Taken from Loveland, Colorado which is the town it threatens to encroach on if the winds shift. The initial report was 100 acres and it grew by 150 or so every hour. I’ve been doing irrigation work outside for two hours and already have a terrible headache. That smoke plume is heading toward Denver with the entire front range of the Rockies obscured.
Edit: super cool. It has again more or less doubled in size over the past few hours and is now at 3575 acres. The smoke plume in this photo is quaint compared to how it now is. A second fire has started just south of it, also close to a town, so the suppression efforts will be split.
There’s certainly an acreage gulf between these and the megafires. This one concerns me because it’s right next to a large town and critical water infrastructure. The environmental conditions are really bad for containment and it has a solid chance of jumping the existing burn scar to become a much larger fire. That fire in California luckily spread mostly through uninhibited wilderness.