A grow­ing Cameron Peak Fire just west of Fort Collins has forced the U.S. For­est Ser­vice to close addi­tion­al parts of the Roo­sevelt Nation­al For­est in Larimer Coun­ty Mon­day as the blaze spread to more than 59,000 acres overnight and was just 5% contained.

Depend­ing on winds and tem­per­a­tures, the wild­fire is expect­ed to spread even fur­ther into the for­est, accord­ing to Paul Brug­gink, a spokesman for the Cameron Peak fire team. It con­sumed an addi­tion­al 10,000 acres of for­est land on Sat­ur­day and at least as much Sun­day while reports of smoke and ash reached south of Den­ver and into parts of Dou­glas Coun­ty. Smoke plumes around the fire report­ed­ly reached up to 40,000 feet into the air.

“It wasn’t total­ly unex­pect­ed,” Brug­gink said of the fire’s reach and speed of its spread. More than 800 per­son­nel are work­ing the fire, most­ly in struc­ture pro­tec­tion, he said. Only an out­house has been report­ed­ly destroyed.

An approach­ing cold front expect­ed into Tues­day with freez­ing tem­per­a­tures and snow­fall up to 6 inch­es fore­cast­ed for Den­ver could slow the blaze, but isn’t expect­ed to extin­guish it, Brug­gink said.

“We won’t call it a sea­son-end­ing event,” he said. “We would need a bunch of those.”

The area now closed is all Nation­al For­est Sys­tem lands west of the Roo­sevelt Nation­al For­est bound­ary, east of the Col­orado State For­est State Park, south of Coun­ty Road 80 C, and north of Rocky Moun­tain Park and High­way 34.

The Nation­al Weath­er Ser­vice said the approach­ing win­ter storm could break a 148-year-old record for the largest tem­per­a­ture change in a 24-hour peri­od in Den­ver. That record, set in Jan­u­ary 1872, was a 66-degree dive. Tuesday’s storm could see a drop of as much as 70 degrees in just six hours, accord­ing to mete­o­rol­o­gist Evan Diren­zo with the service’s Boul­der office.

The fore­cast calls for as much as 14 inch­es of snow in the foothills and moun­tains west of Boul­der with the Inter­state 25 cor­ri­dor though Den­ver expect­ing as much as 6 inch­es of wet, heavy snow.

The east­ward-mov­ing fire on Sun­day caused the Larimer Coun­ty Sheriff’s Office to issue evac­u­a­tion orders for parts of the coun­ty includ­ing areas near Red Feather’s Lakes. Parts of Rocky Moun­tain Nation­al For­est were also closed, includ­ing Trail Ridge Road, because of smoke and poor visibility.

Wildfire map

Click mark­ers for details, use but­tons to change what wild­fires are shown. Map data is auto­mat­i­cal­ly updat­ed by gov­ern­ment agen­cies and could lag real-time events. Inci­dent types are num­bered 1–5 — a type 1 inci­dent is a large, com­plex wild­fire affect­ing peo­ple and crit­i­cal infra­struc­ture, a type 5 inci­dent is a small wild­fire with few per­son­nel involved. Find more infor­ma­tion about inci­dent types at the bot­tom of this page.