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"   Published in the December 2012 issue Amy Cosper, whose home burned down. June 28, 2012; 5:00 p.m. We were on vacation in Santa Fe when we got a call from the lady who was boarding our horses. She said there was a backfire, and they were gonna go ahead and evacuate the horses \u2014 but, you know, it&amp;#039;s not too bad. About forty minutes later, we got a call from our contractor, and by that point he&amp;#039;s saying it&amp;#039;s a pretty serious situation. If we wanted him to grab a couple things for us, he would. I had him grab my computer, because it has everything on it. Probably twenty-five minutes later, we got a call from the Larimer County Sheriff&amp;#039;s Office telling us to evacuate all our things, but of course we couldn&amp;#039;t.  We started driving toward home and could smell the smoke a good four or five hours outside of Fort Collins. As we went north on I-25, the smell got stronger and stronger. It was staggering. Because we could look at the fire maps online and see where the fire lines were, we were hopeful that maybe there was some sort of act of God and our house had been missed. But by the time we got to Fort Collins, we pretty much knew it was gone. We found a place at a Marriott, but we spent most of our time at the shelter the Red Cross had set up, where all the firemen would come and give briefings and the Red Cross would pass out postdisaster tools like sifters and hazmat masks. Two weeks after the fire started, they called each little area of the canyon into a conference room. They had a giant piece of paper with addresses on it, and they went through and called out the addresses that were still standing. It was just this gripping anticipation and horror, standing there in that room watching my neighbors fall to their knees in tears. And our address wasn&amp;#039;t called. It was shocking. The physical reaction, you can&amp;#039;t even really control it. I just started shaking. It was probably three and a half weeks before they could secure the area so that it was safe for people to go back up. They had a very precise process in which people were lined up in their cars at the bottom of the canyon. At five o&amp;#039;clock, they let us go back in.  There was the smell of propane that I will never forget. It didn&amp;#039;t even smell like burning trees. It smelled like chemicals. It smelled toxic. Seeing our property for the first time, I literally fell to my knees in this pile of twisted metal and cried. The cry lasted for a good five minutes, then I kind of got up and looked around at the weirdness \u2014 at the way things change in heat. Pieces of glass that used to be windows. The twisted metal roof of our Infiniti. It was total destruction, a smoldering hole in the earth. There was nothing to pick up. The fire was so hot that even the ash had burned off. Our driveway was asphalt, and that served as a firebreak between us and the rest of the neighbors. We were the only house on the road that burned down. Our driveway probably saved a lot of houses below us.  \u2014As told to Matt Goulet "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a16748/colorado-wildfires-1212/>