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WALK WHERE THEY WALKED

About this website

This website is intended as common ground for anyone with a tie to the South Canyon Fire of July 6, 1994, on Storm King Mountain near Glenwood Springs, Colorado.

The fire has come to touch many lives in the years since it happened. Those bonded to the fire range from firefighters who fought the blaze and relatives of the 14 who died there to tourists affected by memory of the event.

After the fire, which burned within sight of Interstate 70, families and others began climbing the mountain as a tribute to those who died and to try to understand what had happened. Over time, they wore a footpath up the mountain. Realizing what was happening, the Bureau of Land Management, the land manager for the area, began to build a more permanent trail, drawing on volunteer help.

"The trail was built by a community literally walking through the grieving process," said the BLM's Kathy Voth, who organized the effort.

Today, the trail has two stages. The first part is a steep mile-long hike from a trailhead, easily accessible from I-70, to an observation point looking east toward Hell's Gate Ridge, the major spur ridge of Storm King where most of the events of the fire occurred. The trail rises 700 vertical feet to the top of the ridge immediately to the west of Hell's Gate Ridge. The path then follows the top of that westerly ridge to a lookout spot where interpretive signs tell the story of the fire.

The second stage of the trail is more rugged and less well maintained; hikers can experience what it felt like for firefighters carrying 30-pound packs to struggle on the slopes of Storm King Mountain. This trail leads to the west flank fireline where 13 firefighters raced the flames. Only one person from that group survived. The 12 crosses on the steepest portion of the fireline, only yards from the safety of the ridge top, accurately mark where the other 12 firefighters fell. There is also a trail along the top of Hell's Gate Ridge that leads north to the site where two helitack crewmen were caught by flames and died. To the south, the trail leads to the point overlooking I-70 where lightning struck a tree on the evening of July 2 and ignited the fire.

A swift walker can make the round trip from the trailhead to the top of Hell's Gate Ridge in less than two hours. But speed no longer counts the way it did on the July afternoon when the fire blew up. A visitor can take it easy and imagine what it must have been like for the firefighters who struggled along the fireline, more aware with every step that the blowup was chasing them.

Standing quietly among the crosses, a sense of what happened begins to rise. Those who have visited the site know it is not farfetched to say there is a charged feeling to the air, a sense of past events reaching out to become part of the present moment.

Scorched trees come to life with imagined flames. The stirring air carries hints of the mighty blast that drove a tide of flame along the slopes. The spirits of the vanished firfighters seem to rise again to race the flames. They swirl past and then mount up into the sky like fire itself. Visitors feel, as the BLM's Kathy Voth once wrote, "the grief that comes of imagining the dead back to life, and then walking with them to that point where life becomes death."

The story of Storm King does not end in ashes and sadness. The fire continues to teach lessons at many different levels of firefighting, from the ways that fire management should be organized to ways in which individual crews should conduct themselves in dangerous situations.

Walk where the firefighters walked. Imagine events from their point of view. Create a bond with the fire; this is a fitting way to honor the dead. For firefighters, such a bond will help assure that in the future no one need die this death again.