Hope for the Hills

Last year’s Alexander Mountain Fire was yet another reminder that Northern Colorado’s foothills remain in a precarious position.

Most of the state’s largest wildfires have occurred in Northern Colorado. This is so apparent now that Alexander’s 10,000 burned acres look almost quaint despite the damage and heartache it brought to homeowners in rural Larimer County.

But there’s hope, both in the way agencies from all sectors are working to restore the areas affected by the worst fires and in what they’re doing to prevent new fires from burning so hot. The agencies listed here are just a small part of the extensive effort underway to help Northern Colorado get its forests back.

“Fire is a natural part of our landscape,” says Reghan Cloudman, spokesperson for the U.S. Forest Service. “What the Forest Service and partners focus on is how to best manage the landscape to accept fire.”

One tree at a time

Kevin Brinkman felt compelled to help his beloved outdoors in 2020, when the Cameron Peak Fire ripped through more than 200,000 acres in the Poudre Canyon, choking our air and charring our landscape. That same year, he went on a backpacking trip in the Lost Creek Wilderness near the burn scar of the 2002 Hayman Fire and found a way to make a difference.

The Hayman Fire’s 138,000 acres made it the state’s largest wildfire in history when it burned through the forest, and yet, 20 years later, it still looked much like it did when the fire released its last curl of smoke. That was alarming to Brinkman, given that 16 of the 20 largest wildfires have occurred in the last 13 years. Hayman now ranks fourth.

“It looked like a moonscape,” says his colleague Katelynn Martinez, “and he was curious as to why it still looked the way it did.”

Martinez is the director of operations and business development for OneCanopy, a Loveland-based tree nursery with a goal of becoming the largest producer of native plants for reforestation in the Rocky Mountains and operating in all areas of the reforestation pipeline by 2027. Brinkman researched the Hayman landscape and launched OneCanopy in 2023 for one reason: Colorado needs more trees.

As it stands now, the state needs to reforest three million acres, Martinez says, but Colorado’s largest tree producers can only meet roughly 20 percent of that demand. Brinkman saw a business opportunity there after building a real estate company that got him elected to the Colorado State University Real Estate Hall of Fame with more than $800 million in real estate transactions.

There are many reasons why the state falls short in producing enough trees, including inadequate seed volume, financial constraints and Colorado’s harsh environment, Martinez says. OneCanopy hopes to help by growing more than a million seedlings every year in its 34,000-square-foot greenhouse and surrounding property.

“The nursery made the most sense because it was the most tangible way to get involved,” Martinez says. “There was an actual product to be made. It was a good fit for a business.”

Brinkman’s resources, of course, were also vital, both in the capital to pay for the property and the knowledge to acquire it, Martinez says. That helped eliminate many barriers that others face in tree production, which is demonstrated in the way OneCanopy views its operations as more of a social enterprise than a business focused on profits.

“We have the mission of a nonprofit but the drive of a business,” Martinez says. “Basically any profits we make, instead of going to Kevin, they go back into the business.”

Brinkman’s willingness to forgo profits means OneCanopy doesn’t need donations—although it will take them—or grants to survive, and avoiding nonprofit status means, bluntly, avoiding red tape, such as a board or meeting government requirements for funding.

“There are already a lot of nonprofit and government players,” Martinez says. “Those people are very much needed, but each one has its own noise and bureaucracy. We didn’t want to be adding to that. We’d almost be working against our mission to streamline the process and make us an easy partner to produce more trees.”

OneCanopy recognizes the obstacles Colorado faces in getting seedlings into the ground and growing. The same issues that cause hotter wildfires that burn longer—including drought and stifling summers—also make it harder for reforestation, and Colorado’s altitude and arid climate have always made it hard for trees to grow. But they’re relying on the research that Colorado State University and others are doing to ensure our state forests can not only survive but thrive.

OneCanopy hopes to add to the trees available for planting when Colorado is ready for them. So far it’s going well: The company has sold more than 650,000 trees since its inception, and it reached more than one million seeds sown late last year.

“We don’t have decades to wait,” Martinez says. “We can’t always wait for the science. Sometimes we have to work with what’s available. We can’t solve everything. But we can do this.”

Reforestation research

The aftermath of the Hayman Fire that inspired Brinkman to start OneCanopy is also what inspired scientists at the Colorado Forest Restoration Institute. Even 20 years later, it still looks like the moon for one painful reason: Bringing a forest back to life is not only hard work, but it’s also frustrating.

“When people think about planting trees, they think you go and just put a seedling in the ground,” says Marin Chambers, who leads post-wildfire reforestation and recovery efforts and conducts research for the institute. “But it has the capacity to exhaust forest management resources and activities.”

The need for researching the most efficient ways to carpet Colorado’s charred landscapes with trees appears more dire than ever: Forests aren’t bouncing back as well as everyone hoped.

“We’re seeing certain forest types with limited regeneration,” Chambers says.

The institute works with many others to further understand how forests recover, the best plants to use to assist them and, perhaps most importantly, what methods to use to get seeds into the ground.

Seeds are scarcer than you might think, and many of them are getting eaten by insects and mammals, Chambers says. In one recent study, they planted five different types of trees in the Cameron Peak burn area to assess their survival rate in the most extreme temperatures of the year.

One question the study hoped to answer was whether, say, ponderosa pines will still be successful or if other trees that do well at lower elevations might be more suitable in higher elevations now, given that the changing climate means we’re experiencing hotter and drier days.

