Lookout Mountain will inevitably one day burn.
But before that fire sparks in our beloved foothills, Coloradans can work to ensure parts of the forests survive, providing for faster recovery and protecting the complex watershed that more than half a million households rely on for drinking water.
The work needed is complex, costly and controversial. Saving our forests from catastrophic fire while allowing slow-burning fires to replenish our landscapes will take everyone pulling together in the next 10 years on projects that feel, well, downright destructive.
It抖阴ap not going to be easy, but it will be worthwhile.
What culling trees looks like
The dramatic effects of fire mitigation are on full display at the Lookout Mountain Preserve and Nature Center, where Jefferson County foresters recently removed 60% of the small and medium-sized trees on about 73 acres of parkland.
When all was said and done, foresters removed roughly 500 very small trees and 100 significant trees per acre, leaving an open forest of older, established ponderosa pines. These older pines can withstand a fire that remains burning along the ground and stays out of the treetops, said Terry Auciello, natural resources supervisor with Jefferson County Parks and Open Space.
The remaining trees will also be more resilient to pest infestations like the pine beetles that this summer killed scores of trees visible from the Interstate 70 corridor between Genesee and Floyd Hill. Auciello explains that trees need water to produce sap to force out an attacking colony of beetles. If a large tree is competing with dense undergrowth, dozens of saplings and a nearby large tree, it cannot get the water it needs to fight off diseases and pests. The historic drought of 2025-26 has exacerbated the problem, and he said far more trees in this corridor will die before next summer.
I think of it like culling tomato seedlings when they sprout. It抖阴ap hard to do after nurturing the seeds for weeks in ideal conditions to spark germination, but if you don鈥檛 give some of the seedlings space to grow, none of them will. A seedling growing alone in a pot is far more likely to reach maturity and start producing fruit.
Healthier, more resilient trees with less competition will also be more likely to survive a moderate-intensity wildfire.
Will it work?
A decade ago, Terry Haury reluctantly agreed, along with the majority of his neighbors, to cull 60% of the trees on his 40 acres of forested land in Conifer. The neighborhood combined their resources and a state matching grant for the job.
Then, he said, looking out at the dramatically changed forest, the doubts started: 鈥淲as this really necessary?鈥�
Today he has no doubts. Lightning near his home in the middle of the land mitigated for fire and drought resilience. The fire spread quickly along the ground, but when firefighters arrived, they were surprised to find easy access to the low-intensity blaze in a forest dramatically thinner than its surrounding lands. It was contained before a single home burned.
Haury says the fire mitigation saved his home, possibly lives and the forest.
Auciello says that a fire sparked in a low-density forest with healthy older trees is significantly less likely to have the crown fires that burn hot, spread fast from tree to tree and devastate the landscape.
A treated forest can buy homeowners time to get to safety and firefighters time to respond.
The herculean effort
For residents in a small community known as Rainbow Hill, the outlook is dire.
Landowner Erin Pyne is pre-grieving the death of her forest 鈥� first it was the pine beetle threat, but now she is preparing for a catastrophic fire.
鈥淚鈥檓 so scared,鈥� Pyne said.
Last year she pulled permits to burn slash piles during the winter, but never got the 4鈥� of snow required to burn her small-scale wildfire mitigation efforts safely. Estimates say it鈥檒l cost $5,000 an acre to reduce her fire risks in the easily accessible spots and $15,000 or more per acre for the steep hillsides on her property.
Wildfire mitigation is essential in Rainbow Hill, a neighborhood of 3,200 acres cut into about 120 lots. The community has one road in and one road out.
But even if miracle funding were to arrive to help homeowners like Pyne with the essential work, there is a deep sense of grief for the work itself.
The forest on Pyne’s property is extremely dense when compared to the now thinned Lookout Mountain land. Pyne has juniper bushes and blue spruces growing alongside ponderosa pines. The forest feels healthy even though it is pockmarked with dead standing beetle kills. A group of children come to the forest on her land and use it like a schoolroom. But the forest is not healthy, and Cassie Nyx, a teacher with The Wild Ones Forest School, is trying to teach kids about the need for change.
Of course, even if everyone agreed to treat their land, the other problem is funding.
About halfway between Pyne’s property in Rainbow Hill and the Jefferson County open space on Lookout Mountain is the Mount Vernon Canyon Club. The club holds almost 1,000 acres of what appeared to be very densely packed forest, and it will begin thinning a very small portion — about 40 acres — of it this October.
Mount Vernon is paying half of the costs, and a matching grant from the Colorado State Forest Service for wildfire mitigation will cover the other half. The private club is also teaming up with Denver Mountain Parks, which owns land adjacent to Mount Vernon. Together they will treat 80 acres at a cost of about $484,000.
The Lookout Mountain project’s total cost was $289,000. Half of the funding came from Jefferson County’s Parks and Open Space funding, and the rest was funded through a wildfire mitigation grant program run by the Colorado State Forest Service.
But couldn’t the logging industry be invited onto public lands to do some of this work and save taxpayers money? Can’t someone profit from this timber? Tree-harvesters are generally not interested in a project where we remove all the little trees, shrubs, and small fuels and leave the high-value trees for future generations. Loggers are looking for land that is easy to access, and they are looking for the 40% of trees that are left standing in a project aimed at forest health. The incentive for them is the opposite of what our forests need — protecting old, established trees that will survive pests and fire.
Protecting our water
It undoubtedly feels bad for Coloradans who do not live in the high-risk areas of the wildland urban interface (WUI) to subsidize work being done on private land they will never get to visit and enjoy. It feels doubly bad when so much work needs to be done and funded on our public lands and yet the budgets for the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management have been reduced.
Yet, there is a compelling reason for us all to chip in on these projects no matter who owns the land — water.
Take, for example, the watershed that runs down Clear Creek Canyon below Lookout Mountain, Mount Vernon and Rainbow Hill. That river provides clean drinking water to an estimated 500,000 households in Golden, Arvada, Westminster and Thornton. We know from disasters like the Hayman Fire how burned hillsides send debris, contaminants, ash and other particulates into what was once a clean drinking source. The cost from — more than $70 million — and ongoing.
Preventing a catastrophic fire from sending debris rushing down Clear Creek Canyon is in everyone’s best interests.
Clear Creek County Commissioner George Marlin makes a compelling case that alone, his small county of about 9,000 residents could never fund the mitigation needed to protect the headwaters of Clear Creek. His county is working hard to protect the forests, but they need help. Should Coloradans be subsidizing that work, and what could it even look like?
Paying for it all with Proposition 137
This November, voters will be asked whether the state should give an additional $175 million a year to wildfire mitigation and other land conservation needs in the Great Outdoors Colorado program. The money would not come from the state’s general fund but would be funded only in years with TABOR refunds. The extra sales taxes paid on outdoor recreation goods, over what the state can retain under the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, would be kept by the state and distributed to agencies working on this very issue.
That money from Proposition 137, if approved by voters, isn’t going to save the millions of acres in this state at risk of a total-loss fire.
But it could make important dents in key areas that we want to protect for future generations for both recreation and water quality.
Coloradans can band together to save our forests and protect our water.
Megan Schrader is The Denver Post’s opinion editor.
To send a letter to the editor about this article, submit online or check out our guidelines for how to submit by email or mail.
