“Go after what needs to happen next. One foot in front of the other. Just keep going and, and allow yourself time to rest, time to process the loss.””

Courtney Walsh

BOULDER COUNTY - Angie Busby wasn’t at home when the Calwood Fire started. She received an evacuation order, but couldn’t act on it. 

That’s because she was just up the road at the Cal-Wood Education Center, where she works as natural resources manager and volunteer coordinator. Also trained as a wildland firefighter, Busby spent three weeks helping with evacuations, combatting the blaze, and otherwise assisting the emergency crews.

“ I was there start to finish—since the original 911 [call] went in,” she recalls. “It was about a week before I could come back to the house. I drove by every day while I was working the fire.”

Busby’s house was, thankfully, unharmed. Cal-Wood Education Center was not so lucky. The fire, which began five years ago this week, burned over 10,000 acres in Boulder County, including half of the Center’s land near Jamestown. 

Founded in 1982, the Center had landscape and operations altered by the Calwood Fire in ways good and bad, Busby said. 

In some areas, “the soil burned so hot that the seed bank burned with it,” Busby said. “There's no current seed left.”  

In other areas, the clearing away of decades of growth allowed long-dormant wildflowers to thrive. “I've been at Cal-Wood for 18 years,” Busby noted, “and there's wild flowers that I've never seen before that showed up post-fire.”

Helped along by humans, “Nature's doing what nature does,” she said. “It's recovering.”

Recovery doesn’t come cheap: It will likely take 5 to 10 years and cost millions of dollars, according to information posted on the organization’s website. 

In the meantime, the nonprofit is making the best of what’s left behind. The burn area essentially became a “ fire education laboratory” for the school children Cal-Wood primarily serves, Busby elaborated, and a “fire training center” for first responders seeking chainsaw certification and taking some of their first firefighting classes.

“We have this 600-acre classroom that we normally didn't have pre-Calwood Fire,” she said. 

I spoke with Busby the same day a structural fire ravaged Nederland’s Caribou Village Shopping Center. We were set to talk about the Calwood Fire anniversary, but the recent destruction weighed heavy on the conversation.

Busby said the community resilience fostered in the wake of the blaze has lasted, years later. The number of volunteers at the Center doubled from pre-fire. 

“We had so many people ask ‘How can I help?’” she said—people who “are still helping me to this day.”

To the people of Nederland, she declared “your community is behind you.”

The Calwood Fire also taught Courtney Walsh to lean on her community. Walsh lost her home north of Boulder, just off US 36, to the fire, and suddenly found herself in a role she wasn’t used to.

“ We've always been the ones offering help to people,” Walsh said. “I've never really needed help, and so just to be able to receive the help at that time was really, really special.”

Walsh’s advice for the Nederland fire survivors is to prioritize their mental health and immediate needs. 

“Go after what needs to happen next,” she directed. “One foot in front of the other. Just keep going, and and allow yourself time to rest, time to process the loss.”

Learn more about Cal-Wood Education Center at calwood.org.