“We don’t have a big cloud of agreement on what forests are doing,” Chambers says, “but we do know that forests have changed dramatically in the last 400 years, and those changes have to do with climate.”

The institute’s research also focuses on whether placing seeds directly onto the ground, instead of planting seedlings, or baby trees grown in a nursery, yields better results. Carrying seedlings into a severely burned area is not only difficult, but it’s also dangerous, Chambers says.

“These are difficult-to-access areas,” Chambers says. “The effort of carrying seeds is a lot less dangerous than seedlings.”

But the institute does a lot more than just conduct research, Chambers says.

“Our mission is to bridge the gap between science and land management,” she says. “We do a lot of research, but we also help bring science to the stakeholders.”

They want to help land managers make decisions, not direct them, Chambers says. Part of that was putting out a state forest resilience planning guide in February that collected information from 40 agencies and 90 experts on coordinating efforts to leverage the billions of dollars it will take to help the state forests recover from wildfires.

“A lot of the questions we are trying to address are coming from land managers,” Chambers says. “These are the big questions, so we want to collaborate together and address their needs and knowledge gaps.”

Wildfire mitigation

The Coalition for the Poudre River Watershed doesn’t want to stop wildfires. Instead, they believe fire can be a tool to prevent them from growing into monsters.

Fire was always a part of the landscape, and it has many benefits, including keeping trees from growing on top of each other, clearing out carpets of clogged-up brush and giving the land a fresh start by putting nutrients back into the soil, says Megan Maiolo-Heath, communications and outreach coordinator for the coalition. But more than 100 years of fire suppression have left a dried-out mess ready to burn like jet fuel at the first spark.

Thinning, prescribed fire and intentional clearing saved Red Feather Lakes from the wildfires in the Poudre Canyon, she says. The same kind of treatment makes a forest more resilient, the kind of toughness it will need to withstand our changing climate and ever-present wildfire danger. Other organizations work on this as well, including the Northern Colorado Fireshed Collaborative.

“If we increase the pace and scale of prescribed fire, I definitely think we could make an impact,” Maiolo-Heath says. “We are really behind.”

Prescribed fire and other measures to prevent so-called “high-severity” wildfires like the ones that have burned through the Poudre Canyon make up roughly a third of what the coalition does. It also helps the landscape recover from those fires: In fact, it was born from the ashes of the Hewlett Gulch and High Park fires in 2012 that scorched more than 95,000 acres.

The coalition mainly exists to protect the integrity of the Poudre River watershed. The High Park and Hewlett Gulch fires showed just how much degradation in water quality large wildfires can cause: Drinking water supplies for Fort Collins and Greeley were threatened as heavy summer rainstorms swept debris and ash into the Poudre. The burn scars also caused severe ecological distress, wiping out prized fishing spots.

A group of natural resources agencies, nonprofits, representatives from Greeley and Fort Collins, local businesses and individuals gathered to discuss how they could rehabilitate the land after the 2012 fires. They called themselves the High Park Restoration Coalition, and they identified top priorities, found funding to pay for them and trained volunteers to help them achieve their goals. The organization morphed into the Coalition for the Poudre River Watershed, which now does much of the same kind of work. The need for rehabbing the land from wildfires has only become more urgent.

“We focus a lot of our work as an agency on post-fire mitigation,” Maiolo-Heath says.

The coalition uses science and input from experts to figure out where their reforestation efforts will have the most impact. They tend to measure these based on how those efforts will protect the watershed.

During the first couple of years after a fire, they mulch the area “just to get some roughage on the ground,” Maiolo-Heath says, and focus on other efforts such as capturing sediment in small channels before it reaches the Poudre. These can include what Maiolo-Heath calls “beaver mimicry,” such as placing log jams that slow the water and filter the sediment. Folks who want to help can volunteer for the coalition and other organizations that work on these types of projects, such as the Poudre Wilderness Volunteers and The Big Thompson Watershed Coalition.

Maiolo-Heath says they also focus on the health of the Poudre itself, something that came to the forefront a year after the fires that led to the coalition’s formation, when the Colorado Flood of 2013 washed through our region. The projects help to improve the resiliency of the Poudre just as the other efforts improve the 2012 resiliency of the landscape. These include reconstructing the Godfrey Ditch diversion in the South Platte River (a part of the watershed) and restoring ditches such as the Eaton Ditch in addition to doing work on the main body of the river.

Their work now is as important as it’s ever been, Maiolo-Heath says, given that as of early March, the Trump administration cut 3,500 employees of the U.S. Forest Service.

“Public land managers are understaffed,” she says, “at a time when we need it the most.”

 

Government Efforts

The U.S. Forest Service, the largest landowner in the areas most affected by wildfires in Northern Colorado, has continued playing a large role in the restoration of the Poudre Canyon landscape since the Cameron Peak fire burned through it in 2020.

Their more recent work includes mulching more than 11,000 acres on U.S. Forest Service land. Plantings occurred on more than 800 acres in the last couple of years, a significant accomplishment but also a reflection of the reforestation issues previously listed.

The restoration work also gathered employees, youth crews and volunteers to rebuild the Roaring Creek Trail, which was completed last year. In the last three years, the U.S. Forest Service worked to repair other infrastructure, including toilets, kiosks and fences in the burn area.

Noxious weeds, always looking for an opportunity to thrive, continue to need controls. There are other things they plan to do in the Cameron Peak burn area, like rebuild the Jack’s Gulch Campground. Design work is already underway.