More than 41,000 piles burned! 2023/24 Pile Burning Impact in the NoCo Fireshed

The mission of the Northern Colorado Fireshed Collaborative (NCFC) is to create resilient landscapes by facilitating an increase in the pace and scale of not only mechanical fuel reduction methods but also prescribed fires and strategically managed wildland fires across jurisdictional boundaries. Pile burning is a necessary activity to help reduce wildland fuels, potentially preparing an area for future broadcast prescribed fire (Learn more here about different forest treatments).

Across the Fireshed’s federal partners, local fire protection districts, and county fire agencies, 41,492 piles were burned across the NCFC footprint. Additionally, some local fire protection districts assisted on burns with the Arapaho Roosevelt National Forest. We did not capture piles burned by private landowners, but that work is absolutely critical to mitigating the risks of wildfire to our communities. 

Preparing the land for fire

Fire is a natural part of the landscape of northern Colorado’s Front Range. Forests and plants renew through periodic fire, resulting in a rich diversity of wildlife habitat, functioning watersheds, and an abundance of recreation opportunities. However, increasingly large and severe fires are putting these resources and assets at risk of long-term damage or loss. For over two decades, forest land and fire managers have been reducing flammable fuel loads and restoring forest conditions adaptive to fire through mechanical, manual, and prescribed fire methods. Achieving landscape level forest resilience requires bringing prescribed fire back into the management toolbox as a natural ecosystem process. On some dense sites, mechanical and manual thinning may be required before prescribed fire can be used, including pile burning to remove cut woody material. 

Pile burning challenges

Why do we have far less pile burning on non-federal lands? In Colorado, practitioners from local and state agencies face many hurdles to pile burning including:

• Challenges acquiring prescribed fire liability insurance
• Not having enough local qualified personnel and resources for burning
• Weather windows that are too short, narrow and/or unpredictable

Looking to new solutions

We celebrate this season’s successes, and we hope to continue pile and broadcast burning efforts across a greater variety of land ownerships in the coming years. The Arapaho Roosevelt National Forest wrote in greater detail about their incredible 38,700 piles burned this season here. NCFC partners are also looking to new creative solutions to increasing pile burning and capacity, detailed in these articles about:  

• A new local Pile Burn Collaborative, following the Prescribed Fire Association model 
• The Arapaho Roosevelt assisting to burn piles on adjacent private lands 
• Crews from The Nature Conservancy helping add capacity from the Keystone Agreement