Where Are the Jolly Lumberjacks When You Need Them?

  

Video from Colorado Parks and Wildlife. 

A log jam on the Arkansas River -- probably the first time I have heard of one of those -- is frustrating boaters in the Brown's Canyon section:

The blockage, below Hecla Junction and downstream of the Seidel’s Suckhole rapid in lower Browns Canyon, stretches for 100 yards, and anyone using the river is required to portage around it. Nobody should try to cross the debris raft or try to remove parts of it, state officials said, as the floating wood is unstable. 

You never know, maybe some of those young guys who throw axes in taverns might equip themselves with caulk boots, buffalo plaid shirts, and peavey poles, and try to clear it. Probably best to leave the job to the spring run-off though.

The source of these logs is not mentioned. No large fires have burned above that spot recently. I am open to suggestions,

Now if you want a real big log jam, try the "Red River Raft." Miles long, many years old.

The raft removal project, initiated by Captain Henry Shreve in the 1830s, opened new territory in Louisiana and East Texas for settlement and agriculture. Its engineering audacity inadvertently reshaped the geology of the Lower Mississippi River watershed.

The "Red River Raft" came to the US government's attention in 1806 when it was blocked the upstream  progress of the Freeman and Custis "Red-River Arkansas" expedition. It was centuries old and nearly a hundred miles long. 

The Louisiana Purchase, more or less (Wikipedia)

This expedition was a less-known parallel to Lewis and Clark's trip up the Missouri River and to the Pacific Ocean, and Zebulon Pike's probe up the Arkansas River.

All three expeditions were devoted to exploring our 1803 Louisiana Purchase from France, which supposedly covered all French land claims in the Mississippi drainage.  

The problem was that Spain claimed some of that territory too. In fact, President Jefferson thought that a frontier war with Spain was a distinct possibility.

The Spanish tried twice to intercept Lewis and Clark on the prairie but were too late both times. As is well-known, they did shadow the Pike expedition along the Arkansas and captured his little group (who probably were in fact spying as well as exploring) in the San Luis Valley of Colorado in February 1807. 

The Freeman-Custis Expedition, the most purely scientific, was an easy snatch for the Spanish. As Dan Flores writes,

The Spaniards had no intention, then, of letting the Americans treat with Comanches and groups like that, and so for their own reasons, the Spaniards were determined to make every effort to block these American expeditions. . . . the Red River of the South was easily accessible to those Spanish troops, and so Spain, in the spring of eighteen-six, began to put together a plan for stopping this Southwestern Expedition. It decided—the Spanish government in Madrid, and in Cuba—decided to, first of all, alert the authorities in New Mexico and in Texas of the impending American expedition. 

Collecting specimens and mapping, the expedition (with Caddo Indian guides) had to pole their boats through streams and swamps to bypass the Great Raft. But then on July 29, 1806, on roughly today's Arkansas-Oklahoma border, they encountered about two hundred Spanish cavalry troopers. Oops.

No blood was shed. The Spanish commander, Capt. Francisco Viana, was firm with them.

He said, my instructions are, you cannot proceed beyond this point. He said, this is as far as the French ever established settlements and posts the Americans had passed an old French post about two days before. And the Spaniards had set up their blockade of the river just about fifty miles upstream of that old French post, and Viana said, this is as far as the French ever proceeded on the Red River, the country above this is ours, and you are going to have to retrograde to American territory. 

Thomas Freeman, the expedition leader, was a civil engineer, not a soldier like Zebulon Pike or Meriwether Lewis, although some American soldiers were present for protection. This was not a military probe of hostile territory. President Jefferson had given Freeman written instructions that if they encountered hostile forces, they should turn around. And so they did.

Flores has several reasons why no one remembers the Freeman-Custis Expedition:

This expedition, blocked by the Spanish army in 1806, simply doesn’t play into the idea of American expansion across the Southwest. Now, it may be, in our own time, as the history of the West becomes more multicultural, that Hispanic-Americans in the Southwest will look upon the outcome of this expedition as sort of one of their victories in blocking American imperialist expansion into the West. But, I think in terms of American national history, this is one of those events that can’t be fitted comfortably into the story of a successful kind of migration of the American people across the continent.

Another thing that makes it an invisible expedition to a certain extent is that the scientific results were relatively meagre, and they were undermined really by how the expedition was reported by the Jefferson administration. The map that resulted from the expedition was a remarkable map, but it didn’t really explore very far into territory that the French hadn’t already explored. So it didn’t provide much in the way of new geographical discoveries.

Peter Custis’s work, on the other hand, I think, had things played out a little differently, might have made the expedition very well known and famous, but the way, in fact, Custis’s work did pan out, it made the expedition even more ill-starred. What happened was that Custis wrote descriptions of more than two hundred and sixty-seven plants and animals that he described on this four-and-a-half-month expedition. It’s a remarkable ecological kind of time machine into what the Red River was like in 1806.

But the the publication was fumbled: you can read more here.

Your Porch Wants to Burn

The projecting beam caught fire, which was luckily caught by
firefighters working in the area. 

As the Aspen Acres Fire moved toward them in early July 2026, the owners of this historic ranch (clear back to Charles Goodnight, in a way) cut a fire line through the surrounding pines with a skid steer. 

Later they got permission to come back for a few hours, while the area was officially evacuated, to look for some missing bison. Another volunteer firefighter and I were tasked with escorting them — there was still some live fire in the area — and making sure that they left on time.  

They cruised on ATVs here and there. We parked our "brush truck" and walked around nearby, noting what had burned (two outbuildings, a Kawasaki Mule) and what survived.  

