For decades, large wildfires were managed through the Incident Command System, a framework that depends on highly trained teams at the federal, state, and local level. These teams coordinate everything from strategy to evacuations and communication with communities.

Today, fewer than 38 of the largest teams, known as “Complex Incident Management Teams”, are expected to be available nationwide, a sharp decline from previous years. But even that number is optimistic, because many incident teams are no longer fully staffed. Personnel shortages have forced teams to share members; obviously those members cannot be deployed to different fires at the same time. On paper, capacity remains. In practice, it does not.

This is not an accident. It is the cumulative result of a decade of declining federal participation in wildfire management, compounded now by recent cuts to non-fire federal personnel. These cuts may seem unrelated to wildfire response, but they strike at its core.

Much of the wildfire system depends on specialists from other roles—hydrologists, biologists, planners—who step into fire assignments when needed. As those positions disappear, so does a critical reserve of experienced responders.

What remains is a workforce that’s smaller and increasingly strained. Many of the people still filling these roles are senior employees who, during a busy season, can hit federal pay caps, effectively eliminating financial incentives to keep working long hours under dangerous conditions. At the same time, there’s deteriorating morale and ongoing administrative upheaval, all caused by staff cuts aimed at reducing the size of the federal workforce.

As one fire manager put it bluntly, the only way to cope has been “to care less.”

Against this backdrop, the public is assured that wildfire staffing remains stable. But there has been no comprehensive accounting of how many fire-qualified personnel have been lost through early retirements and deferred resignations, and what could be lost in the new reorganization.

The gap between official assurances and operational reality is growing. This matters.

It matters because the system is already under strain. As of April 23 this year, almost 1.8 million acres have burned nationwide, nearly twice as much as the year-to-date average over the previous 10 years. This includes the 640,000-acre Morrill Fire in Nebraska. Last year, which was a relatively mild fire year, the U.S. Forest Service still spent a record amount on fire suppression—nearly $5 billion.

Why? In part, because of how risk is increasingly avoided. Political and administrative pressure to suppress every fire has changed behavior on the ground. Local decision-makers, aware of the professional consequences if a fire escapes initial containment, are incentivized to order more resources than they might otherwise need.

The result is scarcity that will show up in experienced leadership and fully staffed management teams. The remaining Complex Incident Management teams will be stretched thin, sometimes asked to manage multiple major fires events simultaneously. Fatigue will follow, and with fatigue comes risk—of poor decisions, accidents, or injuries and fatalities among firefighters. Communities will feel it too.

Incident Management Teams don’t just fight fires; they serve as a lifeline for affected areas. They coordinate evacuations, connect local officials with state and federal agencies and help lay the groundwork for recovery. If those teams are unavailable or overstretched, communities will face greater disruption and slower recoveries.

Whether 2026 becomes a historically severe fire year remains uncertain. But the conditions—environmental and institutional—are aligning in troubling ways.

The United States has spent years building one of the most sophisticated wildfire-response systems in the world. That system is now being asked to do more with fewer people and much higher stakes: Wildfire seasons have become longer and more devastating; they are a defining feature of the American landscape.

The question is not whether the fires will come. It is whether we can still respond effectively when they do.

David Calkin is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. Until recently, he was a senior scientist for the U.S. Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station. He now runs a wildfire consulting business in Missoula, Montana.

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That experience led me to understand that the current Trump administration’s unpopular plan to move the U.S. Forest Service headquarters will be every bit as destructive. It will hurt forests, wildlife and communities that rely upon our public lands and waters.

In 2020, almost 90% of the BLM employees ordered to move West chose not to, forcing them out the door. With those seasoned employees went years of wisdom and knowledge of how things are supposed to work, of how to deliver for the American people. 

Today’s Forest Service plan goes farther, aiming to close regional offices and shutter dozens of the agency’s research centers, as we face what some say will be a horrific wildfire season.  

The Forest Service and the BLM combined manage 20% of our country’s lands and waters. These public lands, the places we camp, hike, watch birds, hunt and simply wander in nature, are truly one of America’s best ideas. For Westerners, they are a deep part of our identity.

There is a reason Forest Service headquarters are based in Washington, DC. It’s where our nation’s leaders work. Believe me, I did not want to move to the capital from my home in Montana to run the BLM, but to be able to fight for Western people and places, I had to go to the seat of our nation’s power. 

