Speedy Fire Forces Evacuation at Mesa Verde Park
Authorities closed Mesa Verde National Park and ordered 1,000 day campers and visitors to leave Thursday after a wildfire raced through tinder-dry brush, growing from 50 acres to 500 acres in about three hours.
No injuries were reported and the park’s Pueblo Indian ruins were not damaged, said fire management officer Mark Lauer. One structure, believed to be a residence, was threatened.
Park officials feared the fire might cross the park’s only road and trap visitors, but it had not done so by Thursday evening. Some visitors at a lodge about 10 miles from the fire and employees who live in the park were allowed to stay.
Erratic winds caused by thunderstorms and high temperatures hampered the 300 firefighters who battled flames in steep, rugged terrain and rolling plateaus.
Mesa Verde, about 35 miles west of Durango in southwestern Colorado, is laden with cliff dwellings of the ancestral Pueblos. It was established by Congress on June 29, 1906, as the first cultural park set aside in the National Park system.
An August 1996 fire scorched a tenth of the park and revealed more than 400 previously unknown archeological sites that had been covered by dense forest. Those sites remain off-limits to the public in the park’s back-country area.
Officials suspect lightning started Thursday’s fire.
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