Even before the snow (however little the Roaring Fork Valley got) stopped flying this past winter, fire leaders across the region were ringing alarm bells about what it meant for the 2026 fire season.
The winter was preceded by a dry fall during which monsoonal rains in late fall hadn’t materialized, and Colorado ended up seeing its worst snow season in recorded history.
Before the dry fall and winter, fire districts in the valley were discussing wildfire mitigation and what an increasingly hotter and drier climate meant for fire risk. A warming climate makes wildfires hotter and exacerbates conditions that help them move faster.
“In 2000, the largest timber fire in state history was around 25,000 acres,” said Aspen Fire Protection District Chief Jake Andersen. “In the last five years, we’ve had fires grow five times that size in an afternoon.”
It’s one reason the AFPD asked voters to approve a new 0.5% sales tax last November. The new voter-approved revenue for the fire district helped jumpstart mitigation work ahead of what fire and emergency preparedness leaders across the region cautioned would be an unprecedented and potentially catastrophic fire season.
‘Buckle up, it’s coming’
In November, voters approved a new half-cent sales tax dedicated to the Aspen Fire Protection District and extended an existing property tax for the fire district.
The district said at the time that both measures would strengthen firefighter staffing and recruitment, upgrade equipment and facilities, and fund wellness and cancer-prevention programs for first responders. The sales tax, expected to generate nearly $6 million per year, would help fund technology upgrades to improve fire detection and response times and expand personnel and equipment.
After the measure passed, the AFPD built a 10-person wildland fire division, which included a new wildland battalion chief and lieutenant, and seasonal firefighting and fuels management crews.
The crew was built in addition to the district’s volunteer firefighters.
“None of this replaces anything that we’re currently doing. It just expands it,” Andersen said. “Especially the fact that we’re not on the I-70 corridor, we don’t have this rapid influx of resources coming from the Front Range or even just up and down that pipeline. We’re at the end of a valley, and sometimes we can get help here in a reasonable amount of time, but it’s really crucial that we are able to expand capacity when we have those major incidents and get enough people on them to be impactful.”
The fire protection district was building its wildland fire division this spring and prepping mitigation projects across the city of Aspen while monitoring upcoming fire behavior predictions.
“We knew that we were being set up for [a dry summer] as we saw a very low snowpack through the winter, then how fast it went away in the spring,” Andersen said. “We had a lot of talks about it, we did a lot of simulations, we did a lot of training and the general message was, ‘Buckle up, it’s coming.’”
Part of the preparation included conducting $1 million in mitigation projects across town.
AFPD’s wildland fire division — alongside 22 crew members from Summitt Forestry in Ashland, Oregon — conducted fuel reduction and vegetation management on Shadow Mountain; along Castle Creek; in the North 40, Aspen Airport Business Center and Burlingame neighborhoods; and on Smuggler Mountain.
The polka dots of brush on display on Smuggler and the west side of Aspen Mountain are the result of tree thinning, removal of dead and dying vegetation and retaining healthy, fire-resistant vegetation.
“You have to do this stuff before the fire comes,” Andersen said.
The mitigation projects were the result of several collaborations, with the city of Aspen, Pitkin County, the Aspen Valley Land Trust and Aspen One. The next step will be burning of the accumulated brush piles once adequate snow or ground moisture is present.
Emergency preparedness and valleywide partnerships
Fire chiefs from across the valley, alongside emergency managers and other wildfire experts, hosted several panels and briefings this spring about what the upcoming summer could hold.
They told community members about upcoming fire restrictions and urged them to make go-kits and discuss evacuation plans with family members in the event of a wildfire.
During a media briefing in April, Pitkin County Emergency Manager Chris Breitbach said if people have lived in the valley for decades and never made a go-kit, this was the summer to actually do it.
People listened, Breitbach told the Aspen Daily News this week.
“In the past, it seemed like at times we were talking to the wall,” Breitbach said. “We redefined some of the [fire restriction and preparedness] language a little bit … tried to simplify it, but I don’t think that was the biggest thing that made the change — I think it was people were just really willing to listen and actually act this year.”
Breitbach and Andersen pointed to the collaboration between the valley’s fire districts — AFPD, the Carbondale and Rural Fire Protection District, Roaring Fork Fire Rescue and the Glenwood Springs Fire Department — and their work on preparedness and mitigation as a success of the past summer.
Breitbach deployed to Pueblo County twice this summer to help their emergency management efforts as the county responded to the Aspen Acres Fire. The Aspen Acres Fire ignited in southern Colorado in late June and has reached about 102,000 acres. It was the largest wildfire in the state this summer.
The valley got lucky that it didn’t have any fires that got out of hand quickly, Breitbach said, but the valley’s fire district efforts have also paid off.
“I’ve seen in other parts of the state, they do not throw the kitchen sink at fires like we do here in Pitkin County,” Breitbach said. “And that’s a testament to the fire chiefs collaborating and together making these decisions to do some of these things.”
