Renata Vigil-Archuleta had slept badly in the back of the truck, parked behind the brewery off Elk Avenue where the streetlight came through the canopy window at the exact angle of her left eye. By five she had given up and walked the two blocks to RMBL365 with her thermos and a Forest Service-issued tablet that had begun, in the last six months, to anticipate which folders she wanted open. This morning it had guessed correctly: the 2038 burn perimeter, the draft polygons, the phenology overlay the translation team had sent on Tuesday. She set the tablet face-down on the long table and watched her breath in the meeting room until the heat came on.
Crested Butte in late October had become a different town than the one she had first driven into in 2024. The shoulder season was longer now, dustier, and the aspens above Mt. Crested Butte had gone the rusted color they used to go in mid-September, three weeks back on the calendar. She could remember when October felt like winter waiting. Now it felt like a long pause.
Brett came in at seven-fifteen with two coffees and the apologetic look of a junior planner who had also slept poorly but in an actual bed. "Per diem still off?"
"Per diem still off."
"My couch is open next time."
"Your couch is in Montrose."
"My couch is open next time you're in Montrose."
She took the coffee. The translation team lead — Inés Quispe-Bertelsen, hired in 2031 out of a Wyoming water district and now the person Renata called first about almost everything — came in at seven-thirty with a roll of plots under her arm and the phenology PI, Doc Halloran, behind her. Doc had driven down from Gothic before light. He looked like someone who had been outside since four and was pleased about it.
"The willows above Copper Lake," he said, before any of them had sat down. "I want to talk about the willows above Copper Lake before we get into the polygons."
"Good morning to you too," Inés said.
"Good morning. The willows are doing the thing again. Earlier than last year."
Renata pulled out a chair. "Hold that. Let me get Daryl on."
The wall screen woke up. Daryl Whyte, the natural-resources liaison out of Towaoc, was already there, a mug in his hand and a window behind him showing the flat south light that meant his morning had started even earlier than Doc's. "I've got till ten-thirty," he said. "Council meeting at eleven my time. Where are we starting?"
"Willows above Copper Lake," Renata said. "Apparently."
"Of course we are."
The thing about working at this table for eight months was that you stopped narrating to each other what you were doing. Inés unrolled the plots. Doc was already pulling something up on his own tablet, muttering, and the tablet — Renata noticed without quite registering it — had filled in the rest of his sentence on the shared display: a sixty-year curve of willow leaf-out at the Copper Lake cluster, with the last seven years bolded and the 2038 outlier circled. Doc had not asked for the bolding. The system had inferred it from how he was talking.
"So this is the thing," Doc said. "What burned last August at 11,200 — that's not just a fire-season-lengthening story. That's a subalpine fir story that's been three decades in the making, and our willows are telling us the moisture pulse is moving up the drainage faster than I would have predicted in 2030."
Renata set her hands flat on the table. "Which means treat-or-leave on Polygon 14 isn't actually a fuels question."
"It's a fuels question and a corridor question."
"It's both."
"It's both, yes."
Brett was the one who said the quiet part. "The agency model doesn't do both."
"The agency model doesn't do both," Renata agreed. "Which is why we're here."
She walked them through what she had. The GMUG map was up on the long wall, polygons hand-numbered, with the 2038 burn shaded in a color Brett had chosen because it didn't shout. Polygons 11 through 17 were the contested ones: a band of subalpine fir and aspen running northwest from the burn scar toward the divide, intersecting two lynx linkage zones from the 2019 boundaries and one sage-grouse seasonal-use area that had been mapped — Renata had spent August on this — when no sage-grouse had been seen in that polygon since 2026.
The boundaries had not moved. The birds had.
"Daryl," she said. "What I want from your office, if you can, is the seasonal-use information you mentioned in September. The PHMA boundary on 14 is wrong in a way that matters for what we do with the fir."
"I can share what we've cleared to share. There's a piece I have to hold."
"Understood."
"What you'll see is consistent with what Inés's team modeled in the spring."
Inés nodded without looking up. "It's consistent."
Renata watched the polygon on the wall. Polygon 14 was eight hundred and forty acres of fir-aspen-meadow mosaic that the agency had been planning to treat — mechanical thinning, prescribed burn in year three — based on a 2034 modeling run that had not known about the moisture pulse, the sage-grouse that had moved, or the lynx that had started using the south face after the 2031 winter. The treatment would reduce fuels. It would also, if you laid the corridor data over it, sever a connection that had reorganized itself in the last eight years without anyone with authority noticing.
"What I want," she said, "is to draft a version of 14 where we treat the eastern third, leave the central band, and monitor the western edge for three years before we decide. And I want the rationale to cite the phenology curve and the corridor reorganization, not just the fuel load."
"Cite both," Inés said.
"Cite all three. Fuel load, phenology, corridors. That's the revision."
Brett was already typing. The tablet was suggesting language. Renata watched it propose a paragraph that was almost — but not quite — what she wanted, and she rewrote the second sentence by hand on the tablet's surface with a stylus, because the system had used the word integrated and she had been fighting that word in agency documents for two years. Integrated meant nothing. She wrote cumulative. The tablet absorbed the correction without complaint.
Doc was looking at the willow curve. "The 1979 notebooks," he said. "You'd want to see the 1979 notebooks for the comparable year. Henley's handwriting. I can pull them this afternoon. The archive has them scanned but they're easier in the original — the marginalia didn't make it across."
"Tomorrow morning?"
"Tomorrow morning."
Daryl, on the screen: "I can be on at seven your time tomorrow if Renata's still here."
"I'm still here. Per diem or no per diem."
"Stay at my sister's," Inés said. "She's in Mount Crested Butte. She has a futon and she likes Forest Service people."
"Does she."
"She likes you specifically. From the August session."
"I'll take the futon."
They worked through the rest of Polygon 14, then 15, and by ten Renata had a draft paragraph for the December public-comment document that she did not hate. The paragraph said that the treatment design on Polygon 14 had been revised in light of basin-scale phenology and corridor data developed in collaboration with the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory and tribal natural-resources partners, and that the revised design reflected cumulative stressors rather than fuel load alone. It was a single paragraph. It would generate, Renata estimated, between forty and two hundred public comments, half of them furious. Inés had read it twice.
"The agency's never said it like that before," Inés said.
"The agency's never had the data before. The data's been here. The agency's never had the data."
"Different sentence."
"Different sentence."
Daryl signed off at ten-twenty. Doc left for Gothic before lunch, because he wanted to see the willows in afternoon light, and because he had a graduate student arriving on Saturday and the cabin needed firewood. Brett went to find sandwiches. Inés and Renata stayed at the table.
"The parcel layer," Renata said. "The county records. I still don't have a clean time series for the eastern subdivisions."
"I know."
"I need it for the next revision. Not this one. The next one."
"I know. We're working on it. The county's cooperating now in a way they weren't in 2035. It's slow."
"It's slow."
"It'll be ready before the 2042 cycle."
Renata picked up her stylus. The tablet had pulled up Polygon 15 on its own. She looked at it for a moment — the fir mosaic, the burn edge, the seasonal-use boundary that she suspected was also wrong — and started writing the next paragraph, the one she would argue with for the rest of the week, and probably the rest of the year.