I was often in the Interior Secretary’s offices. I frequently walked to work with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service director, talking through thorny problems such as how to protect wildlife while permitting transmission lines. Washington is where people manage relationships with Congress, where budgets get made.

The administration says all their changes are about bringing leadership closer to where the work happens. That’s a political talking point, and it’s false.

If DOGE’s dismantling of government agencies last year provides any lesson, then cruelty and disruption are the real point. These changes aim to create chaos, deliver the administration’s stated goal of traumatizing employees, and imperil the very existence of public lands — lands that belong to all Americans. We improve the management of our forests by giving foresters the resources they need and letting them make decisions based on sound science and collaboration, not by gutting their agency.  

Over the course of the last year, the Forest Service forced or coerced roughly a quarter of its approximately 30,000 employees to leave. In this latest round of engineered chaos, thousands of people will be reassigned and ordered to move. If BLM history is any guide, almost all will leave their positions rather than uproot their families. The agency could soon be left with roughly half its former ranks. 

Think of your job. Now, think of half of your colleagues gone. Would your organization be able to recover from the loss and demoralization to do its work? 

There are inevitable repercussions to this radical attack on our public land management agencies: Campgrounds will close. Trails won’t be maintained. High fuel loads near communities will go unaddressed. Wildfires will become even harder to fight. More sawmills will close. The health of our land, waters and wildlife will decline. With things going wrong on the ground, some will demand that these lands be transferred to states or sold to private industry.  

That’s exactly what the people in power today want. The choice of Utah for the Forest Service headquarters—home to Senator Mike Lee, who leads the charge on public land selloff, as well as to the state that is suing to try to take over millions of your public lands—reveals the administration’s true agenda.

The inevitable does not need to happen. There is one power to stop our public lands from being mismanaged to the point of selloff: It’s the outrage of the American people.

Americans overwhelmingly support public lands and want future generations to enjoy the freedoms found in them. Our public forests, rivers and deserts deserve to be treated better, and the federal land managers who work tirelessly deserve better. It’s up to us to demand it.  

Tracy Stone-Manning is president of The Wilderness Society and a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West.

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I took delight in the abundant crops of acorns and bright red madrone berries. The madrone trees were thronged with feeding robins and hermit thrushes, and the oaks were alive with squirrels, jays and woodpeckers. Although neither acorns nor madrone berries will be part of my Thanksgiving feast, my feeling of thanks for this bounty came easily and naturally.

Then, further up the trail, I passed through a stand of dead ponderosa pines. Throughout the West, many forest areas are experiencing severe conifer die-offs, and these skeletal dead trees represent fuel for the wildfires that we all fear. Looking up at them, I certainly didn’t feel any stirrings of gratitude.

But just then, a hairy woodpecker landed in the largest snag and began to hammer away, anticipating a feast of beetle grubs. For the woodpecker—and the beetle grubs—the dead trees were a gift, something to be grateful for.

So, what else was I missing? I looked down at my feet. There was the usual jumble of the forest floor: fallen leaves and conifer needles, bits of lichen, with some scattered manzanita berries. If anything in nature deserves to be called humble, it’s layers like this of decay.

But as soon as I knelt and focused my attention, there it was, waiting to be acknowledged: gratitude. From a nearby clump of brush came the sounds of a towhee’s big feet scratching through the fallen leaves. For towhees, the duff is a banquet table, spread with a cornucopia of seeds, insects, sowbugs and spiders. For the seeds, the litter of the forest floor is where they need to be, where they have their only chance to germinate and grow. For the insects, sowbugs and spiders, it is a world complete, their grazing land and hunting ground, the habitat that makes their lives possible.

I stood and took a long drink from my water bottle. That water came from the watershed surrounding me, its stream fed by snowmelt and filtered through the ancient granite soils of the Siskiyou Mountains. I took a deep breath. The oxygen that filled my lungs and keeps me alive is the gift of photosynthesis, produced over billions of years by plants and cyanobacteria.

To state the obvious, none of this—none —is humanity’s doing. The birds, the berries, the decaying leaves, the spiders and the sowbugs, the life-giving atmosphere and the life-giving water—all are gifts that we receive, some so essential we cannot imagine their absence. Others are so useful it seems they were made for us especially, and for those we sometimes remember to be grateful. Others appear to be of no use to us whatsoever, or even to be intended for our harm, and why would we ever be grateful for those?

