A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible early. Partly cloudy skies. Low 47F. Winds W at 5 to 10 mph..

A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible early. Partly cloudy skies. Low 47F. Winds W at 5 to 10 mph.

Three members of Bravo team use chainsaws to cut through the timber felled by bulldozers cutting the indirect fire line above Fox Creek subdivision and Sangre de Cristo Drive. From left are Jayson Papenfus, Chuck James and Rick Renteria, part of an engine crew from Security.

Sangre de Cristo Drive resident Cal Hansen, left, stands with Bravo Task Force Leader Steven Thime on the back of his property, where bulldozer fire crews built a fire line where there was no road before. “We’re cleaning it up and will put in gates if he wants us to,” said Thime.

The Bravo “swamp” team works along the bulldozer lines created to protect the community below, pulling the brush and trees out to the new road, to be chipped and returned to the land. The engine crews that make up the team hail from South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa and Colorado.

The Bravo three-man chipper crew runs a giant chipping machine that turns trees and brush into material that will decompose quickly into the ground.

Three members of Bravo team use chainsaws to cut through the timber felled by bulldozers cutting the indirect fire line above Fox Creek subdivision and Sangre de Cristo Drive. From left are Jayson Papenfus, Chuck James and Rick Renteria, part of an engine crew from Security.

Sangre de Cristo Drive resident Cal Hansen, left, stands with Bravo Task Force Leader Steven Thime on the back of his property, where bulldozer fire crews built a fire line where there was no road before. “We’re cleaning it up and will put in gates if he wants us to,” said Thime.

The Bravo “swamp” team works along the bulldozer lines created to protect the community below, pulling the brush and trees out to the new road, to be chipped and returned to the land. The engine crews that make up the team hail from South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa and Colorado.

The Bravo three-man chipper crew runs a giant chipping machine that turns trees and brush into material that will decompose quickly into the ground.

With 45 percent containment announced Wednesday, the Hayden Pass Fire firefighting operation is beginning to shift gears.

While the crews on the lines are still Type 2 – identified by the operational level of fire they are fighting – now their task is not to fight the fire. It is to begin the task of returning the areas protected from burning to something approaching normal.

“Our goal is to get this area cleared up by Friday,” said Steve Thime, Bravo team task force leader in charge of chipping crews working above the Fox Creek subdivision and Sangre de Cristo Drive. “We don’t leave things looking bad. We fix what we cut or take down. We try to leave it better.”

The 10-man brush prep crew, most of which hailed from Nebraska and the Black Hills of South Dakota, was working Wednesday with a giant chipper in the process of clearing the areas along the winding dozer lines – which created a fire road above and along Charles “Cal” Hansen’s back lot where there was none before. Their task: to chip the brush and trees that were bulldozed to create a wide fire line into biodegradable materials.

“The smaller it is, the quicker it’s going to break down into organic materials, said Cameron Eck, a public information officer who came from Idaho to work the fire. “This group isn’t going to leave piles of brush and trees – they’re going to try as much as possible to return it to a natural state.”

Another three-man crew from Security, Jayson Papenfus, Chuck James and Rick Renteria, was chainsawing downed trees into sections that could be hauled out.

“It’s closer to home, but the work doesn’t change,” said Papenfus.

“Fire is fire,” added Renteria. “The terrain doesn’t matter to us. We’ve still got to get the job done.”

Most of the crews arrived at the fire July 11, the day the fire blew up, and have been on the lines since that time, not leaving the fire area. The area in which they were working had been cleared but not burned back.

“With such a solid bulldozer line, we made the decision not to burn back this area,” said Thime. “We try hard not to do any more damage than necessary to protect homeowners from the fire.

“Our job now is to make things right again – fix the fences that we had to take down, clean up the dozer piles, remove our sprinklers and hoses from the protective rings around the houses.”

While the giant chipper roared, Cal Hansen, in his 80s, stood leaning on his cane watching the crew work. The crew has asked him if he’d like gates put up on the road that materialized along the edge of his land. They’re already cutting and piling the large logs for Hansen, who plans to use them to heat his house this winter.

“We evacuated as soon as they came to tell us to go,” said Hansen. “Boy, I tell you, it’s good to be back. There’s no place like home. And these fellows,” he motioned around him to the work crews, “they’re just wonderful. They saved my home.”

The Bravo team that Thime leads dropped into the area less than 24 hours after the fire blew up.

“We’ve been based at drop point 10 since the beginning,” said Thime. “First it was just a drop point, then a helispot (for helicopter landings) camp, then a safe site, and now it’s a spike camp,” said Thime. “So we’ve been in the midst of this. And if we can make things better for these homeowners – it’s all about them.”

The Hayden Pass Fire is not the first, nor will it be the last for the fire crews.

“I figure this is my 10th fire this season so far,” said Cassandra Garcia, who hails from a Black Hills engine team. “Our team has fought at, I think, 10 fires this year. This is what we do.”

While hotshot teams are still working the fire hot spots, come Friday, the BAER crews arrive to begin assessment of fire damage, which signals a major shift in the action. The incident management team will move from Type 2 back to Type 3. The action will shift from fighting the fire to assessing the impact on the terrain and community.

The BAER acronym stands for Burn Area Emergency Response. This team’s role is to assess the fire’s impacts on the terrain, the forests, the watersheds and on private property and help the community recover.

The fire has burned 16,414 acres. Some 748 firefighters and support crews are still on the lines. Total cost of the fire to date has been $6.7 million. It is expected the fire will continue to burn into the wilderness areas until snowfall in October, Jay Esperance, incident commander said.

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