The fire line had held, and that was good. But wind-blown embers had flown up under the back porch roof and lodged there, setting a large beam on fire. Had not a Forest Service wildland engine come by when it did, fire could have taken the whole roof and then the house.

We love our porches, but they are fire traps. 

Horseshoe Lodge, 1950s (?)

A few valleys away, the historic Horseshoe Lodge (12,294 sq. ft.) stood in Pueblo Mountain Park just above the little town of Beulah. The park was created in the 1920s as a refuge from Pueblo heat, and the lodge, originally called Mountain View Lodge, was built for lodging, dining, and event space in the 1930s. Its Pueblo Revival style might be considered to be Southwestern "Parkitecture," with adobe walls and heavy pine beams.

Decrepit by the 1970s, it was heavily renovated and upgraded in the 2000s. The park managers were fire-conscious too, and over recent years thinned trees and removed underground in the central parts of the park.

Aerial view of Horseshoe Lodge after the fire, published on Facebook 
by Pueblo photographer John Wark. Click to enlarge.

On its first day, the wind-driven fire rolled downhill from the west — the top of the photograph — toward the lodge. It looks to me like embers flew into the porch timbers, setting the roof and then the interiors ablaze, which reflected heat back into the trees in front of the lodge. There no trail of charring on the ground. Only the adobe walls were left.

If you want a fire-resistant house, build with masonry, metal, or stucco, and have no protrusions for fire to snatch. But who wants that?  

I am as guilty as anyone. My house is basically a rectangular box, set into a hillside along its long edge. 

What makes it more than a box is the covered porch taking up most of the downhill long edge. M. and I eat out there, weather permitting. There are chairs for lounging and a desk/work table. And the space underneath the porch, where you can walk in, is always where both junk and necessary stuff collect.

We left in too much of a hurry. I should have cleared it, but I did not. I came home to find the chairs, tables, firewood box, garden supplies, wheelbarrow, and everything else set helter-skelter out in the grass. I totally understand: that was basic structure protection. Even with the metal roof, that underneath space is a fire-catcher. All you can do is prepare for it, I suppose.

Or there is this approach:

A historic cabin in North Cascades National Park is wrapped with foil
to protect it during the 2026 Border 2 Fire (National Park Service).

After the Aspen Acres Fire: The House is Still Here, So Is the Blog

 

Having driven out of the hills and onto the prairie, 
we stopped for a short break before going on to Pueblo.

Where did this blog go? No, I have not quit blogging, but I was a little distracted during the month of July. 

At around 6 a.m. on June 29, a tree (it is believed) was blown into a power line near the little resort community of San Isabel, on the Custer-Pueblo county line. (Local residents had already put out a couple of little fires previously in that general area.)

That spot is in the Rye Fire Protection District. Chief Gallegos and his volunteers got the call. It's uphill and twisty all the way—maybe 15-minutes plus in a car, but longer in a fire truck with a full tank of water.;

The weather had been hot, dry, and breezy. The fire was spreading in conifers and aspens. The Rye crew called for "mutual aid" from the nearest department  — the even-smaller Beulah fire department, with about 20 volunteers.

Beulah responded. The big guns of what would become the Aspen Acres Fire of 2026 (102,000 acres) were pointed right at their faces.

 

The Beulah Valley in winter.

"The Aspen Acres Fire experienced explosive growth due to record‑low fuel moisture levels and persistent red flag conditions during the week preceding and the days following ignition. The fire was driven by sustained winds over 40 mph, with gusts estimated up to 100 mph. It initially impacted the community of Beulah, Colorado, and later affected additional communities and areas across Custer, Pueblo, Fremont, and Huerfano counties."

Between the little town and the fire, a couple were car-camping off CO 78 (a.k.a. Twelve-Mile Road) on national forest land. The wife later commented on Facebook that had they not heard Beulah's sirens out on that road, they would have had no idea (at 6:30 a.m.) that the fire was burning and coming right at them.

A home on Pine Drive in Beulah. 
I do not know if it survived. (Redfin.)

Beulah is "nestled in the pines," as a real-estate agent would say. For more than a century it has been a community of summer homes and parks for those fleeing prairie heat, a retirement community, and a home to people who commute down to Pueblo for their jobs. The elementary school focuses on the natural sciences.  Every December there is a community Yule Log hunt which is actually fun to watch.

M. and I go there occasionally for a change of scene, and I would look at the comfortable, even fancy, homes under the tall ponderosa pines, and think, "This is lovely and gracious and oh gawd, if it ever burns. It's the textbook example of 'wildland-urban interface." (WUI, pronounced "whooie.")

The outnumbered fire fighters were trying to be in six places at once. My even smaller department had not been summoned, but help was streaming in from the city and county of Pueblo. I kept the radio on though, eavesdropping as they called for more water, ordered evacuations, and dashed from place to place. I heard someone say, "Down power lines. Venting propane tanks, Everything they taught you in WUI class — and more."

We thought we were safe, but the wind had other ideas,  By July 1, we were on "pre-evac" in the morning. "Maybe I should air up the tires on the pop-up trailer," I thought. By late afternoon, it was "GO!" 

 This was Evacuation Number 4? Or 5? But the others were always for a night or two or three. This one was for two weeks. For some people in Rye, it was three weeks.  

If you watch this Facebook video, it's Beulah firefighters discussing how they prepared for such a fire and what they did when it hit. Yes, some lost their own homes.

Since Facebook is not always fun, here are some local TV videos from the beginning of the fire:

 

 

After the fire, there was monsoonal flooding, of course. CO 78 re-opened only two days ago (Aug. 7). Some time I will go have a look, but I hate to be a disaster tourist, even though I am a "local" in the broader sense. Could go patronize the coffeehouse and/or the little restaurant; they survived.