But nothing in nature is wasted.

Every gift given is accepted: the dead tree by the beetle, the beetle by the woodpecker, the woodpecker by the hawk, the dead hawk by the scavengers, then by the decomposers, then by the germinating ponderosa pine seed rising from the fertile duff.

All of this is one oversimplified cycle of gift exchange. The world we inhabit is a web of reciprocity far beyond our ability to comprehend, much less control. To be alive at all seems a miracle.

As we celebrate Thanksgiving, let us imagine the world we share with every living thing. Let us give thanks for this planet, this blue and green ball spinning in a lifeless void, holding us all and making possible our every heartbeat, our every breath. And not just ours, but the existence of all life, and of all the interrelations that make our world healthy and resilient and diverse and beautiful.

This year, when I sit down to my Thanksgiving feast, surrounded by loved ones, I will try to be mindful of every kind of giving thanks.

Pepper Trail is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is a writer and ecologist in Oregon.

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Staffing and budget cuts at the Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and U.S. Forest Service aren’t just numbers on a spreadsheet. They are empty ranger stations during peak season, trail crews that never arrive and wildfire teams stretched so thin they can’t keep up.

During the four years when I led the BLM, from 2021 to 2025, I saw what it takes to care for hundreds of millions of acres of public lands. It takes committed, dedicated people—wildfire crews, wildlife biologists, planners, law enforcement rangers—and it takes funding. Today, both are being stripped away at historic rates.

We can already see the consequences. As I write, flames tear through the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, burning down the historic lodge and scarring over 100,000 acres. The fire has raged for weeks since a lightning strike started it on July 4, and it may continue for weeks more.

Fire is part of the West’s natural cycle, but climate change and decades of suppression have made today’s fires hotter and more destructive. It just doesn’t make sense that the Trump administration is gutting the agencies responsible for managing fire risk when we need these experienced and dedicated people most.

More than 1,600 wildfire-qualified staff have been driven out of the Forest Service in recent months, and as many as one in four firefighting jobs remain vacant. To make it worse, firefighters are being pulled from the fire lines to tend to logistics for some forests, even in one of the most dangerous wildfire seasons in memory. 

The administration has even proposed removing firefighting from the Forest Service entirely, a dangerous move that separates the rangers who know the land best from those dousing the flames.

People of all backgrounds celebrated when we collectively stopped Congress from selling off our public lands earlier this summer. But now, a clear and dangerous pattern is emerging: Shrink these agencies until they break, then claim that selling off or industrializing our public lands is the only fix.

This should alarm anyone who values the freedom these lands provide. Public lands are a great equalizer—places where all Americans have the same right to hike, hunt, fish or camp. And to unplug and touch nature. If we lose the people who manage these lands, our access will shrink under wildfire closures, roads will be gated and campgrounds will close. We’ll lose our freedom to wander.

It’s also a direct threat to conservation. Our public lands deliver clean water, clean air and wildlife habitat. Cutting conservation programs and abandoning fire-smart management will leave forests overgrown and ready to burn—with wildfires too big and too hot. 

Worse still, future generations are going to inherit the choices made today. When the administration guts our parks and public lands to pay for tax cuts for billionaires, they saddle the future with parks and trails that are closed, crumbling roads and buildings, forests prone to even worse fire, smoky skies and “No Trespassing” signs. The cherished traditions we pass down—teaching a child to fish or hunt, camping under a night sky, chasing butterflies—will no longer be available to all.

Westerners know what’s at stake. Poll after poll shows that people across the political spectrum want to keep our public lands public, healthy and accessible. That consensus is powerful, but only if we use it now. Either we protect the agencies that protect our public lands, or we watch the slow-motion sell-off unfold.

We must demand full staffing and funding for the agencies that manage our lands, and we must all stand together—hunters and hikers, ranchers and rafters, anglers and climbers—in defense of the places that belong to us all, and to future generations.

Tracy Stone-Manning is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. She is president of The Wilderness Society and a former director of the BLM. Like millions of Americans, she is spending her summer vacation on public lands.

