Here’s some geeky map stuff. Sue and I did a hike recently through some wildfire burn area. I had thought it was part of the Hayman fire, but I did some research and it was the Buffalo Creek fire area.
I put together a Google Earth map of the wildfire burn areas in the Pike National Forest…at least the ones I can remember happening over the last 17 years since I moved to Colorado. I am sure I missed a few.
I drew the boundaries of each fire using embedded images that I found from a Google search. I was quite surprised to see how much burn area there is in the Pike National forest. Here’s a screenshot above. The embedded wildfire images are hidden (0% transparent), but present in the Google Earth file I used. I embedded an image of the Pike National Forest and increased the transparency in this image (in green) so you can see how much area of this national forest area has been torched by wildfires, relative to the national forest boundaries. And most of the acreage burned is focused closer to the front range.
In total these 4 fires amount to about 180,000 acres, with Hayman at about 138,000 acres. Clearly, the Hayman fire makes up for most of this. Again, I am sure I am missing some fires, but these are the ones I could remember.
