As wildfires burn across Colorado, they threaten not only the homes of the people who live in their paths, but also the remnants of those who came before them, from pioneers and miners to the Ute Indians who called the mountains home before European settlers arrived.
In the Hayman fire, archaeologists fear that the 1870s Custer mining cabin south of Cheesman Lake on the South Platte River was destroyed, along with a stand of “medicine trees” once used for food or medicine by the Utes. Both sites were considered eligible for the National Register of Historic Places.
The fire also might threaten the historic Manitou Experimental Forest headquarters, a Depression-era sandstone lodge and outbuildings built by the Civilian Conservation Corps and still used by the U.S. Forest Service.
In the Coal Seam fire near Glenwood Springs, officials said a historic coal camp seems to have been miraculously spared.
At both blazes, archaeologists are trying to determine what has been lost, what may be threatened and what can be saved.
Officials are hoping that despite the Hayman fire’s massive scale, many pieces of history have been left untouched.
“From what I’m seeing by looking at the maps and watching the news, it looks like we’ve escaped as far as National Register properties are concerned,” said Dale Heckendorn, National Register coordinator for the State Archaeological Society. Still, he said, some old cattle ranches and tourist cabins remained threatened.
Flames aren’t the only threat. Efforts to plant trees and control mudslides could also cover up or damage relics. In the Flat Tops, for example, Ute artifacts are all but invisible to firefighters.
“We’re concerned that, say they start putting up ‘dozers in that area,” said Andrea Brogan, a Forest Service archaeologist working with the Coal Seam fire team. “We’re definitely going to be right there … working hand in hand with those guys” to save artifacts.
The Pike and White River national forests were once home to the Utes, and signs of their passage remain: wooden burial platforms; cliffside eagle traps, where they hid to snatch the birds from perches; and wickiups, lightweight domed homes of bent juniper, lodgepole and willow branches.
“We’ve probably lost lots of those over the decades as forests burn,” said assistant state archaeologist Kevin Black, “but we’d like to save the ones we know about.”
Medicine trees also exist in both forests – lodgepole pines whose bark the Utes peeled back to eat the underside. Even stone arrowheads and knives and the rock shavings left behind could be damaged if flames are hot enough.
“Areas burned over in the woods many times over thousands of years,” said White River archaeologist Bill Kight, “and those were generally low-intensity fires. But it seems like we’re in a cycle of high-intensity fires.”
The fossils at Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument have survived 24 million years of fires and floods, but they could also be threatened by the Hayman fire. Superintendent Jean Rodeck said the fossil collection, stored in a historic 1950s A-frame cabin, could be damaged if exposed to searing heat. Fire could also damage the dozen petrified stumps outside.
The good news for archaeologists is that while fire may destroy historic relics, it may uncover others. That was the case two years ago with the Mesa Verde fires.