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On April 1, the Administration began laying off most of the staff working on the National Firefighter Registry for Cancer.  The registry was proposed in a bill in 2018 so researchers could study why all firefighters, structure and wildland, suffer from certain types of cancers at much higher rates than the rest of the population. The bill was passed unanimously by Congress and signed into law by President Trump in his first term.

The registry was open to all U.S. firefighters—career, volunteer, wildland, active or retired. Participants completed a confidential survey about their service history, with data linked to state cancer registries to spot trends and risks.

It was groundbreaking for the National Firefighter Registry to recognize and include the unique job hazards posed by those who fight fires in the backcountry and areas close to homes. You might assume wildland firefighters protect themselves with breathing masks, but that is not the case.

This personal protective equipment is unworkable because wildland firefighting includes hiking for miles and digging in the dirt for days and weeks at a time. I’ve been a federal wildland firefighter for 35+ years all over the nation. Too many times to count, I have worked on wildfires and prescribed burns where thick, acrid smoke had us on our knees gagging, tears streaming from our eyes and our noses dripping gunk.

Now I work for an organization that encourages wildland firefighters—especially those who work for federal agencies—to sign up for this cancer registry. I know we’re a challenging profession to study as we’re somewhat nomadic, assigned to wildfires across the West all summer, often in remote places. That helps explain why there’s been so much less research on wildland firefighters than on structure firefighters. And there’s nearly no specific research on women firefighters. To be included was a major step.

More than 23,000 firefighters have signed up for the National Firefighter Registry since it went live in 2023, and thousands more are eligible to join. But with all the layoffs of federal workers, the registry website stopped. The National Institute of Occupational Health and Safety confirmed that the program was shut down because no support staff were left to manage the website.

The International Association of Firefighters, a powerful union that represents many municipal fire departments (but not firefighters in the Forest Service, BLM or Park Service), went directly to Health and Human Services Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to fight for restoration of this program and several others. Kennedy promised to bring them all back online and kept his promise.

But he did not address the staffing issue, and he didn’t say whether researchers already let go would be re-hired. No one knows what will happen to the data already collected.

A related firefighter health issue is “presumptive health.” It presumes that firefighters diagnosed with certain cancers and cardiovascular diseases got those illnesses as a result of their work.  Before 2022, it was nearly impossible for a federal wildland firefighter to prove to the Labor Department’s Office of Workers’ Compensation Programs that they’d become ill because of hazards faced on the job. 

But in 2022, the Labor Department declared that federal firefighters are at increased risk of certain types of cancers and cardiovascular diseases. Congress codified this declaration into law in 2023 and established a special claims website.

Now, that website is also down.

A Forest Service firefighter I spoke with called the staff cuts that black out firefighting health statistics just another “punch in the gut.”  

He added, “We’re getting ready to go into what looks like another challenging fire season with yet another distraction to worry about. But, when the fire call comes, we’ll respond like we always do and worry later.”

It should not have to be this way.

Riva Duncan is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. She is vice president of Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, www.grassrootswildlandfirefighters.com.

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Now, she’s helping Durango, population 19,000, and others in the county to prepare for the inevitable approach of wildfire. During the week of April 20, more than 40 neighborhoods will participate in mock evacuations, responding to an alert as if cataclysmic fire were the real thing. Under Legarza’s leadership, it’s become an annual community event that people look forward to, a time when residents can make sure they’re ready if—and when—the real thing happens.

Many locals can tell you that Legarza knows her stuff. She spent 20 years as one of the elite firefighters know as Hotshots, muscling a 45-pound pack deep into wilderness, digging fire lines and sleeping in the dirt.

Legarza finished her career with the Forest Service overseeing broad swaths of the nation’s firefighting apparatus. But before Legarza could become a Hotshot, she had to break into a man’s world.

“It was 1990 and I had this scrap of paper with two job openings,” she recalled, “so I called the first Hotshot superintendent who said flat out: “We don’t hire women.” Legarza, who would go on to start the San Juan Hotshots crew 12 years later, didn’t give up.

“I called the next guy on my list and said, “’Hey, my name is Shawna Legarza and I want to be a Hotshot.” This time she got the job. “I was super fit and I knew it was my job for life.” 

Still athletic at 55, she ran 13 ultramarathons last year. A co-worker, Emily Spencer, the county’s planning section chief, calls LeGarza “tough as nails.”

