Burn Scars: A Memoir of the Land and Its Loss

Journalist and educator Patricia Prijatel and her family built a tiny cabin in a remote Colorado mountain valley where they embraced the silent, the wild, and the beautiful-until June 2013 and the East Peak Fire. Their cabin survived, but their woodlands became a burn-scarred landscape of splintered trunks and blackened branches.

After the fire, the ruin of the land and its people grew: flash floods on eroded land, invasive weeds crowding out grass and seedlings, hurricane-level winds breaking healthy trees, dangerous orphaned animals, toxic air, and stress leading to life-threatening diseases.

Burn Scars: A Memoir of the Land and Its Loss follows Prijatel and her family through six years of living in a changed ecosystem. It’s a story of a love of the land, of hope challenging despair, of climate grief, and the birth of a climate warrior. With searing honesty, Prijatel chronicles an unprecedented transition for America’s natural forests, the life they nurture, and the people witnessing their tragic loss. Her story serves as a love song, a warning, and a glimpse of the future we’ll all navigate as climate change remakes the places we’ve loved. It’s also a call to fight for a priceless treasure we can still preserve-if we act now.