Free Republic

Terry Lynn Barton has been released from prison after serving a six-year term for starting the worst wildfire in Colorado's recorded history. Barton, 44, pleaded guilty to arson charges stemming from the 2002 Hayman Fire, which blackened 138,000 acres, destroyed 133 homes and forced more than 8,000 people to evacuate. She was a fire spotter for the U.S. Forest Service at the time

Barton Gets 15 Years Probation, Community Service. A woman who admitted to starting the Hayman Fire will not do any time in Colorado for sparking the largest wildfire in the state's history... "I feel good. It's done," Terry Barton said, looking relaxed at the hearing. Barton is currently serving a six-year sentence in a federal prison in Fort Worth, Texas and will be released in June. The state wanted her to also serve time in state prison, but Barton's original state sentence of 12 years in prison was overturned by the Colorado Appeals Court. "Your honor, I'm not asking for...

A small band of archers has been shooting bows and arrows for 37 years on a range in the Pike National Forest north of Deckers, paying the U.S. Forest Service about $450 a year for a permit. This year it will all end because the Forest Service presented the Columbine Bowmen with a bill for $23,000 for the one-year permit, said club president Tom Younger. The same fate faces the 180 or so members of the Buffalo Creek Gun Club, who shoot targets in the Pike forest near Bailey. The club's annual permit fee of $150 over the past 40...

It was early in the evening when the fire surged toward the homes in a mountain settlement called Turkey Rock, a raging orange hell of 50-foot-high flames that roared off a ridge, pushing a thick, super-heated cloud of soot and blazing embers. In moments such as these, when nature swings its heaviest fist, the human instinct to survive cries out. It is when ordinary people run. But Monday night, as the catastrophic Hayman fire raged across the parched Rocky Mountains just above our village, driven northward through Jefferson County by fierce and relentless winds, 19 members of the Colorado Springs...

June 19, 2002 Heavy equipment moved into Rampart Range Road area ~The Colorado Springs Gazette Massive flames from the Hayman fire leap into the air Tuesday north of Florissant. U.S. Forest Service personnel estimated the flames at 60 to 100 feet high. The blaze has consumed 120,000 acres. Wind pushed it farther east toward Woodland Park. The Army joined the battle against the Hayman fire early Wednesday, hoping to hold back flames that advanced Tuesday to the back doors of Woodland Park and Palmer Lake. At dawn Wednesday, a group of bulldozers and other pieces of earthmoving equipment from Fort...

June 19, 2002 Colorado Wildfire May Have Been Intentionally SetBy MICHAEL JANOFSKY ENVER, June 18 — Federal investigators have concluded that the Forest Service employee charged with starting a fire that has burned more than 100,000 acres in central Colorado set the blaze deliberately and lied when she said she had done so accidentally by burning a letter inside a campfire ring, a senior Forest Service official said today. Associated PressAt Confluence Park in Denver, high winds blew heavy smoke yesterday from the Hayman fire, 35 miles away. The official said investigators had found burned underbrush positioned in such a...