By 2013, Legarza had moved up fast in the Forest Service and was overseeing all federal firefighting in California, Hawaii and the Pacific Islands. “I was year-round firefighting,” she said. What it taught her was that if you’ve planned and you’re ready to act beforea wildfire erupts, you can help save people’s lives and their homes.

The consequences of not being prepared were the most heartbreaking part of firefighting, she said. “Throughout my career I had to dwell on the bad fires, the ones where people panicked. I’ve watched structures built in the trees become torches. I’ve felt the chaos when there were no appropriate roads to escape on or to bring in help.”

One local wildfire she helped fight was the 2002 Missionary Ridge fire, which burned 76,000 acres near Durango. Buildings were destroyed and mountain ranges once considered fire breaks turned into wildfire bridges.

Invited to give a talk to the Durango Rotary Club a few years ago about her career, she said the first question from the audience was: “‘You’ve had a million jobs! Are you 90 years old?’”

“I’ve worn a lot of hats,” she admitted. As a rural kid growing up in Nevada, she started out as a ranch hand building fence and collecting manure. A slaughterhouse job earned her $1.50 a day.

Now, as spring begins with a climate growing drier and warmer, it’s no secret that forests are primed for wildfire. To get residents prepared if wildfires ignite at the edges of Durango, Legarza for the last three years has sponsored a widely popular “evacuation scenario.” There’s even a waiting list to participate.

Legarza said emergency management is about imagining the future. “Ask yourself, are you prepared? Here’s a start: remove fire fuels around your property, check your insurance, pack your go-kits, know how to evacuate.”

Specifically, that means scanning your important documents and storing them in the cloud, or for Luddites, storing them in a bag next to your door. “You could have only five minutes. Learn the safe routes out of your neighborhood and where to go when you are evacuated.”

In two weeks, Legarza’s event in La Plata County kicks off at the county fairgrounds April 22, with a wildfire preparedness workshop that includes booths offering resources for the public. It ends with an evacuation drill after make-believe fire alerts are broadcast on the county’s emergency system. Residents involved will get an IPAWS alert, much like an Amber alert. Then it’s time for people to move quickly, gathering belongings, children and pets and going to a designated evacuation center.

“We’re not going to live forever,” said Legarza, “and every day becomes more precious than the day before. Let’s all be ready for the worst.”

Dave Marston is the publisher of Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He lives in Durango, Colorado.

The second to last paragraph has been changed to reflect IPAWS as the correct acronym, we had IPAUSE.

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The photos of smoldering neighborhoods and distraught residents are horrific and shocking. Could they also presage the kind of wildfire that might overtake Durango, a town of about 20,000 in southwestern Colorado?

It’s a question worth asking. Local fire experts say Los Angeles and Durango are similar in topography. Durango doesn’t experience the hurricane-force Santa Ana winds that pushed the LA fires, but it does often have sustained winds of 30 mph and gusts over 40 mph, which can vault burning embers great distances.

Perhaps more importantly, the big city and the town share the same pattern of development.

Angelenos have long coveted proximity to wooded canyons for their homes. Durango residents crave the same access to nature, pushing housing into canyons. In both places, million-dollar homes have been built among flammable trees.

Other similarities include lax regulations that fail to dissuade wildland builders. Then there’s the question of storing enough water and having sufficient water pressure to fight blazes. Los Angeles ran out of water fast because attacks on simultaneous fires quickly drew down supplies.

Durango uses around four million gallons daily and has two weeks of storage in its Terminal Reservoir. But if the city ran a dozen or more high-flow hydrants, water pressure would plummet in days. Here’s a suggestion: Prioritize building the $11.3-million-dollar, 36-inch proposed water line from Lake Nighthorse, a nearby reservoir, to the city system, boosting raw water storage to four months.

Durango has a history of large wildfires. In 2002, the 73,000-acre Missionary Ridge Fire torched 46 structures. The town suffered another blow in 2018 when wildfire ringed the town, burning 54,130 acres.

Randy Black, Durango Fire Protection District Fire Chief, is quick to point out that not one structure was lost in 2018, thanks to a coordinated effort by local and state crews. “We got lucky,” he said. “If the June 2018 fire happened later in the season, resources wouldn’t have been available.” Also key were carefully forged relationships among regional firefighting resources, Black said, along with extensive planning.

