The Silver Fire

THE BLACKRANGE RAG - WWW.BLACKRANGE.ORG
The Silver Fire
As We Lived It
Published on the Second Anniversary of the Silver Fire.
What we saw and felt...
The blog entries on the Free Range and Silver Fire Blogs captured our thoughts as we lived through the Silver Fire. This reprint of those blog entries and never before published images by Véronique De Jaegher and Catherine Wanek are a vivid reminder of what the communities of the Black Range went through during the summer of ’13. Although reformatted to fit this publication, the blog entries otherwise remain unchanged. Read the blogs carefully and you will see that our understanding of what was happening; changed over time, was not always clear, and was full of dread and hope.
At the end there are photographs of the fire and Range which were not published in the Black Range Rag.
This document is available as one document, or because of its size, as
several. See the Black Range Rag for details.
The Silver Fire Blog
During the summer of 2013, the Silver Fire burned much of the Black Range, or at least that is what we thought at the time. We worried, we helped however we could, but mostly we turned our faces to the Black Range and watched.
It was especially traumatic for the people of Kingston, the fire was at their doorsteps, they were evacuated, they worried more, their gaze was not always at the crest of the Black Range. Their gaze was often toward Kingston.
During that time, the Black Range Rag carried a special blog: “The Silver Fire Blog” - some how a title that was less precise did not feel good in the stomach, it was not a time for catchy titles. The blog was one of several sources which the people of the Black Range were able to use to keep informed about the status of the fire.
The Initial Post
On June 14, 2013 The Black Range Rag first noted the fire in a post by Harley Shaw on a different topic. At first it was not clear that the fire was going to be anything out of the ordinary. A lightening strike, a fire, quickly suppressed was certainly the scenario of the first couple of days. By the 14th things had changed.
This post was submitted prior to the start of the Silver Fire. The photographs of that fire are from June 9 and 10. As of this posting the fire has consumed 19,000 acres of forest.
In Memory of the Granite Mountain Hotshots
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