A wildfire in southern Colorado has burned 55,405 acres, destroyed more than 180 structures, forced entire communities to flee with whatever they could grab in minutes, and as of Thursday sits at exactly 0% contained. Zero. The Aspen Acres Fire is now the number one firefighting priority in the entire country, and there is no meaningful rain in the forecast.
A Fire That Just Keeps Getting Worse
The Aspen Acres Fire started Monday and has not slowed down for a single day. CBS News reports that strong, sustained winds pushed the fire to further growth throughout Thursday, chewing through Pueblo and Custer counties in a region that has no relief coming from the sky anytime soon.
The fire has already torn through the communities of Buelah, Rye, and San Isabel, with evacuations expanding both north and south on Wednesday. Southern Fremont County, sitting to the north of the fire's main push, has now been added to the pre-evacuation zone. That is not a small geographic footprint. This thing is spreading in multiple directions at once.
Officials confirmed at a Wednesday news conference that it is the country's top firefighting priority right now. Let that sink in. Of every wildfire burning anywhere in the United States at this moment, this is the one the federal government has decided needs the most resources. And it's still at zero percent containment.
What 'Pack What You Can' Actually Looks Like
Derick Collins got his evacuation call at 2:30 in the morning. He told CBS News he grabbed what he could, prioritized the expensive items, and got out. "You can't load everything," he said. "I mean, it's almost impossible to get everything out."
That is the brutal arithmetic of a fast-moving wildfire. You get a phone call in the middle of the night, you have maybe an hour, and you have to decide in real time which pieces of your life make the cut. Photo albums, medications, pets, irreplaceable documents, tools you've worked with for thirty years. You cannot take all of it. You just can't.
Collins ended up in Colorado City, watching the fire come around the ridge from a distance. "We get down here and see it coming around the ridge, so that's not good," he said. That is a man watching something he spent years building potentially disappear in real time, from a parking lot, because there is nothing else he can do.
180 Structures Gone, Homes, Ranches, and Businesses
More than 180 structures have been destroyed. The exact number of homes among those is still unknown, according to CBS News, which tells you something about the pace and scale of this thing. Investigators haven't even been able to fully assess what's been lost yet because the fire is still actively burning.
Collins put it plainly: "It's sad to see a lot of people, a lot of livelihoods out here, a lot of houses, a lot of businesses, ranches, farms. I mean, it's sad to see nothing you can do about it, except watch it go." Ranches and farms are not just homes. They are decades of work, equipment, livestock, land. These are not things you rebuild easily or quickly, if you rebuild them at all.
The fire is human-caused, according to investigators, who are still working to determine the specific circumstances of how it started. That detail will matter enormously once the legal and insurance reckoning begins.
A Bar Becoming a Lifeline
While the fire departments and federal crews fight the blaze itself, some of the most immediate community support is coming from places like Three Sisters Tavern and Grill in nearby Colorado City. The staff there have been feeding evacuees and first responders, keeping bathrooms open through the night, and handing out bottled water to anyone who pulls into their parking lot.
"We just walked around the parking lot, because a lot of people came to our parking lot just to watch the fires," manager Jolee Ortiz told CBS News. "So we just walked around with bottled water, kept our bathrooms open all night." The community has responded with over $1,000 in donations so far, which the staff plans to direct toward first responders and affected residents.
Sady Stinchcomb, who works there, described watching the fire grow day after day with a helplessness that is hard to read without feeling it. "It breaks my heart every day, just seeing it grow and grow, and there's nothing you can do about it either." That is the emotional reality behind the acreage numbers and structure counts.
The Conditions That Made This Inevitable
Strong sustained winds. No meaningful moisture in the forecast. A fire that started earlier this week and has had nothing but dry fuel and favorable spread conditions ever since. This is not a complicated meteorological situation. It is a terrible one.
Colorado has been hammered by drought conditions for years, and the western United States has watched its wildfire seasons get longer, more destructive, and more expensive with every passing year. The Aspen Acres Fire is the latest entry in a pattern that anyone paying attention has seen building for a long time. It will not be the last.
The Dingo Take
Here's the thing about a wildfire at zero percent containment with no rain coming: there is no good news version of that sentence. The Aspen Acres Fire is going to keep burning until conditions change or firefighters get an opening, and right now neither of those things is happening. Over 180 structures gone. Thousands of people displaced. The number one firefighting priority in the country, and it is still completely uncontrolled.
The human-caused origin is going to be a whole separate story once investigators finish their work, and depending on what they find, there will be very serious questions about liability and accountability. But that is a future story. The present story is people getting phone calls at 2:30 in the morning and having to decide in the dark what they can fit in a truck.
In the meantime, a bar in Colorado City is keeping its bathrooms open through the night and handing out bottled water, because that is what communities do when the institutions that are supposed to protect them are overwhelmed. That is both genuinely moving and genuinely damning. We should be doing better than relying on a tavern to fill the gap.