One hundred eighty employees and volunteers staff the Durango Fire District, which covers both the city and a 325-square-mile swath of the county. Black said they focus on what he calls the most important aspect of firefighting—mitigation meant to keep wildland fires from starting in the first place.

That means working to create fire breaks between wildlands and urban areas and removing fuels within the urban core. The town participates by thinning wooded areas on its perimeter, and federal agencies manage both thinning and controlled burns.

 “If you don’t do the fire mitigation, you run the risk of whole neighborhoods catching on fire,” Black said.

Another similarity between Los Angeles and Durango is that both share difficulty in getting fire insurance. Some insurers have pulled out of California entirely, and when the Durango Fire District built its new in-town firehouse last year, Black said, no one would insure the structure at first. Colorado insurance companies had just weathered 10 years of property losses to wildland fire, and they were loath to take chances. 

Colorado’s new, state-backed Fair Plan offers a last resort for home insurance, but it’s bare-bones coverage of homes worth up to $750,000.  With building costs in Durango now estimated to be $500 to $700 per square foot, losing a 2,000-square-foot home to wildfire means rebuilding a much smaller house.

I’ve talked to many wildland fire experts about how towns can fight these multiple, destructive blazes. Their suggestions boil down to three basics:

First, make building requirements stringent for any home proposed in wildlands.

Second, get residents involved. The Durango Fire District offers homeowners free assessments of fire risk, and it also advises the creation of three zones around a house: Remove anything flammable within five feet, include a turnaround big enough for fire vehicles, and allow only widely spaced trees and mown grass out to 100 feet.

A third step is “hardening” existing structures with fireproof building materials. Black, who built his own house, said he chose cement siding and a metal roof.

If homeowners take these steps, say insurers, they stand a better chance of keeping their insurance policies. 24 people have lost their lives in the Los Angeles fires as of January 12. Their deaths are a wakeup call to everyone living in the West—especially Durango.

Dave Marston is the publisher of Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to lively discussion about the West. He lives in Durango, Colorado.

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But when they woke up, they saw a plume of smoke rising into the sky. Darren Wilson had anticipated something like this, even before their trip began.

“It was in the back of my mind—I hope we don’t hike into somewhere and get trapped by a fire,” recalled Wilson, a Hamilton, Montana, resident.

They were hiking through the Anaconda Pintler Wilderness and knew it was under strict restrictions: No building campfires, no fire allowed anywhere, no exceptions. The summer had been dry and hot, and wildfires had been erupting throughout Montana.

But as the group continued hiking toward Hidden Lake, they realized the trail of smoke ahead might be the early stage of a wildfire. 

The hikers weren’t trapped, but 200 yards from Hidden Lake they came upon scorched earth surrounding a tree split down the middle, most likely from a lightning strike. Its bark was blackened and glowing, and beneath the tree the charred ground smoldered. The smoke they’d seen was seeping from beneath hot charcoal and dry wood. 

“You could tell the tree torched and burned while it was standing and then cracked and fell on the ground,” said Darren’s wife, Chelsie, an x-ray technologist with previous experience in wildland firefighting. 

“I think everyone had different feelings,” she said. “Those who had never seen forest fires before were panicking.”

The group put Chelsie Wilson in charge, and she laid out a two-step process: Some people would run to Hidden Lake to fill every water bottle and hydration pack. Everyone else would use the water to turn the smoldering dirt into mud.

Chelsie Wilson and Brittney Erickson, one of her fellow hikers, poured water on dirt, using the wet earth to put out the fire bit by bit. Chelsie kicked a burning stump into the ground. The team smothered it. She instructed and delegated jobs, describing the team as willing, communicative and diligent.

“It was really scary at first,” Chelsie said, “and then it became fun.” After two hours, she gave her team the all-clear. They had transformed the patch of smoldering char into a wet pile of dirt and debris. 

On a hike later the same day, the group climbed West Pintler Peak only to spot another fire, this one on the horizon some 10 miles away. They called in the sighting from a ridge with cell service and heard a plane fly low overhead the next day. Weeks later, they said they think that was the first alert to the Johnson Fire, a 270-acre blaze southwest of West Pintler Peak.

