Emergency Protocols

The flooding in Texas is heartbreaking and the sadness felt across the camp community and the country is palpable. Emergency protocols are always top of mind for us. Although flooding in our location is extremely unlikely given our mountain perch, fire risk is always top of mind and each year brings new challenges to the forests across the country. In our current world, fire will increasingly affect more and more populations.

Therefore, we must be ready in the event of a fire in the distant vicinity, medium vicinity and immediate vicinity. We work with the local fire district to establish our internal fire protocols (i.e. our cabin fire sprinklers, fire extinguishers/training, single campfire location (propane campfires only this year), safety talks, etc.). We also have 3 established evacuation routes. We are lucky to be in an area that is not a dead end. The routes are as follows:

Primary: Down Fryingpan Road to Basalt. (Meet Point at Basalt Elementary)

Secondary: Take Eagle-Thomasville Road to Eagle (Meeting Point at Eagle Library)

Tertiary: Only in the extremely unlikely event that both Eagle and Basalt are for some reason not available, take the upper Frying pan Road route over Hagerman pass to Leadville (meet at Lake County Public Library in Leadville)

Fire to us is extremely scary and nothing to take lightly.

Regarding communication in the event of an evacuation – we have an email and text service that will send alerts to all the session’s parents with the evacuation plan and timings. If the Starlink internet fails (this has never happened to us given we have 3 different Starlink internet dishes and two backup batteries to power the dishes in event of a power outage), we will send communications from the Thomasville Fire station which is at the bottom of our dirt road.

Weather reports found on ‘Open Snow’ seems to provide the most accurate weather reports for our area, so we typically follow their predictions for rain. However, for fire, the Basalt Rural Fire Protection District rangers and Marshall keep in touch with us in the event of emergency.

All of our staff carry a two-way radios 24/7 which allows us to react quickly in any sort of emergency situation.

Please feel free to ask further questions: info@ajaxsleepaway.com | 970.718.6008