deadly floods July 8 on burn scars left by two wildfires in 2024. “So that’s why we need to make sure that this place is safe.”
Using the team’s assessment, the national park service will open the South Rim in stages, as each area is cleared, Stuart West superintendent of the park said. Thirteen structures, including a maintenance and storage building, vault toilets and campgrounds were destroyed in the fire.
The park will open the trails as they are marked safe, but almost all of the trails into the park’s wilderness area will remain closed through the year, West said. The canyon’s plunging cliffs attract about 360,000 visitors a year — 98% of which are not from the area, he said.
While there’s a lot of rehabilitation work to be done, a lot of the recovery work can be left up to nature.
“The rock, when it gets hot, it fractures and all the vegetation in between those roots go and that’s what is holding the rock behind. So a lot of it becomes unstable,” West said. “We’ll go through the whole winter cycle, let it get wet, let it freeze and thaw and then next spring, hopefully get it open.”
Fresh blades of grass had already begun to push their way through the soil Monday. Seed caches, that squirrels collected and stored in shallow holes or under rocks, will soon start to grow, Gibson said.
“Fire can be devastating to communities … but in parks, it is a natural process, and our forests, too,” she said. “It helps clean the fuels up. It creates new life.”
Along the southern side of the park, the varying levels of heat from the fire created a natural mosaic of white ash, blackened trees and green patches of vegetation.
“In this post-fire environment, maybe next spring you’ll see a flush of wildflowers,” Gibson said. “There are seeds that sit in the soil for years waiting for a fire event, so you might see some really rare plants pop up. So it could be a totally different and dynamic ecosystem and it’s really exciting to see.”
Meanwhile, the North Rim, which was spared from fire, will open Wednesday to visitors, providing an up-close view of the fire’s devastation and the return to life.
Firefighting challenges in the Black Canyon
While the park welcomes visitors on the North Rim, officials don’t expect to fully contain the flames on the south side for weeks to come.
That’s largely because of the towering granite walls of the Black Canyon that pose both a benefit and danger to firefighters assigned to the South Rim fire, said Rusty Stark, district fire management officer with Bureau of Land Management’s Colorado Southwest District.
The cliffs can help stop the fire’s spread, but if smoldering debris tumbles down the canyon and starts a spot fire, firefighters can’t safely reach the area to extinguish it.
“Fire usually doesn’t move downhill very fast, but it will move downhill and this steepened topography — a lot can roll downhill really fast,” Stark said. “You get one pinecone that bounces all the way down to the canyon and is throwing sparks the whole way down with every bounce.”
“If those catch a spot fire, you can’t really put people there safely. So once it gets in there, it is more of a monitoring game,” he said.
Because of the rugged terrain, crews can’t access the entire fire perimeter to confirm the heat is gone and mark it contained, Stark said. Containment numbers likely won’t increase until rain or snow moves in.
You get one pinecone that bounces all the way down to the canyon and is throwing sparks the whole way down with every bounce.”
— Rusty Stark, district fire management officer with
Bureau of Land Management’s Colorado Southwest District
Crews will use drones to monitor hot spots along rugged terrain that’s inaccessible to firefighters and also to start controlled burns. The drones drop small, chemically ignited spheres to start the fires.
“You can control the heat of the fire,” said West, the park’s superintendent. “Rather than dropping them at the bottom of the hill and having the fire run up and get really hot, you can go from the top and (the fire) will go down slowly and it’s not as hot that way.”
The risk of the fire spreading across the ridges of the Black Canyon is very low, officials said. As of Tuesday evening, the fire was estimated at 4,232 acres and 41% contained.