If there was a theme to the hikers’ trip it was definitely fire, because while camping near the bank of Oreamnos Lake, they spotted wispy smoke billowing from the opposite shoreline.

“We start yelling across the lake, top of our lungs,” Darren Wilson said. “‘Is there anybody there? Do you have a fire?’” Hearing no response, they initiated a then-familiar course of action. Gathering every container of water they possessed, the group rushed toward the smoke’s source. 

“Like children of the corn, we come out of the trees,” Wilson said, only to find three men huddled around a prohibited campfire. The hikers explained that they’d put out a smoldering wildfire, spotted another and were worried about a third—the campfire they were now looking at.

“The guys were not very impressed with us, though,” Chelsie Wilson said, as the men reluctantly extinguished their fire. “They didn’t like our story at all.” Still, they’d agreed to douse the fire and the hikers withdrew, hoping this was the end of fires popping up on their trek.

“It’s a real possibility,” Darren Wilson said. “You could be caught behind the wrong side of a fire.”

Zeke Lloyd is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He lives in Helena, Montana and writes for the Montana Free Press.

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Meanwhile, in California, some fire insurers have lost so much money they’ve pulled out of the state. Overall, fire insurance is becoming as expensive and unpredictable as the natural disasters—not just wildfires but also hail and windstorms—that are driving up rate increases. In some places, increases are as much as 1,000% for houses and condos nestled close to trees.

In Colorado, Tiffany Lockwood said she was dropped twice by fire insurance carriers over the 10 years she’s lived in Evergreen, a heavily forested exurb of Denver.

A former Florida resident, Lockwood, 59, only has one way out in case of a wildfire—and even then she’ll have little warning. “When I lived in Florida,” she said, “we knew four days ahead when a hurricane was coming. Here we get 40 minutes.”

Lockwood thinks insurance companies are running scared and giving impossible directives. One insurer asked her to remove all the shrubs and trees within 30 feet of the house. But the plan meant taking down a lot of her neighbor’s trees, too.

Evergreen’s attraction is that residents live amidst towering conifer trees. But red zones on fire maps are being expanded all over Colorado after several recent large forest fires and the wind-driven Marshall grassfire outside of Boulder, in December 2021. It destroyed more than 1,000 suburban homes and was the state’s most expensive fire yet. Formerly “safe” places are now described as at-risk.

Jeff Geslin lives in high and dry La Plata County, in southwestern Colorado, surrounded by 35 acres of piñon and juniper trees. He and his wife Lorna are used to remediation plans, he said, and when their insurance increases, “I just pay it, no questions asked.”

But they were shocked when their condo association in Summit County, governing their second home, lost its insurance policy.

“It might be because we’re close to Forest Service land,” Geslin said, “which must be more risk.” Geslin was assessed $6,772 extra for the new policy the Homeowners Association managed to find—an increase of 1,000%.

Colorado State Senator Dylan Roberts is working on legislation to insure larger structures. “I’ve gotten calls about insurance for the last year if not two years,” he said. “The single-family upset has quieted down, but the big thing I hear about is HOA and condo buildings.”

The state already has what is called the Fair Access to Insurance Requirements (FAIR) Plan in place for smaller buildings when insurance companies refuse to underwrite traditional coverage. It’s backed by private insurers and administered by an appointed board of insurance professionals.

“We hope to insure no one,” said FAIR Plan board member Carole Walker. She’s the executive director of an insurance trade group covering, New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming and Utah.

“This is insurance of last resort,” she said, “as we don’t want to compete with private insurers. They’re  struggling after 10 straight years of unprofitability in property insurance.”

The FAIR Plan board, which plans to sell policies late next year, hired industry veteran Kelly Campbell as executive director this May. It will offer bare-bones coverage with high deductibles and low maximum amounts. The plan would offer coverage of $5 million per commercial structure and $750,000 per house.

“Everything has escalated,” said Walker. “Colorado is in that perfect storm of catastrophes. The number of claims and the cost to pay those claims is at a record pace. Add in the escalating number of events like hail and wildfire, and it’s the hardest insurance market in a generation.”

Walker says Colorado established a resiliency code board via state law in 2023, with a mandate of hardening structures with fire-resistant siding, metal roofs and landscaping. “We need confidence back in the marketplace,” she said about the board. “Ultimately, this is a life-safety issue because wildfire knows no boundaries. You’re dependent on your neighbor.”

