Aguilar - A 6-inch blanket of snow provided the ultimate fire suppressant Monday, stopping the advance of the Mauricio Canyon fire in southern Colorado, but not before three homes and 5,000 acres burned.
Meanwhile, a grass fire west of Berthoud grew to nearly 400 acres before firefighters were able to control it late Sunday. About 40 homes in the area of the Sedona Hills subdivision had to be evacuated, with residents allowed to return around midnight Sunday.
No structures were destroyed and no significant injuries were reported, according to the Larimer County Sheriff's Office.
The cause of the fire is believed to be a faulty power line, according to the Berthoud Fire Department.
In Mauricio Canyon on Monday, a bizarre natural scene played out as smoke from hot spots billowed through snow accumulated on the ground.
The day before, winds whipped flames across the landscape until the snow started falling about 10 p.m.
The fire started on the Walker Ranch. Forest Service officials were not saying Monday how it started, only that it was "human-caused."
Pam Dorland, 62, a retired nurse from Sterling, was getting ready for bed about 9:30 p.m. Saturday when she heard the banging of the screen door. The wind - gusting at 74 mph - was so mighty, she had to call on her husband, Jim, 64, a retired teacher from Sterling, to close the door.
"When they came out, they could smell the smoke, and they figured they better see what was going on," said Dave Dorland, 35, of Golden, their son. "They drove down to the end of the road, and they could see the flames."
Pam Dorland grabbed some photographs, and the couple drove down a dirt road to safety.
Their home, which they completed in 2003, and two vintage cars - a mint-condition 1933 Plymouth and a 1931 Model A - were destroyed.
While many of central Colorado's ski resorts are enjoying snowpack levels much higher than average, there has been little moisture in southern Colorado since the fall. Snowpack in the Rio Grande basin was 32 percent of normal Monday, and it was 46 percent of average in the San Miguel, Dolores, Animas and San Juan river basins.
Southern Colorado's winter drought has almost surely contributed to the wildfire risk, said Mark Svoboda, a climatologist with the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln.
"The snows may continue not to come. ... The pattern is stuck," Svoboda said. "Storms are scurrying up well to the north, the Pacific Northwest, the northern Rockies. They've really avoided the midsection of the country."
It's not uncommon to have a winter outbreak of grass fires, he said.
"In the plains states, the Dakotas, Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, you don't have snow, you've got a lot of dead or dormant vegetation, low humidity, you can get really windy weather," Svoboda said. "If a fire starts, all the ingredients are there."
Craig Morey, 53, of Red Wing said he has been fighting fires in Colorado since 1970, but never in January.
"This is a first in January, with snow on the ground. We've had fires where the snow has come and put them out in the fall," he said. "All the years that I've lived here, I've never seen it this dry for this time of year anyway. If we don't have a wet spring, we're going to have a rough fire season."
