The Colorado River Wildfire Collaborative just hired a program manager to focus on fire mitigation between Glenwood Springs and De Beque.
That region is particularly fire-prone, and a recent study found the northwest part of the state lacked sufficient resources to address fire risk. The Lee Fire burned 137,758 acres there last summer, making it the fifth-largest wildfire in state history (three acres shy of the 2002 Hayman fire).
Sam Feuerborn, the collaborative’s new program manager, is tasked with making the region more resistant to those highly destructive fires.
“This whole landscape that I'm working in along the I-70 corridor up north into Rio Blanco and Moffat Counties is one of the most susceptible areas of the state to wildfire,” Feuerborn said. “When we see this larger number of fires on a landscape, the potential for them to spread and grow is absolutely higher.”
The Colorado River Wildfire Collaborative is a project of the Middle Colorado Watershed Council, which recently received $350,000 to support Feuerborn’s position over three years.
A grant from the Colorado State Forest Service supplied $262,500 of that funding. That same agency doles out several million dollars annually for fire mitigation and restoration, but the northwest region rarely receives, or applies, for that funding.
Feuerborn hopes to start filling the gap by identifying projects and seeking grant funding from a variety of sources. He said good work is already being done at the individual and HOA level, but larger projects need broader investment.
“Some of these landscapes where folks know the areas that they want to do work in, know what sort of work they want to do, but maybe don't have the capital to get metal into soil — or fire into soil,” Feuerborn said.
Feuerborn recently toured the burn scar of the Turner Gulch Fire, which burned more than 31,000 acres south of Grand Junction last summer.
He said firefighters showed him where prescribed burns had stopped the path of the fire.
“As soon as the main fire hit that prescribed burn, they're like, ‘It was over’,” Feuerborn recalled. “And it made their life so much easier to do real meaningful work to contain the fire perimeter.”
It’s too late to do any more prescribed burns this season, and Feuerborn said the dry winter limited opportunities this spring.
“I don't know of any that actually went through,” he said. “Oftentimes they'll try and burn into a snow line and use that for containment, and we just didn't have a snow line this year.”
But there are plenty of other tools available to protect local landscapes, ranging from large masticators that grind up vegetation, to herds of goats that feed on the underbrush.
The three-year funding from the state forest service was supplemented by $87,500 from local municipalities, fire districts, an electric utility and one corporation: Chevron.
Feuerborn said the fossil fuel company owns a lot of valuable gas infrastructure in the region, which can be threatened by wildfires.
“In some ways it's a no-brainer, although maybe a little paradoxical, to have Chevron at the table helping contribute to some mitigation work in all of our backyards,” he said. “Because they stand to benefit from it just as much as the rest of us.”
A 2023 merger made Chevron the biggest oil and gas producer in Colorado.
Burning fossil fuels like oil and gas is the primary cause of climate change, which has increased the risk and extent of wildfires.
Colorado is coming off a historically low-snow winter, largely due to higher temperatures driven by climate change. That low snowpack, in turn, creates drier summer landscapes that are more susceptible to wildfire.
