A Wildfire Jumped the Ridge Above Their Campsite. With the Road Gone, Dad Pushed the Family Into the Lake
A wildfire canoe escape in the Colorado Rockies: fire jumped the ridge, the road out was gone, and a family pushed off in a tiny canoe. Was it far enough?
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One minute, the kids were roasting marshmallows by the campfire. The next, the entire ridge behind their campground erupted in flames. Chris, a dad from Denver, was filming his family at a lakeside campsite in the Colorado Rockies when a wildfire crowned over the top of the mountain and came racing down through the pines. Within seconds, the only road out was gone. So he did the one thing left: he pushed his wife and kids into a tiny canoe and shoved off into a lake glowing orange with fire.
The Perfect Last Night of Summer
Chris, 39, and his wife Amy, 37, had been taking their kids, Ava, 10, and Ben, 7, camping at the same small mountain lake every August for five years. It’s a quiet campground at the end of a long gravel road, with about twenty sites tucked between the pines and the water.
There had been fire warnings in the county that week, but the nearest reported fire was more than fifteen miles away, on the other side of a mountain range. Rangers had said the campground was safe.
That evening, the sky had turned a strange dusky orange. Chris thought it was just smoke haze making a pretty sunset. He started filming in his green fleece and headlamp because the kids were laughing over burnt marshmallows.
“The Road’s Gone!”
At the start of his video, the ridge behind the campground suddenly explodes. Flames crown over the top, leaping from treetop to treetop, and race down the hillside faster than anyone could run. Strong evening winds had pushed the distant fire over the mountain in less than an hour.
Embers begin to rain down on the tents like glowing snow. One tent starts to smoke. Amy, in a braid and puffy vest, grabs both kids. All around them, other campers are shouting and running for their cars.
Chris swings the camera toward the gravel road, the only way in or out. It has already vanished into a solid wall of smoke and flame. The cars that tried it are coming back, reversing, honking.
“The road’s gone! Chris, the road’s gone!” Amy screams.
Chris turns toward the lake. The water is glowing orange, reflecting the fire. He drags a canoe off the shore, the family scrambles in, and the camera catches the trees right behind them bursting into flame as he shoves off into the dark water. The clip ends.
Was the Water Far Enough?
The canoe wasn’t even theirs. It belonged to an older camper two sites down named Walt, a retired firefighter, who had chatted with Chris that afternoon. When the fire came over the ridge, Walt was the one who shouted, “Take my canoe! Get to the middle of the lake! Don’t stop!” He and several other campers waded into the shallows on the far side of a rocky point.
The lake is roughly half a mile across. Chris paddled as hard as he has ever done anything in his life. Behind them, the heat was so intense that he says it felt like standing in front of an open oven. Ben was coughing so hard he threw up over the side. Ava kept her face pressed against her mother’s vest.
About a hundred yards out, the heat eased slightly. Two hundred yards out, they could breathe. But the smoke was getting thicker, rolling down across the water, and burning embers were landing on the canoe.
Amy did something that Walt later said probably saved them. She soaked the kids’ fleece jackets in the lake and draped them over their heads and the kids’ faces, then used a plastic water bottle to splash the embers off the canoe as they landed.
Chris paddled to the very middle of the lake and stopped. There, the air was hot and smoky, but breathable, about four or five feet above the water. They lay as low in the canoe as they could.
A Night on the Water
For the next six hours, the family stayed in the middle of the lake and watched the entire shoreline burn. Their tent went up. Their car went up. The trees around the campground exploded one after another, sending showers of sparks hundreds of feet into the air.
Chris says the hardest part was not knowing about the others. He could hear people shouting from the rocky point but couldn’t see them through the smoke.
Ben eventually fell asleep, curled up between his parents. Ava asked, very quietly, whether God could see them through the smoke. Amy told her yes, and that he had sent them a canoe.
Around 2 a.m., the wind shifted and the fire moved away up the next valley. At dawn, a sheriff’s boat that had been launched from a fire department staging area across the lake came motoring through the haze, calling out over a loudspeaker. Chris waved a paddle in the air and couldn’t stop crying.
Everyone Made It
Every single person at that campground survived. Walt and eleven other campers had spent the night standing chest-deep in the water behind the rocky point, wet towels on their heads. Several were treated for smoke inhalation and minor burns. Walt had burns on both hands from swatting embers off a teenager’s hair.
When Chris found him at the staging area, the two men hugged for a long time. Chris tried to apologize for losing the canoe in the chaos. It had drifted off as the family climbed onto the sheriff’s boat.
Walt just laughed. “Son, that canoe has never done anything more useful in its life,” he said.
The fire burned more than 20,000 acres before crews contained it. The family lost their car, their camping gear and their favorite spot in Colorado. But two months later, Chris tracked down a canoe of the exact same model and color, drove it to Walt’s house, and left it in his driveway with a note taped to the seat: For the next family. Thank you for ours.
Would you have known to head for the water? Have you ever been caught near a wildfire? Share your story in the comments.
