JoAnne and I were on a trip to Cripple Creek Colorado on Saturday, 23 June, 2012 with her work folks.  Because she belongs to a group that pays money over the year for a Christmas Party, a Cripple Creek trip and a picnic in the summer, we went.

Around 1230 local time in Colorado we started hearing rumors of a "fire" near Colorado Springs. At about 1315 my daughter sent a telephone text message saying something about a fire in "Waldo Canyon" and the possibility of  highway 24 being closed.  As a ham radio operator connected with the Amateur Radio service (ARES) I contacted the local police and fire to find out what was up.

To make a very LONG story short a fire was found to be burning and by the time we heard about it, the fire was close to 100 acres.  The road wasn't yet closed.  By the time we passed the location where the fire was supposed to be located, it was raging on the mountain top, we saw flames that were pretty damned high and a helicopter doing an airdrop.

On Sunday the fire got bigger.  On Tuesday evening the fire had been 5% contained.  At 1600 local we had a press conference and about the end of the conference the fire exploded with 65 mile an hour winds running up the canyons.  It hit Mountain Shadows along the front range and wiped out a lot of houses.  Estimates at this time are from 100 to 300 homes.  Somewhere around 64,000 people over Saturday through Wednesday (today) have been displaced.

Amateur Radio has been called up and they can't get enough people to operate radios.  This fire has become the highest priority for Colorado and we have now well over 1000 fire fighters, thirteen aircraft hitting the fire, and we have no idea the number of trucks and other fire suppression units. 

At this point, NO LIVES have been lost.  Lots of homes are gone though.

And lo and behold, Obama will visit on Friday.  As far as I am concerned he can keep his ass home at the White House and deal with all the other crap he ought to be dealing with and just sign off on sending us money to this state.  (I think the state ought to stop sending money to the Feds, myself, but that's another story).

Colorado has been declared a disaster area.  There are somewhere between 10-13 fires burning right now. There were over 20 set in Teller County over a week (last week) and they were ARSON.  A few weeks back the Al Qaeda published a magazine telling their followers to "Set the US West on Fire".  Looks to me like they succeeded, and if not them, it was the bloody Earth Liberation Front.  Either way, they are terrorists and they better hope they never meet me and admit it.

Hundreds of people have lost their homes on the mountain side.  This has affected 1.5 million people in Colorado Springs and El Paso county, the Air Force Academy, and it is promising to be problematic for the people up the front range.  The fire is moving NORTHWARD and people in Monument have been requested to standby on evacuation.  Woodland Park on the West side of the county has had a mandatory evacuation.

The last few days have been hell for a lot of people in Colorado Springs.  Many of us believe this was a terrorist attack and the government is keeping that information quiet, because frankly they don't want the public to know the truth any more.  Think me a Conspiracy Theorist? You'd be way off.  There are news articles and evidence to support this.  Then again, I think it was either AQ or ELF.  Neither of them are beyond the pale.