Cameron Peak One Year Later: Finding Inspiration in a Post-Fire Landscape

This summer’s smoke-filled skies bring us straight back to the Cameron Peak Fire of 2020 and the collective experience of witnessing our watershed on fire. And now, one year later, flash flooding, black water, debris flows, and forest closures are a daily reminder of how wildfire impacts our precious forests and rivers here in the Cache la Poudre Watershed.

On August 13, 2020, the Cameron Peak Fire ignited within the Upper Poudre River Watershed near Cameron Pass between Cameron Peak and Chambers Lake. Little did we know, the fire would burn more than 200,000 acres over more than 100 days, becoming the largest wildfire in Colorado’s recorded history.

Anniversaries like this day remind us how, as a community, we have been negatively impacted but also the importance of working together to help our watershed recover. It takes a community-wide effort to do the hard work of post-fire mitigation and restoration, ensuring life and property are protected as well as water quality and ecosystem health.

As we look back over the past year, we continue to be inspired by the incredible amount of collaboration that has been organized around this historic fire. Within days of Cameron Peak igniting, stakeholders came together to begin planning, prioritizing and fundraising for recovery. Individuals, businesses, nonprofits, state and federal agencies, local municipalities, foundations, and the county have all chipped in money (and an incredible amount of time and energy!) to help protect our forested watershed in the aftermath of Cameron Peak.

The forest also inspires us. Walking through a burn provides a new perspective. We see and experience the landscape in a new way. There is hope in regrowth and regeneration. The forest knows what to do! We witness this in the thousands of new lodgepole seedlings and aspen shoots emerging from the ashes. Or the beauty of morel mushrooms fruiting out of a charred log. And, oh! the wildflowers! Nature’s process of healing can help us heal as a community. We see how the river, and the forests that surround it, connect us all. They are also community.

With more than 330,000 residents in northern Colorado dependent on a healthy Poudre River, we are all stakeholders in the process of post-fire recovery, and watershed protection more broadly. If your water comes from the Poudre River, you have a voice and a place in this conversation.

How has the Cameron Peak Fire affected you and how do you want to see our watershed recover moving forward? Questions to ponder as we continue, together, down the road of post-fire recovery.