A handful of wildfires have sparked along the I-70 corridor in the past week.
Last Friday, the Cottonwood Creek Fire forced a closure of I-70 and Highway 6 and a temporary evacuation of residents in the Rulison area. On Monday, residents near Sunny Acres Road received a pre-evacuation notice, which was quickly lifted as firefighters contained the blaze.
Kevin Warner is the district ranger for the Aspen-Sopris Ranger District in the White River National Forest. Speaking after a fire education event last week, Warner said historically, people thought of the Roaring Fork Valley as an area with less frequent, more intense fires.
“But over the past decade or two, we've really seen that change,” Warner said. “And now we see more fires, more frequently in this area than we have in the past.”
Warner said the Roaring Fork Valley and surrounding area has mirrored trends seen across the country.
According to NASA, fire weather in the American West has become more common, and human-caused climate change is the main reason. A warmer planet means hotter temperatures, earlier snowmelt and less summer precipitation in dry regions.
Wildfires are a naturally occurring part of the landscape, serving to regenerate and refresh the ecosystem. But decades of wildfire suppression and a subsequent buildup of flammable fuels have compounded the effects of climate change on fire intensity.
The U.S. Forest Service is now working to undo that fuel buildup.
With the help of the Wildfire Collaborative Roaring Fork Valley, Warner said his agency is actively engaged in fire mitigation work, including prescribed burns such as April’s Sunnyside Prescribed Fire in Aspen. Their strategy also includes manual and machine-powered clearing of vegetation, done in a pattern that Warner calls “groupy clumpy.”
“A lot of the work that you'll see out there actually leaves clumps of trees grouped up, and then areas in between those trees of cleared area,” Warner said.
That’s intended to mimic the effect of what a natural wildfire would do to the landscape, and Warner said it’s been found to be beneficial for wildlife, on top of mitigating future fires.
Try this at home
Much of the local mitigation work is made possible by the Wildfire Collaborative Roaring Fork Valley.
The nonprofit brings together fire agencies, local government, businesses and private citizens to focus on the challenge of mitigating wildfire. They raise money through grants and donations to help fund wildfire mitigation work, including the Forest Service’s efforts. The collaborative is currently facilitating several large-scale forest projects in the region.
However, they're also focused on working with residents to make their homes more wildfire resistant. Angie Davlyn heads the organization, which hosted an educational film screening and panel in Snowmass Village last week. While wildfires are natural and unavoidable, the filmmakers say they don’t have to cause catastrophic damage to homes.
Davlyn said making a home fire resistant is often pretty simple.
“It's really not a wall of flame or kind of this rolling fire that burns homes down,” Davlyn said after the event. “It's embers, and those embers can travel in the wind away from a front of a fire a mile, two miles, five miles.”
Hardening a home against fire then, involves reducing materials for those embers to catch on and preventing them from getting indoors, such as putting mesh over open vents and cleaning plant debris out of gutters and roofs.
It may also involve some landscaping, as experts recommend not having any plants within a five-foot radius of the home. Davlyn said some plants are better than others, and juniper bushes are “the worst.”
“Those burn at 800 degrees, and I'm shocked at how many decorative juniper plants I see all around the valley here,” Davlyn said.
The Colorado State Forest Service has a guide for low-flammability landscaping. Residents can also sign up to get a free home assessment and apply for funding assistance for more involved mitigation measures on the wildfire collaborative’s website.
“I think wildfire can feel sometimes like, ‘Climate change, this incredibly scary, overwhelming problem, what could I possibly do to make a difference?’” Davlyn said. “And in fact, it's something that individuals have immense power to change on their own.”
