Colorado Blaze Traps, Kills 13 Firefighters : Inferno: Three federal ‘smoke jumpers’ remain missing; three others are injured near Glenwood Springs.

Trapped by a surging wall of flames, 13 federal firefighters were killed and three others were missing late Wednesday while battling a swift-moving forest fire near Glenwood Springs, about 180 miles west of here, authorities said.

The blaze also injured three firefighters among the team of 50 “smoke jumpers,” a crew of specially trained U.S. Bureau of Land Management firefighters who were airlifted to the fire lines on Storm King Mountain earlier in the day.

By late Wednesday night, more than 60 homes had been evacuated as the fire spread eastward, engulfing more than 2,000 acres and threatening the town of 6,000 people, Garfield County officials said.

The fire, sparked by lightning on July 3 in a grove of trees, burned slowly until it was fanned by hot, dry winds gusting to more than 30 m.p.h. Wednesday afternoon. What had been a relatively small blaze, fought only by hand crews, suddenly turned on the firefighters.

Garfield County Undersheriff Levy Burris said the firefighters were killed when flames crested a steep ridge and “just exploded over their positions.”

Burris said the firefighters who died were all killed at an elevation of about 7,000 feet. He said the terrain left them with no place to run to escape the fire. Kathy Voth, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Land Management said the smoke jumpers--all of them specially trained to parachute into a hot fire area and clear brush with shovels and chain saws--had been given fireproof blankets to shield them in the event of a flare-up.

“This situation is extremely hard on everybody,” Burris said, adding that this was the worst fire in terms of fatalities in recent memory in the Western Slope region.

“We’ve got mental health and counseling services available,” he said. “A lot of the guys here knew these crews--they’ve worked different fires together.”

The injured firefighters were taken to Valley View Hospital in Glenwood Springs, where one man remain in guarded condition with second-degree burns on his back, arms and hands. Another firefighter in her 20s was admitted for treatment of smoke inhalation. The third firefighter was released after treatment for minor burns on his back, a hospital nursing supervisor said.

A special BLM emergency recovery team was airlifted into the mountainous burned region late Wednesday to search for the missing, Burris said. Meanwhile, more than 100 firefighters from agencies throughout the Western Slope region battled the wind-whipped flames, which had swept through a six-mile canyon area just north of Interstate 70 at an estimated 100 feet per minute.

To accommodate the evacuees, an emergency shelter was opened at the Glenwood Springs Middle School, but most people were choosing instead to stay with relatives or at local hotels and motels that had opened their doors to those forced out of their homes by the flames, said Greg Allen, who works for the Aspen Skiing Co. and volunteered to run the shelter.

Chuck Johnson, a retired forester, stood in the driveway of his home and watched the flames on the ridge less than half a mile away.

“This stuff is dynamite with all that dry resin in it,” he said of the trees.

Some homeowners used garden hoses and shovels to keep back the fire as crews hosed down trees and ground cover.

Allen said smoke was so heavy from the blaze that it could be seen 40 miles to the south in Aspen.

“It’s a very tragic situation,” Allen said. “Everyone is kind of numb. We can’t believe this has happened. We’ve had so many fires in the area that all the fighters were working them and there was no manpower left for this one.”

County sheriff’s officials said they had been unable to commandeer aircraft to drop chemical retardant or water on the blaze until Wednesday because of the much larger fires that were raging throughout Colorado.

Much of the terrain devastated in the Glenwood Springs fire is inaccessible by land, officials said.

Once control was established over forest fires in neighboring Paonia, about 30 miles west of Aspen, additional fire crews, slurry bombers, helicopters and other aircraft were sent to the Glenwood area, sheriff’s communications supervisor Joanne Benson said.

Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt canceled a trip to Idaho and planned to go to Glenwood Springs today, said Jennifer Jones, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Land Management at the agency’s headquarters in Boise, Ida.

Sahagun is a Times staff writer and Lindgren is a special correspondent.