Fire in winter

Fire and frost go hand in hand during the winter on the Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests, and firefighters have been busy since November putting fire to work as a tool to improve forest conditions. This past winter, crews used fire to successfully remove over 34,000 piles of woody debris. This amounts to more than 3,440 acres of wildfire preparedness work that was completed in strategic locations across the national forest along our wildland-urban interface. With a newly increased workforce capacity on the forest and with our local partnerships, we have recently been able to double our efforts as part of our response to the wildfire crisis currently facing our forests.

The Arapaho and Roosevelt Forests are part of the Colorado Front Range Wildfire Crisis Strategy Landscape, an area of over 3.5 million acres which spans from the Wyoming border to the north and past Colorado Springs to the south. Supplying water to over 3 million people and adjacent to several large metropolitan areas, this landscape serves a diverse array of people who live, work, and recreate here. It is one of the 10 original landscapes designated by the Secretary of Agriculture as part of a 10-year plan first announced in January 2022 to address the Wildfire Crisis, focusing on areas where wildfires present the most immediate threat to communities.

After years of fire suppression, our forests along the Colorado Front Range are overgrown and prone to uncharacteristic and destructive wildfires. Dead tree debris clutters our forest floor, dense stands get crowded, and unhealthy undergrowth creates a hazardous fuel load in the forest. While many Front Range forests are adapted to withstand and recover from frequent low intensity fires, this hazardous fuel load has dangerous potential for unwanted fire to spread quickly and cause significant destruction. To address this buildup of hazardous fuels, crews work across the landscape to mitigate debris, minimize overgrowth, and declutter dense areas. As crews work through these project areas of our forest, they build burnable piles of wood and then wait for winter.

When the materials have dried and with the arrival of the winter season, firefighters look for favorable conditions to burn piles. Certain parameters must be met to burn these piles, such as having the workforce capacity to perform the burn appropriately and enough moisture on the ground to help confine fire to the footprints of the piles. Firefighters also need appropriate weather and enough wind to help with smoke dispersal, moving the smoke up and away. This year provided us with several excellent weather windows. That, alongside our increased workforce capacity, enabled us to notably increase our pile burning numbers for the season.

“Increasing our capacity over the past three years has made a big difference for us on the forest. We have more year-round staff to help with the day-to-day winter needs such as checking on piles and burning multiple units, and better staffing helps with better planning. We are also spending more time working with our local partners, building stronger relationships, and creating a more cohesive forest health plan as we work on bring fire back into our ecosystem.” -Ed LeBlanc, South Zone Fire Management Officer for the Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests.

Prescribed fire treatments are planned for strategically important areas, connected deliberately across the landscape. These targeted treatment areas become part of a broad and interconnected landscape where the rivers, roads, ridges, and slopes of the forest integrate with areas of historic fire activity, producing a connected ribbon of treatment areas. These areas are mapped and the information then used strategically to enhance our planning on where to focus future prescribed fire treatments, while simultaneously improving the landscape capacity to receive and respond to wildfire in a sustainable way. By linking together these areas where fire has less opportunity to grow quickly and destructively, we can create an area of the landscape that has a higher likelihood of slowing down aggressive fire growth. This enhances our ability to respond to and fight unwanted fire. By using fire now, deliberately, and intentionally, we improve our ability to fight the next big fire.

“We know that fire is the most effective tool for protecting our forests and watersheds from catastrophic wildfires like Cameron Peak. We continue to work with our partners to expand the use of prescribed fire across all lands in the Colorado Front Range Landscape to help protect the lands and waters we love”. -Daniel Godwin, Wildfire Crisis Strategy Program Coordinator for the Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests and Pawnee National Grassland.

We use fire in many ways as a part of our response to the wildfire crisis here on the Colorado Front Range. Our work does not stop with the end of pile burning season. After proactively thinning overgrown areas, many places on the forest where piles have been burned may now be considered appropriate for broadcast burning. During broadcast burning, firefighters deliberately put fire on the ground and manage it as it spreads along the forest floor in a prescribed area. By promoting fire that moves low to the ground and slowly along the land, we create stronger defense capabilities against fire that moves too fast, too hot, and too high along the landscape. This broadcast burning process helps promote forest growth with fire that is useful, healthy and a natural part of the landscape. And in the meantime, we will continue to address new areas of the forest, helping fire play its natural role in the ecosystem.