Black trees and gray ash litter the landscape for miles along Hovenweep Canyon, remnants of the area’s newest blaze, which started Saturday afternoon in western Montezuma County.

Fire officials believe that lightning sparked the fire in the bottom of the canyon Saturday, but have plans to investigate after it has been mopped up.

By Monday afternoon the fire had consumed 1,525 acres, mostly of piñon-juniper brush, along Hovenweep Canyon, about 10 miles northeast of Hovenweep National Monument. About 150 local, state, and federal firefighters managed to contain 50 percent of the fire by Monday morning.

The fire is moving to the west and into the Canyons of the Ancients National Monument.

Tom Kelly, fire management officer at the Dolores/Mancos Ranger Station, said that efforts of local volunteers were instrumental in keeping the fire from reaching nine threatened buildings this weekend.

Travis Daves, who owns property and a home 8 miles west of Pleasant View, agreed that the lines dug by local volunteers who own and operate bulldozers were instrumental in saving his home. "Those guys just dove into the fire and pushed the fire back into itself," he said.

Daves said the fire came within 200 yards of the house on Saturday before the wind changed directions.

"They tried to evacuate me," said Daves, "But I stayed on the roof to water it."

In addition to the Daves home, a Kinder Morgan CO2 substation narrowly missed destruction and lost three power poles in the blaze.

Bob Clayton, supervisor of the McElmo Dome unit, said that a mile and a half of electrical wire and three poles will have to be replaced before they can restore power to the substation. Kinder Morgan was not economically impacted by the temporary electrical outage. Two Kinder Morgan employees were at the unit helping ward off the fire on Saturday.

The area of the Hovenweep Canyon grazing permit, leased by Grady and Gail Gardner, was completely burned. The Gardners were able to move their cattle before the fire hit them.

Hovenweep Canyon is part of the newly designated Canyons of the Ancients National Monument, and is bordered by private land. The National Historic Preservation Act prevents firefighters from using bulldozers in archaeological sensitive areas. Kelly said that archaeologists were in front of the hand-line crews, monitoring the digging to make sure subsurface sites weren’t damaged.

Gary Thrash, from the San Juan Field Office in Durango, is the new Type II incident commander at the site. The fire is being managed with local fire-management resources.

Three 20-man hand-line crews are on site and an additional two crews and a helicopter are on order.

The three hand-line crews are National Park Service firefighters from the Black Hills, an interagency crew from northern Colorado, and a Cheyenne Bureau of Indian Affairs crew.

The Pleasant View volunteer fire department and BLM firefighters were the first to arrive on the scene on Saturday. Several 3,000-gallon capacity air tankers then helped to douse flames with slurry.

Hot, dry and windy weather conditions did little to help firefighters’ efforts.