Each fire district in the valley has an automatic aid agreement with one another, Andersen said. If a wildland fire starts in Roaring Fork’s district, the surrounding districts’ crews are immediately called in to help. Even five or six years ago, that wasn’t the case, he said.
AFPD has also prepared to spend more money upfront to avoid more catastrophic fires.
The district’s protocol is to immediately order a large aircraft package before even reaching the scene of the fire, “because we know we’re going to need it,” Andersen said.
“We would rather spend what seems like a considerable amount of money at the front end,” he added. “The moment you lose a fire and it goes to a complex incident, it’s a million dollars just to order the team … that’s before you start talking about all the aircraft that it’s going to take for this thing that goes on for months. We’re spending our money where it’s most effective and we get the greatest return on investment.”
Some fires can’t be caught and spread too fast to catch them early, Andersen said. But the valley has had big successes in the last two summers attacking fires immediately before they grow to be unmanageable.
Kittle and Spring Creek fires
Two small wildland fires sparked in the valley this summer, but neither of them grew past 30 acres.
The Spring Creek Fire ignited northeast of Thomasville near Ruedi Reservoir in early June and was contained in about one week.
The Kittle Fire was first reported on Aug. 19 southwest of Ruedi. The fire, near Woody Creek and Triangle Peak, halted commercial flight operations out of the Aspen-Pitkin County Airport as air resources fought to keep the blaze from spreading.
It was contained six days later and didn’t reach more than 28.7 acres.
“The crews that were up there that first night worked through the night to make sure that they got containment around a certain side of it to make sure it couldn’t go any farther toward houses and structures,” Andersen said.
A summer unscathed
At times the valley was blanketed in wildfire smoke, from nearby fires in Utah, Grand Junction, Ouray or nearby Leadville. But beyond the Kittle and Spring Creek fires, the valley emerged from the worst of the summer fire season relatively unscathed.
Some of that, Andersen and Breitbach said, is just pure luck. If a fire sparked in the wrong place at the wrong time, it could have spread quickly under the extremely dry conditions.
But it’s also a testament to the region’s collaborations, and the community’s willingness to heed the warnings, like not building fires or shooting off fireworks, and dedicate more tax dollars to the mitigation efforts.
“I think there’s been a fair amount of people that have prepared, whether they built a go-kit or they went back home and they communicated with their neighbors in their HOA or just their neighborhood and said, ‘Hey, this guy kind of scared the hell out of me at this presentation and I think we need to listen to them,’” Breitbach said. “The taxes that some of the fire districts are starting to collect, this is the investment that the community has put into this, and I think we’re going to see it more in the next coming years.”
According to Tom Renwick, a senior meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Grand Junction, the valley is through the worst of the fire season. While it’s still unclear exactly what the so-called “super” El Niño will mean for Aspen’s winter, recent rains and dropping temperatures have helped slightly in easing drought conditions.
According to the U.S. Drought Monitor, a majority of Pitkin County is still in extreme drought. But a good snow year could change that, Renwick said.
“The drought’s been so prevalent and it’s been dry for so long, so [the rain] helped some, but not as much as we would have hoped for,” he said. “The Western Slope is still in mostly severe [drought], but I say that, and we can have a great winter and things will change very rapidly.”
The fire district isn’t banking on a great winter season to ease drought conditions (and, Andersen said, good snow years can exacerbate the problem — more moisture means more vegetation growth and more fuel for fires). Over the next year, the fire district is planning more mitigation work past the urban growth boundary toward Brush Creek, and it is exploring new technology to fight fires.
AFPD is working with Seneca, a Northern California company that builds semi-autonomous drones to help fight fires. Private donations paid for the five drones that can hold up to 20 gallons of water each, and the district is coordinating with the Federal Aviation Administration to be able to fly the drones over federal land.
The district is also investing in the mental and physical health of its first responders to ensure they can keep doing their work, using some of the revenues of the new sales tax. The district offers all members National Fire Protection Association-compliant, comprehensive physicals, and has invested in programs aimed at addressing suicide, depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder.
“When you go through these types of events, you have to figure out how to integrate them into the rest of your life, because they do change you,” Andersen said.
It’s all work the fire district is hoping will help prevent the community from catastrophe and support the first responders who are doing that work. But, Andersen said the community needs to keep doing its part, especially by working to harden their homes against fire. That means reducing flammable brush within the first five feet of their homes, cleaning out gutters regularly and opting for fire-resistant materials.
“I’m a little biased, but I do think this is the most impactful work from a community benefit standpoint that has happened here in probably decades, and it’s not because it competes with everything else, it’s just because it literally protects all the other projects we’ve done,” Andersen said. “It protects the ski hill, it protects the housing projects, it protects the schools, I mean all of it.”