Dayton Knutson walks around the perimeter of his house south of Redstone, pointing to the various trees surrounding the property.
“We had an arborist come out, and we cut this big pondo down, which is kind of sad,” he said.
“Pondo” is short for ponderosa pine. Knutson explains that ponderosas are his favorite pine tree species, but he knew right away that it would have to go.
The tree’s branches were touching his new house, so if a wildfire ignited nearby, it could easily move from the tree to the structure.
Removing it was one of many steps he took to better protect his home from wildfire.
Knutson’s one-story home is on two acres in a secluded, heavily wooded neighborhood, so he was prepared for strategic landscaping. He was not prepared, however, for the home insurance challenges he encountered.
From 2019 to 2024, home insurance rates in Colorado have risen more than 76%, according to an analysis by Lending Tree. That was the largest hike in the country, almost twice the national average.
Knutson is paying about double what he expected for home insurance, but he’s more concerned with retaining coverage altogether. He and his wife bought the home a little over a year ago, and are now on their fourth insurance company.
“Even before we bought the house, I was like, ‘We're gonna have to take some trees down and do some thinning,’” Knutson said. “So the only thing around the house now, within 30 feet, is deciduous, mostly aspen trees.”
Those aspens were a sticking point with his original insurer, which thought they were too flammable.
But his second insurer, a local company, was fine with them, since aspens have been shown to slow fire spread. They had a new list of requests, which included cutting off lower tree limbs to reduce “ladder fuel.” Knutson said he did everything that company asked for, but they still ended up dropping him without an explanation.
For about ten days in the middle of winter, he was without coverage.
“That was kind of the the worst part in this whole situation, was being without insurance during this serious cold snap,” Knutson said. “We were dealing with pipes freezing … just super unsettling not having insurance to fall back on if something were to happen.”
After scrambling, he and his wife found new coverage, but were paying at least $100 more per month. They shopped around and landed on their current carrier, which they’ve had for several months.
But the insurance company hasn’t come out to inspect the property yet, so Knutson’s worried they might drop him too.
Angie Davlyn is the head of the Wildfire Collaborative Roaring Fork Valley, a nonprofit focused on slowing fires between Aspen and Glenwood Springs and protecting homes.
Home insurance is not part of the organization’s mission statement, but Davlyn said people like Knutson kept coming to her looking for answers.
“I've heard stories like Dayton's far more often than I would like,” Davlyn said. “We were hearing from enough people where we felt like there wasn't anyone that they could go to.”
Working with local fire chiefs, she organized a summit in June to hear from insurance companies about how to address the problem. The collaborative then helped form a task force, which is now developing a tool they hope will make coverage more reliable and more affordable.
The online portal will allow insurers to see a map of all fire mitigation work done in a given community. They're piloting it in Aspen, and as far as Davlyn knows, it’s the first of its kind.
“And I think, quite amazingly, we've had insurers ask for it,” Davlyn said. “Which is, I think, a good sign that we're on the right track.”
Davlyn said some Homeowners Associations have seen massive price hikes in recent years.
“We've talked to quite a few HOAs, their price has jumped from a $10,000 or $20,000 cost to over $100,000,” Davlyn said. “It's multiplied by 10x or more.”
After convening with insurers, she learned that while actions taken by individual homeowners matter, the companies are generally more concerned with community-wide mitigation measures, partially because of how wildfires spread.
“LA to Hawaii to the Marshall fire, those were all scenarios where fire was spreading home to home,” Davlyn said. “It may have started in the wilderness and on the wild land, but it really quickly became a home-to-home fire problem.”
Those community-level projects are already happening where Knutson lives in the Crystal River Valley.
But Tim Morgan, a local insurance agent who’s part of the task force, said there currently isn’t a good way for insurers to know about those projects.
“You look at a community like Redstone,” Morgan said. “They have the Pano AI cameras. They've done some large-scale community mulching and creating fire breaks and defensible space. These are all things that [an insurance] underwriter sitting at a desk may not know about.”
Morgan said this new tool will help fill that communication gap by informing insurers about work that’s been done to prevent fires.
“That's really what this task force is working on, is providing some real kind of actionable community level information,” he said.
Part of the pricing problem is that home insurance is a global market. As climate change increases the damage from natural disasters worldwide, prices are driven up everywhere.
But Morgan said that the actions taken locally can still affect pricing.
“All the work that Angie and Aspen Fire have done, it's just next level, and they're so proactive, and I think that helps us a lot,” Morgan said.
The Colorado legislature passed a bill this year that will require insurers to consider wildfire mitigation work when assessing a homeowner’s risk.
Retired Aspen Fire Chief Rick Balentine is cautiously optimistic about how that will play out.
“There's still a lot of things that have to be looked at when it does take effect,” Balentine said of the bill. “I think what this is going to do, in my estimation, is going to make community-wide [fire mitigation] efforts be more substantial and more recognizable.”
Balentine has been working on the insurance issue for years, and he’s been serving on the state’s Wildfire Resiliency Code Board, which created new standards for building, like establishing defensible space around structures.
“I'm very proud of the fact that we're one of the few states in the nation that now has a statewide wildfire code that will become law in 2026,” Balentine said.