Burn It All Down

In the fall of 1998, an individual using the name Avalon placed ten 40-pound gasoline canisters on Vail Mountain in northwest Colorado to set fire to a ski resort. Avalon concealed the drums with trash bags to hide them from view.

According to Nick Tabor in Commonweal, Avalon worked with the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), a group of radical activists from Oregon. The ELF claimed responsibility for several arson attacks intended to protest government environmental actions. These included burning two U.S. Forest Service ranger stations, two U.S. Department of Agriculture offices, and a Bureau of Land Management office. The group targeted these locations because the ranger stations hosted timber sales and the Bureau of Land Management was involved in delivering wild horses to slaughterhouses.

The ELF sought to start an eco-revolution across North America to stop corporate damage to the earth. While the group successfully avoided police capture and maintained the identities of its members, Tabor reports that their larger goals eventually stalled.