Kevin Parks, a State Farm insurer in Western Colorado, has some advice for Western homeowners: “Widen your driveway and road to 20 feet, install a turnaround big enough for fire vehicles, remove shrubs and trees close to your house, and add a perimeter of gravel all around your structure. Finally, hope you live where two roads lead to your house.”

In this new age of longer and meaner fire seasons, Parks added, “The fire is coming—now it’s a question of being ready.”

Dave Marston is the publisher of Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West.

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In Durango, Colorado, former firefighter Jonathan Bartley runs a business called DuranGoats, along with partner Adrian Lacasse, and it’s so popular they’re booked daily. Their herd usually works along the wildland-urban interface of the San Juan National Forest, clearing undergrowth around private houses in heavily wooded, steep areas at the town’s periphery.

Thanks to his work, Bartley has come to a conclusion about newcomers to the West: “When people move here thinking ‘I’d love to live in the woods,’ they’re probably making a big mistake.” If they do choose to live surrounded by trees or next to a forest, though, he has advice.

Because utilities cut off electricity during fires, he suggests buying a generator to keep sprinklers for irrigation running. He also advises homeowners to install a metal roof to repel wind-driven sparks. Always, he adds, have a go-bag ready with your most important stuff if flight becomes necessary. Most of all, he wants homeowners to create flame breaks around their house with gravel while also cutting back trees and shrubs within 30 feet of the house.

That last bit of advice is key. Firefighters triage neighborhoods, he said, picking winners and losers. When they scan neighborhoods quickly, they tend to give defensible homes extra resources while deciding that the brushy, overgrown properties are going to be lost causes.

Bartley knows fire well. He worked for a private company called Oregon Woods as part of a hand crew of 20 based in Eugene, Oregon. There, the Holiday Farm Fire started within a half-mile of his house. From that experience, he learned that our approach to wildfire is backward: “We react, rather than manage landscapes ahead of time. Spending a few million dollars on fire mitigation would have saved hundreds of millions of dollars.”

These days, he said, “I’m still fighting fires — just with goats.”

Bartley is quick to point out that fire itself is beneficial to forests. Even Cal-Fire, the firefighting arm of the state of California, says on its website, “Fire removes low-growing underbrush, cleans the forest floor of debris, opens it up to sunlight and nourishes the soil.”

The problem across the West, Bartley said, is so many unmanaged dense forests full of deadfall and brush — “ladder fuels” — that allow fire to climb into tree canopies. “By the time wildfire gets into the treetops to become crown fires,” Bartley said, “firefighters have evacuated and are miles away.”

Everyone knows that western wildfires are becoming worse. Half of the 10 biggest fires in the United States this century all burned in this region. When wildfires grow massive and super-hot, they destroy forest ecosystems, leaving nearly sterilized bare ground that’s perfect for flammable cheatgrass to invade. That sets up burned areas to burn again, often quickly.

Bartley has big ambitions for his goat herd, which can clear a quarter-acre in a day. DuranGoats charges $400 daily, he said, much less than the cost of a crew of landscapers armed with weed whackers and loppers on hilly, broken terrain. Moreover, the goats’ sharp hooves churn the dirt and fertilize it with poop and pee, setting up a regenerative cycle that improves the soil.

In northwestern Montana, former journalist David Reese has a similar business called Montana Goat. His herd moves daily, and once the animals strip leaves off small trees and gobble up the cheatgrass and knapweed, he said, it’s quick work to chainsaw small trees and dead branches.

Like Bartley, Reese has found he has almost more business than he can handle. He plans to scale his herd to 400 goats, while Bartley aims to build up to 100 goats. Both are angling for bigger contracts from homeowners and also government agencies.

Finding four-legged workers is easy. “A male dairy goat has a life expectancy of a week,” said Bartley. “They’re not plump like meat goats, have no dairy value and often are dispatched at birth.”

Extra income for DuranGoats comes from outdoor weddings. Festooned with wildflowers and bells, goats roam the grounds and are a favorite with all the guests, even pitching in as ring-bearers, or in a pinch, groomsmen. But like any single man at a wedding, they have a wandering eye, which means that flower arrangements can be gobbled up quickly.

Dave Marston is the publisher of Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He lives in Durango, Colorado.

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