It’s been a fast and difficult start to the fire season in the Mountain West, with many large wildfires currently burning tens of thousands of acres in Colorado and Utah. Dry lightning from storms that rolled through the area on Friday night sparked at least eight fires in Western Colorado, some of which grew rapidly thanks to hot, dry, and windy conditions.
As of Tuesday, June 30, in Colorado, the Ferris Fire is burning over 19,000 acres in the Four Corners region, and the Aspen Acres Fire is burning over 28,000 acres in Custer and Pueblo counties. Both have 0% containment. Near Ouray, the Gold Mountain Fire has burned over 8,000 acres, and the Willow Fire has burned over 1,200 acres near Leadville. Officials are reporting 0% containment for both of those fires as well.
The Snyder Fire, which has burned over 30,000 acres and is 0% contained as of Tuesday, began as two smaller fires on Bureau of Land Management land in Mesa County, Colorado and combined into one larger fire which has spread over the Utah state line.
In Utah, large fires have been burning over the past several weeks. The Cottonwood Fire in the Fishlake National Forest has burned close to 94,000 acres with only 4% containment. The Iron Fire is 95% contained after burning over 41,000 acres, but the Cherry Fire nearby is burning very close by at 34,000 acres and is 39% contained.
The Babylon Fire in Bears Ears National Monument started on Friday and had reached 16,000 acres by Sunday. On Monday, however, the fire more than doubled in size, reaching over 38,000 acres. Though the fire remains in the monument, the National Park Service has closed the Needles District of Canyonlands National Park.
How did we get here?
This winter’s historically low snowpack, followed by a rapid melt after a March that broke heat records, means that plants that usually spend most of the winter covered by snow have been exposed for months.
“Those forests really didn't have snow sitting on them at all, which means that they didn't have persistent moisture, so all those trees are stressed,” said Camille Stevens-Rumann. “All the fuel that's on the ground has really dried out, and that's what helps carry the fire is a lot of those surface fuels. So things like fine grass, that's all dried down at this point in many places… When those don't have that persistent moisture, they are able to burn much quicker and easier.”
Stevens-Rumann is a former wildland firefighter and fire ecologist at Colorado State University. She said leading up to the weekend of widespread starts and rapid fire growth, the region saw many consecutive days of red flag warnings: days characterized by hot, dry, and windy conditions. The forecast isn’t showing a cooldown, either.
“When I am starting to think about what size a particular fire could get to, I look at, is there any precipitation in the forecast or is it going to cool down?” she said. “And that's not what we're really looking at for the next week to 10 days.”
Stevens-Rumann says we’ll be able to get a sense of the state of the region’s ecosystems this summer, and how drought is impacting them differently, depending on which areas see more severe fire activity.
“We have many very fire adapted ecosystems in the western United States and here in Colorado—not to say that the way they're burning right now is the way that they should,” she said. “Are we talking about those high elevation places like Rocky Mountain National Park burning, or are we talking about more lower elevation forests, or are we talking about grasslands and shrublands, like the fire and on the Colorado-Utah border?”
Human-caused climate change will likely cause more fire years like this one, said Stevens-Rumann. The American West is trending hotter and drier, with more winter precipitation predicted to fall as rain rather than snow, and that has a domino effect on fire conditions for the rest of the year.
“The earlier snowmelt allow(s) fuels to get dried down quicker, the hotter temperatures mean more water demand from our plants—so those plants are drying out even if they got a lot of moisture in the winter, and then we're also seeing snow later in the year,” she said.
Normally, once snow begins to fall at the start of a new water year in October, that will effectively put an end to the fire season, or at least make conditions less severe for firefighters. But with the first substantial snow in the high country not falling until November or even December, the threat of fire hangs around even longer.
Dangerous conditions for firefighters
Three firefighters died on Saturday while responding to the Knowles Fire, which would eventually become the Snyder Fire, on the Colorado-Utah state line. The U.S. Wildland Fire Service has identified the three firefighters as Emily Barker, Nick Hutcherson, and Sydney Watson. Barker and Watson were both assigned to the Rifle Helitack unit in Rifle, Colorado as part of the Upper Colorado River Interagency Fire Management Unit.
Stevens-Rumann said that federal resources are limited, and typically shared seasonally. For example, if Arizona and New Mexico had fires earlier in the season, complex incident management teams and firefighting units would be deployed there first, and would still have capacity to respond to wildfires later in the season in places like Montana and Wyoming.
“But everybody kind of started out at a high fire danger time, and so those resources become really limited quickly,” she said. “I think that that can be contributing to some of these large wildfires, is just the lack of resources that are available.”
“When you have a really bad fire season, there's a possibility that you don't get all of the resources that you ask for, or you do, but it takes a while because they have to come from really far away,” she added.
There’s also the ongoing uncertainty of staffing at federal agencies, including a recent reorganization of firefighting services resulting in the formation of the U.S. Wildland Fire Service. In March, nonprofit Grassroots Wildland Firefighters and the National Federation of Federal Employees put out a survey to federal wildland firefighters, receiving over 800 responses. Nearly three out of every four respondents said they’d considered quitting over the last year, and morale is very low. It also found that 62% of firefighting units were not fully staffed.
Rep. Joe Neguse (D-Colo.) addressed the survey and other staffing concerns in a press conference last week.
“There are federal agencies responsible for key wildfire prevention, mitigation, and management programs that are experiencing irresponsible and reckless staffing and budget cuts that have dramatically, in my view, worsened working conditions for our wildland firefighters, creating unsustainable workloads, inadequate pay and benefits, and a dwindling trust in agency leadership,” Neguse said.
Those strains compound the difficulties firefighters face during a standard wildfire season.
“You have people that are working 14 to 21 days at a time, and if that keeps going for the whole summer, that creates a lot of fatigue, if you aren’t getting enough of a break,” Stevens-Rumann said. “I worry about that in terms of safety and decision-making as we move later into the season. I think that's less of a concern right now.”
Copyright 2026 Rocky Mountain Community Radio. This story was shared via Rocky Mountain Community Radio, a network of public media stations in Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico, including Aspen Public Radio.
