Fire!

I'm sure by now you guys have probably heard  about all the forest fires happening in Colorado right now. Or maybe not? Maybe it's not as big of a deal anywhere else, but here it's all anyone is talking about. All I have to do is look out my window towards the mountains and see hazy smoke coming up over them. Some days I can smell it- and we are in Denver, so pretty far away!

When we were driving back from iowa a couple of weeks ago we were about 30 min outside of Denver and thought the car smelled funny, rolled down the window and smelled smoke! We had a moment of panic before we realized it was the forest fires making their way closer and not our car on fire. 

Anyway, on Saturday we made our way up to Estes Park for the yearly Midsummer festival. I grew up in Sweden celebrating Midsummer every year and was thrilled when I discovered a few years ago that Estes Park celebrates it every year! 

Out of the past 5 summer we have been three times, the other two times we were in Sweden celebrating the real deal!

We headed up there early because I refuse to miss the opening ceremonies- seeing the Swedish flag raised while hearing the national anthem always gives me goose bumps.  This is always followed by the dancing around the flower decorated pole. 

Around 12 we were dancing around the pole (Not to be confused with pole dancing) when Drew noticed smoke clouds just west of us. We were watching it for a few minutes and the smoke got darker, bigger and looked like it was coming closer. Every 5 minutes fire trucks would rush past us, sirens blaring. 

We had planned on going to the lake and letting Jasper splash around for a few minutes, but we decided to get out of there. There's really only one way down the mountain from there, and one lane and we didn't want to get stuck in some mad rush to get out of there should the fire get closer. 

So glad we made that decision. On our way down the mountain we passed probably ten firetrucks trying to get up to Estes from nearby towns, they needed all the help they could get. 

After we got home and turned on the news we started hearing just how bad it got up there! We were right, it Was a new fire and it Was super close to where we were. Just a couple of miles. And it was windy. Luckily the fire got contained pretty quickly, but twenty something homes were lost. So incredibly sad. 

 Picture I took while jasper was dancing. Notice the smoke cloud right behind?

As we were leaving.


And here's a pictures from the news website just 30 min after we left tops.

The last few weeks has been out of control hot (103-105) every day and it's absolutely unbearable.We are in desperate need of some rain and cooler temperature here as our state is literally on fire so send prayers!