Firefighters and other emergency workers, along with residents and visitors to the county, have been enjoying a fire free season in Summit so far this year.
It wasn’t too long ago that crews were lined up along firebreaks just outside Silverthorne to combat the Buffalo Mountain Fire, hoping to stop the blaze before it burned its way through the Mesa Cortina and Wildernest neighborhoods. A year earlier in 2017, helicopters were flying over Breckenridge and dumping buckets of water to halt the advance of the Peak 2 Fire as it made its way up the mountain.
Thousands of structures were threatened, and relatively widespread evacuations were ordered in Silverthorne and Breckenridge as a result of the fires. But more than a year since the last flames were doused, officials still aren’t sure how exactly the fires started, or by who.