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Burn Scars: A Memoir of the Land and Its Loss
An honest and vulnerable meditation on the trauma of life in contemporary Colorado, put to the page with uncommon grace and insight. Prijatel is a compassionate guide in exploring that chaotic time. Most important, she offers hope for recovery and resilience. Laura Pritchett, Author, Sky Bridge, winner of the WILLA Award A tiny cabin in …
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Burn Scars: A Memoir of the Land and Its Loss
Journalist Patricia Prijatel and her family built a tiny cabin in a remote Colorado mountain valley where they embraced the silent, the wild, and the beautiful—until June 2013 and the East Peak Fire. Their cabin survived, but their woodlands became a burn-scarred landscape of splintered trunks and blackened branches. After the fire, the ruin of …
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Burn Scars: Choose a Title
WE HAVE A WINNER! CHECK OUT THE PUBLISHED BOOK ON AMAZON. Can you help me choose the best title and subtitle for my upcoming memoir on the aftermath of a wildfire? The titles are all illustrated below, but I am not married to any design or photograph at this point. To vote, just leave the …
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Open Air Office
When you live in a mountain valley, you sometimes lose cell service in your cabin. What to do? Put your computer in a backpack and climb up to the top of a foothill to do your work by the outbuildings.
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The Lungs of Our Land
President Franklin Roosevelt called forests the “lungs of our land, purifying the air and giving fresh strength to our people.” Forests absorb potentially dangerous carbon dioxide while producing healthy oxygen. They trap dust, ash, pollen, and smoke, keeping them out of the air and our lungs. According to American Forests, a single tree can produce …
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What Can I Do? A Personal Response to Climate Change in Ten Essential Steps
On June 27, 2018, the Spring Fire in southern Colorado was started by a man grilling meat in an outdoor pit. Within two weeks, it had become the state’s second largest fire in history, burning more than 108,000 acres. The fire was both a natural and an unnatural disaster. Wildfires have always been a fixture …
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A Hawk’s View of the East Spanish Peak
Hawks and other raptors eventually returned after the fire. This guy settled on a large scrub oak, with the grey and burned face of the East Spanish Peak in the background. The photo was taken in 2016, three years after the fire.
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Our Friendly Little Place
My mantra when we were building was, “It’s just a mountain cabin.” So, pretty much, it’s just a mountain cabin, but a beautiful welcoming home and I truly love it. The housing appraiser called it a “friendly little place” and my sister Phyllis says it reminds her of a dollhouse. It’s a tiny charmer, built …
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Some burned forests aren’t coming back
A third of the recently burned forests in the American West will never regenerate, according to research led by Colorado State University foresters and published in the journal Ecology Letters. “In many places, forests are not coming back after fires,” says Camille Stevens-Rumann, assistant professor in the Department of Forest and Rangeland Stewardship at CSU. When forestry …
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The Mountain’s Dance of the Clouds
The view of southern Colorado’s East Spanish Peak from our cabin is mesmerizing, especially when the mountain dances with the clouds. Sometimes this is a prelude to rain, but often it is just the magic of nature. Watch it dance below.
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The Colorado Drought of June 2013
Colorado is a semi-arid climate, and droughts come and go with regularity. It is not unusual for the state to be in a severe drought in the summer and to return to normal in the fall and winter. Most of Colorado was in extreme drought in June 2013, the year of the East Peak Fire.
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Our Neighbor The Bear
We hear a shuffling, then see a movement in front of us, a shape on the boulder less than five feet from us. A furry foot is reaching from the rock to the deck. A big furry foot. Attached to a bear. Seems he’s planning on coming onto the deck. “Shoo!” I shout. Seriously, this …
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The East Peak Fire: What We Returned To
We returned to the mountain on July 8, 2013, three weeks after the start of the East Peak Fire that burned more than 13,000 acres of nearby forest. Ten homes and four outbuildings were lost, including our closest neighbors’ log home. Thanks to the firefighters, our cabin was fine. Our mountain was not. Wildfire …
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The East Peak Fire: Before and After
The forest in 2012 and after the East Peak Fire in 2013. The East Spanish Peak is in the background.
