The Joint Chiefs' Landscape Restoration Partnership between the Forest Service and Natural Resources Conservation Service aims to restore landscapes, protect water quality, enhance habitat, and reduce wildfire threats to communities and landowners across the country. This a story about the latter and how government agencies and private landowners came together to mitigate the damage of Colorado’s largest wildfire on record—the Cameron Peak Fire.

In the most extreme cases, wildfires can burn as hot as 2200 degrees Fahrenheit, with flames over 150 feet tall, and can consume entire football fields of wildland within seconds. These once uncommon megafires are becoming more frequent and exacerbated by climate change and warmer/ drier temperatures.

According to National Interagency Fire Center data, the top 10 years with the most burned acreage have all occurred since 2004, coinciding with the warmest years on record nationwide. These megafires are large. They are hot, and they are hard to fight. At least that was the case with the 2020 Cameron Peak Fire, which burned for nearly four months, spanning 208,913 acres across state, federal and private lands.

“When the fire moves like that, it’s not something you want to get in front of, to try to stop. It’s too dangerous,” said James White, a fuels management specialist at the Forest Service with over 25 years of experience in fire management. White, who worked on the Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests to contain the Cameron Peak Fire, witnessed that extreme fire behavior. He watched as the intense flames moved from the ground up into the canopy traveling quickly across the landscape and leaving mostly scorched earth in its wake.

But White also recalled some success stories from that fire. How areas that had been treated by federal, state, and private land managers served as a buffer to dampen the intensity of the fire and slow its spread.

[...]

[Read Full Story]