Thursday morning, a tower of smoke, visible all the way across town, was coming from the direction of Town Park.

“Do you know what’s going on in Town Park?” wondered some visitors. “It looks like there’s a fire over there.”

There was. But Telluride’s firefighters had it under control. In fact, they’re the ones that started it.

They’d started their annual slow burn, getting ready to grill up the equivalent of two whole cows for the Fourth of July barbecue.

The Fourth of July is about the only time when firefighters, who normally spend their time putting out fires, get to light them.

And, man, did they start a doozy.

When Dave Fruen, Jr., used a flare to light the pit Thursday morning, heavily soaked with lighter fluid, the blast blew open the heavy metal doors and nearly knocked over Chris Robinson, who was standing about 15 feet away. (See the explosive video at Telluridenews.com, courtesy of Dave Fruen, Jr.)

When you walk up close to the barbecue pit, the heat is like walking into an Indonesian volcano. Like the world opened up and was belching its molten core into Town Park. Like a nuclear blast.

“You can’t get too close or it burns the hair off your legs,” says Ricky Denesik, a volunteer firefighter who was stoking the blaze Thursday. “We like to do things big about here.”

He estimated the fire at between 1200 and 1400 degrees Fahrenheit.

The firefighters joking refer to the barbecue pit as “the crematorium.” And it does kind of look like the kind of place where Benazir Bhutto ended up. It is, to be sure, the place where an awful lot of meat was scheduled to meet its final destiny Friday.

Between Thursday evening and Friday afternoon, the firefighters will grill up a ton (literally) of meat: 1200 pounds of chicken and 1200 pounds of beef. This to go along with 500 pounds of watermelon, practically a field of corn, 1,800 bottles of soda, 2160 cans of soda, and 4,480 cans of beer.

The firefighters will help out with everything — not just the buying and the grilling, but the drinking and the eating. 

But grilling up the equivalent of a walrus isn’t easy, and the firefighters stoked the fire Thursday.

Patrick Dasaro put on the full “Backdraft” outfit — coat, pants, shielded helmet — and waded into the conflagration. He kicked at the wood and came away sweating and breathing like he’d just run a marathon.

“We always put the rookie in the sweet spot,” laughed John Bennett, the department’s training officer.

They planned to stay up nearly all night to keep it going.

It’s clear: these guys love being volunteer firefighters. It teaches you things you might not otherwise have known.

“Our training does tell us about how a fire grows,” said Denesik.

The fireworks had yet to start, and the firefighters were looking forward to that part of the holiday, too.

“All of us have a little pyro in us,” Bennett said.