Last week, Gunnison County joined the Roaring Fork Wildfire Collaborative (RFWC), an effort to help prevent catastrophic wildfire and create fire-adapted communities in the Roaring Fork Valley. Although only a small portion of the Roaring Fork is in the county, that area has concerned wildfire planners for decades due to steep topography, fuel types, drought impacts and bug infestation. The collaborative is intended to lessen these risks through inter-agency information sharing and public-private partnerships. Decade-old riskThe Roaring Fork Valley sits north of the county and includes the towns of Basalt, Carbondale, Glenwood Springs and Aspen. There are two kinds of fuel types in that drainage, said Jim Genung, deputy fire management officer for the Upper Colorado River Interagency Fire Management Unit. The first is in the high country. It is composed of densely forested Douglas fir and subalpine fir, and is starting to experience more beetle kill. Snowpack there is melting earlier in the season, so even if overall snowfall levels are good, risk increases due to longer dry seasons. “I wouldn't say it's a dangerous level, but the potential is always there for a fire to grow, especially with climate change,” Genung said. The other fuel type, closer to Marble, is densely populated with mountain brush like Gambel oak, Serviceberry and other shrubs and grasses. Fires tend to move a little faster in those fuels types, he said. A century of fire suppression in Colorado has created a blanket risk, Genung said, as forests that skip regenerative fires are more likely to build fuel load and therefore have larger fires in the future. The north side of those slopes have not seen fire in well over 100 years, so they've probably missed a cycle or two, Genung said. Were there to be a wildfire in the area, evacuation would be a problem. In Marble, only a single, narrow road winds along the Crystal River into town, a barrier that can slow the response time of local firefighters. “There’s essentially one way in and one way out,” said Gunnison County Emergency Manager Scott Morrill. Sparks of changeThe idea for the collaborative started early 2022, when residents in the Roaring Fork River drainage communicated an interest in better fuels treatment. With three fires in recent memory — the 2018 Lake Christine Fire, the 2020 Grizzly Creek Fire and the 2021 Sylvan Lake Fire — valley stakeholders began discussing solutions. “They decided as a group that it's time to start thinking outside of each one of our individual silos and start trying to think about what's the best thing for the watershed that we live in,” said Kevin Warner, district ranger in the Aspen-Sopris region. The idea for a multi-organization collaborative is not new, Warner said, but there’s been more interest in recent years as the wildfire risk increases. Two similar groups, the Eagle County Wildfire Collaborative and Middle Colorado Wildfire Collaborative, have formed just in the last year. The collaborative will help move resources towards the Upper Crystal River Valley and towards Marble, addressing risk by limiting redundancies by making fuel treatment plans more efficient, Morrill said. But a particular focus area for the collaborative is public-private partnerships. “In the past, work was being done on one side of the fence or the other. While there's benefit to that, there's not near the benefit you can get out of a cross boundary project,” he said. Often, federal agencies like the U.S. Forest Service or the Bureau of Land Management start a course of treatment on public land, and will have to forgo those treatments once they cross into private property. There have been success stories in the county, Morrill said, like the Quartz Creek Community Fuelbreak Project and Taylor Park Fuels Mitigation Project — both of which see public agencies partnering with private landowners. The benefits of fuel treatments are even more pertinent to private landowners,” Warner said. “In a lot of instances, private land is more likely to be right up next to, or have, valuable infrastructure on it,” he said. “National forests and BLM provide an amazing amount of ecological benefits to all of our communities, but when you're just thinking about hard infrastructure, there’s a lot more on private land.” Warner said the MOU is 95% complete, and should be finalized in the coming week. After the agreement is finalized, participating agencies will start to identify and prioritize key projects. The collaborative is looking to hire a lead coordinator to run the group. Down the line, it could even become a nonprofit, Warner said. “Right now we’re focused on getting the group together,” he said. “Let's start to agree on the things we're going to do and then look forward to that other part.”(Abby Harrison can be contacted at 970.641.1414 or abby@gunnisontimes.com.)
A portion of the Roaring Fork Valley
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