As spring rolled into summer, fire officials in Southwest Colorado were preparing for an average wildfire season.
“Average could be a very active fire season,” Toby Cook, deputy fire staff officer with the San Juan National Forest, said in May.
It’s a complex and difficult thing to predict, but fire managers were ready to stay busy in Southwest Colorado. And then, consistent monsoon moisture arrived.
Just 37 fires started on the San Juan National Forest this year. That’s a little over 12% of the 300 fires that have, on average, started each year over the last five years. That statistic includes trees ignited by lighting that quickly burn out or are put out by firefighters without leaving any impact on the landscape.
“We were way below the average,” said Pat Seekins, fuels program manager for the SJNF. “So, (it was) pretty slow.”
The state’s climate scientists noted that the Western Slope had a wet summer. For large swathes of Southwest Colorado, summer 2024 was in the top 35 wettest summers since 1895.
The wet summer months, preceded by a wet winter and spring, set the lands managed by the SJNF up for a mellow fire season.
That was not the case across the rest of the Western United States.
Nearly 55,000 fires started this year nationwide and burned over 8.5 million acres, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.
“The Pacific Northwest, Oregon, Washington, California and Nevada, Idaho, had very long and extreme fire seasons, and so most of us were out West, helping the national fire cause in different various positions,” Seekins said.
He runs incident management teams on larger fire operations and spent three weeks in Oregon and two weeks in Wyoming, in addition to time in Idaho and the southeastern U.S. doing hurricane response.
When resources weren’t out of state, firefighters were nonetheless able to keep busy at home. In total, the Forest Service treated over 25,000 acres of SJNF land to benefit forest health, protect watersheds and reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfire in the 2024 fiscal year, which started Oct. 1, 2023.
Of those, 9,500 acres were set ablaze to fulfill prescriptions; 7,100 acres were treated mechanically; and the forest claimed 8,700 “beneficial acres” of four unintentionally ignited wildfires, such as the Spruce Creek Fire which burned 5,700 acres northeast of Dolores in May.
That’s a decent step toward the 30,000 to 40,000 acre-benchmark that Seekins has previously stated as a rough goal for annual treatment on the SJNF. In the 2023 fiscal year, the forest treated 26,500 acres, although a significant chunk of that – over 15,000 acres – was treated mechanically.
“It was a pretty good year,” Seekins said.
Wet conditions, which helps fuel growth, followed by what is predicted to be a warmer and drier winter could mean heightened fire risk come spring.
But, Seekins pointed out, if this year’s outcomes taught any lesson, it’s that fire season is difficult to predict.
rschafir@durangoherald.com
