Prep athletic community lends hand in Marshall Fire relief efforts

Kristin Barbour, a 2016 Monarch High School alumna, looked down on the blaze from a small passenger window in the sky.

Even miles up on a trip back from Chicago, where she’d just seen her family for Christmas, now headed back to California to return to her Ph.D. studies in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California-Irvine, the 23-year-old could point out some landmarks of her hometown and the pockets of fire scorching through them.

“It was definitely devastating to see from the air, the fire like ripping through our (town),” Barbour said of her view of the Marshall Fire, which broke out Dec. 30 and destroyed more than 1,000 homes. “Seeing those places burn down was pretty amazing and horrific.”

Barbour had played town hero plenty of times as the local soccer star at Monarch, but she, like so many others, felt helpless. From her view, the scenes of its wreckage unfolded through social media and texts with family and friends. Her closest look at it came aboard her connecting flight from Denver International Airport.

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