The White River National Forest’s recently approved Frisco Backyard Project uses a shared stewardship approach to improve forest health, help protect the community and watershed from wildfire, and enhance recreation opportunities.  

The Frisco Backyard is a 3,000-acre area of National Forest System lands adjacent to the Town of Frisco, Colorado. The area is in the Dillon Ranger District, which is the most-visited ranger district in the National Forest System with nearly 9 million annual visitors.  

The Frisco Backyard’s extensive summer and winter trail systems are directly accessed from town. With more than 251,000 annual recreational visits, the site is central to the local outdoor recreation and tourism-based economy. The existing recreation infrastructure was not designed to accommodate the extremely high levels of visitation, which has led to sustainability impacts to the trail system.

In addition, a long history of fire suppression and bark beetle impacts in the lodgepole pine forests have created the need for more active forest management to improve forest health and reduce wildfire risk to the town of Frisco.  

An interdisciplinary team from the Dillon District worked with the town to develop a single proposed action to reduce hazardous fuels and improve forest health while maintaining high-quality recreation experiences.  

“We clearly heard from the community the importance of creating a balanced proposal for this extremely popular area. By planning both the forest treatments and recreation improvement activities at the same time under one proposal, we were able to integrate the work and meet both goals,” said Acting Dillon District Ranger Sam Massman.  

The approved project includes forest treatments across about half the project area (1,576 acres), mostly cutting live and dead lodgepole pine with hand crews. To balance the fuels and recreation goals, fuels treatments will be less intensive in areas with higher levels of recreational use and more intensive in areas that receive less use.

Recreation work includes improving 40 miles of summer trails, grooming 10 miles of winter trails, allowing winter bicycling, redesigning two trailheads to better manage parking, and issuing a special use permit to the town of Frisco to help with future management of the area.  

“The Frisco Backyard stands at the center of Frisco’s future, as it is our front door to thousands of acres of public lands and a cornerstone of our wildfire resilience and protecting water quality. Cherished by the community, this landscape deserves the care, planning, and meaningful investment the Town of Frisco is making alongside the USDA Forest Service,” said Pete Swenson, town of Frisco Nordic Center and trails manager.

The Dillon Ranger District will also rely on long-time partnerships with additional agencies to complete the hazardous fuels reduction work. For the past decade, the Colorado State Forest Service, Summit County and Denver Water have partnered with the district to actively manage the local forests that surround Summit County communities. This work improves forest health and helps protect both the communities and the watershed (which supplies drinking water to the city of Denver as well as the local communities) from the impacts of wildfire.

“Time and again, the local community has stepped up to support these important projects on National Forest System lands” Massman said. “Our partners embody the idea that shared stewardship is shared responsibility, and we appreciate their long-term commitment to help manage this popular area.”