I Spent Twelve Years Jumping Into Wildfires. The One That Came for My Own Ranch Gave Me Nine Minutes

The fire burned for eleven days.

It took the Henderson barn, two hundred acres of their pasture and every fence on the canyon road.

It took my hay barn, my equipment shed and every tree on the west ridge of my property.

It didn’t take my house.

When I finally got back up there, I understood why. The fire crews had dug a line around my house with bulldozers and set backfires to protect it. The crew boss was a young woman I’d trained at the smokejumper base nine years earlier.

“You taught us to protect the places people love, Colt,” she told me later. “We knew you loved that one.”

The insurance part came next, and it was its own kind of fire. My homeowners insurance had a wildfire exclusion I’d never noticed, because the company had quietly changed my policy when it renewed. I ended up with partial coverage through a state program for high-risk properties, a long fight with an adjuster and a disaster loan to rebuild the barns.

The Hendersons had it worse. Their insurance company dropped them entirely the month after the fire.

So I did what neighbors do out here. I hired a lawyer for both families. We filed an appeal together and won a settlement that paid for most of their barn and all of mine.

Last month, Tyler and I sat on the tailgate of my truck at the top of the ridge and watched the sun go down over the black hills.

There was green grass coming up through the ash already. Little lodgepole pines, no taller than my boot.

“Were you scared?” Tyler asked. “In the barn?”

“Terrified,” I said.

He looked at me, surprised.

“Being brave doesn’t mean you’re not scared,” I told him. “It means you go back for the horses anyway.”

He’s fifteen now. He says he wants to be a smokejumper.

His mother hasn’t forgiven me for that part yet.

What would you have done if that call came for you? Tell me in the comments.