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Stop. Relax Here
Our cabin is roughly the size of a two-car garage—20X24-feet—with a deck across most of the front. The giant hollyhock took us about a decade to grow, using seeds from my sister Phyllis’s yard in Pueblo. It seems happy in it nest next to the rock our neighbor Harold hauled out of the meadow for …
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The East Peak Fire: June 19, 2013
Our neighbor Dave called to warn us about the fire at about 6 p.m. June 19, 2013. It began at the Spanish Peaks Scout Ranch, about a mile from our little handmade cabin south of Walsenburg, in the foothills of the East Spanish Peak. We had evacuated by 6:20. The fire was ultimately named …
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One of the Quietest Places on Earth
The Japanese have a concept called shinrin-yoku, roughly translated as forest bathing. It originated in 1982 when the country’s forest agency began to encourage wellbeing to combat the threat of suicide in Japan, which at that time was the highest in the world. The idea is to walk deliberately and slowly in the woods, observing, …
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3 a.m. in Postojna
It’s 2 a.m. and I am working at a hotel desk in Postojna, Slovenia. I am a college professor from Iowa and I know only halting Slovene, but should anybody need help at this hour, I have all the vocabulary I might need: ne vem and ne razumem—I don’t know and I don’t understand. Jure, the regular desk …
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We’re Not Telling the Full Story of Natural Disasters
PHOTO: Southern Colorado’s East Spanish Peak four years after the East Peak Fire I had just come back from a discouraging walk, full of reminders of the beauty we lost in a forest fire four years ago, and I sat down with my tea to browse Facebook. The photo of the clear ocean off Key …
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Shaking Our Fists At Elemental Forces
This fearfulness is new. Once a sunset was just a sunset, a raincloud a blessed sign of needed moisture. Now, though, our refuge, our place of peace has an overlay of danger. My confidence in the steadfastness of the mountain and its valleys and ridges has been shaken. Three years ago was the big event, the …
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Sunset on the East Spanish Peak
The view from our cabin deck. The top of the ridge in the left and center of the photo was burned—you can see the skeletons of remaining trees. The meadow was protected, both by the path of the East Peak Fire and by fire fighters, so many of the centuries-old trees there remain. The clouds, while …
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Giant Evergreens from Tiny Pinecones Grow
In the years after a fire, the remaining trees overproduce pinecones to help re-propagate the forest. This photo shows the road in front of our cabin. The trees next to the road were spared fire damage and have thrown off huge bounties of pinecones every year since the East Peak fire of 2013.
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Guillotine Winds
Winds as high as 90 mph again hit the East Spanish Peak last week. That’s hurricane level. Last year’s winds did this: topped off the trees that had been burned in the East Peak Fire of 2013. Most made it to the ground, but a few remain hanging like natural guillotines.
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Out of the Ashes
Out of the Ashes. Copyright Patricia Prijatel I posted this on Cure magazine’s gallery site and then realized I should actually share it here as well. I began painting this a couple of years ago, after a wildfire at our Colorado cabin. These are wallflowers, gorgeous, colorful little beauties that should make you feel better …
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Recovering in the mountains
We finally got to our Colorado cabin a couple of weeks ago. This is the meadow in front of the cabin. It’s a great place to recover. We had a forest fire here two years ago, so the land itself is recovering. We’re quite the pair.
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Sometimes Writers Just Need to Not Write
We’re often told we need to just keep on task, putting one word after another. At times, though, we’re better off walking away for a bit.
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A Prayer in Itself
This beautiful Vermont scene feels like a prayer to me—a thankful, hopeful moment with God. Sometimes we think prayer has to be formal. To me, just giving thanks for this and for all the beauty in our lives is the best prayer we can offer. PHOTO BY PAT: Warren, Vermont
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A mountain-sized wink
As many of you know, we have a little cabin in Colorado, at the base of the East Spanish Peak. Last winter, we took a flight from Des Moines to Albuquerque and I knew we would fly right over the mountain. But it was stormy and all I could see from the plane were clouds, …
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Changing Paths
Old paths are such comforts. Losing them feels like losing the coziness of an old friendship. Today we took a new path through the woods and got a bit lost. The familiar markers were gone and their comfort and clarity gone with them. That’s often the way with forging a trail—you get easily disoriented. But …
