Colorado Is On Fire, In a Drought, and Under a Heat Dome + It’s Only July

The sun has been coming up the color of a cough drop for two weeks, and that is somehow not the most alarming thing happening in Colorado right now.

Time for a wellness check on the whole state.

Start With What's Burning, Because Everything Is

Aspen Acres Fire (Pueblo and Custer counties): Just passed 99,000 acres, making it the seventh-largest fire in Colorado history. More than 850 structures destroyed, at least 337 of them homes. 36% contained.

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Ferris Fire (Dolores County): Past 64,000 acres and now one of the ten largest in state history. It started as three separate lightning fires that decided to merge, because apparently one wasn't enough.

Gold Mountain Fire (Ouray and Ridgway): 13% contained and still working the high country. A pilot died Sunday when his plane went down in Silver Jack Reservoir during firefighting operations.

Snyder Fire: 30,000 acres through Glade Park, Pollock Canyon, and the McInnis Canyons stretch. Now 98% contained, but it killed three firefighters in late June. If you drove Highway 340 at the end of the month, you watched it happen in real time.

That's four deaths this fire season. It's July 14.

Read More: Why Colorado's Three Largest Wildfires Matter to Everyone

The Drought Underneath All of It

Ten percent of Colorado is now in exceptional drought, the category the Drought Monitor saves for when it runs out of adjectives.

Eagle, Pitkin, and Lake counties are 100% in it. The snowpack that was supposed to carry us through summer melted out early, thin, and clearly holding a grudge.

Governor Polis declared a statewide drought emergency on June 4, which somehow feels like a decade ago.

Now Add a Heat Dome

Grand Junction pushed toward 106 this weekend. The all-time record is 107. We got the downslope oven west of the Divide while Denver merely suffered.

The monsoon is allegedly showing up around July 16. Allegedly. If it brings rain, wonderful. If it brings dry lightning instead, well.

We seem to be living in literal Hell, or we're being tortured by a curse put on the state by the indigenous of the lands. Either way, that cough drop sunrise isn't going anywhere for a while.