A wild­fire in Grand Coun­ty grew just slight­ly Mon­day and has not yet shown the explo­sive growth seen in past wild­fires in the region.

The Black Moun­tain fire, which was report­ed at about 1 p.m. Sun­day, grew from 120 acres to 170 acres Mon­day — burn­ing across about a quar­ter of a square mile. The blaze is locat­ed off Grand Coun­ty Road 2 in the hills north­east of Kremm­ling, just west of the burn scar from last year’s East Trou­ble­some fire, which killed two peo­ple, forced wide­spread evac­u­a­tions and burned more than 194,000 acres, about 303 square miles.

“So far we haven’t seen the huge, dynam­ic growth that has caused so much issue in past years, but there is cer­tain­ly still dan­ger with this,” said Aaron Voos, a pub­lic affairs spe­cial­ist for Routt Nation­al For­est. “The fact that it’s 170 acres doesn’t mean it couldn’t grow or get larg­er quickly.”

He esti­mat­ed 50 to 75 peo­ple were fight­ing the fire Mon­day. The blaze is not cur­rent­ly threat­en­ing any struc­tures, but did prompt a pre-evac­u­a­tion order for some parts of Grand Coun­ty, with res­i­dents asked to be ready to leave at any time. Voos said crews expect the fire to burn into the evening and per­haps overnight, and that a cold front is expect­ed to move into the area Tues­day and lat­er into the week, which could bring mois­ture that aids firefighters.

“Today will be a key day, weath­er-wise, with the hot, dry tem­per­a­tures and with the winds,” he said. “Once we get into tomor­row and the rest of the week we will see a cool­ing trend and hope­ful­ly some moisture.”

The fire is uncon­tained, and near­by res­i­dents who were impact­ed by the East Trou­ble­some fire last year are on edge, Voos said.

“We are aware of that and work­ing with the coun­ty to get out as much infor­ma­tion as pos­si­ble,” he said.

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.