Just minutes from some of the most expensive homes in Aspen, Colorado, federal crews are setting the hillside on fire, igniting the brush from hundreds of feet up in a helicopter.
This is how many western areas see their springtimes begin: as snow melts and the temperature rises, land managers prepare for wildfire season.
That means doing fire mitigation projects to reduce the severity of wildfires before they happen. One way of doing that is through a prescribed burn—like this one in Aspen—where land managers ignite the landscape themselves, targeting specific areas for regeneration.
Dan Nielsen, fuels program manager for the White River National Forest, is the burn boss on this job. During the morning briefing before the burn, he said the primary reason for this fire is to improve winter habitat for elk and mule deer, but really, it's good for the whole ecosystem.
"We burn a lot of the decadent, deadened-down oak brush as well," he said. "So then, we burn up that fuel. And then, with the newer vegetation, it has more moisture in it, and it's more resilient for wildfire."
Fire has always been a part of the natural landscape in the West. But Laura Dee, an ecologist at the University of Colorado Boulder, says human-caused climate change drives hotter, more severe wildfires, creating conditions completely new to ecosystems.
"In some places like conifer forests in the West, we're not seeing forests recover," she said. "They're turning into shrublands or just not coming back at all. And part of that is because the fires then burn hotter, they burn deeper in the soil and they burn the cones and seed stock."
Prescribed burns, on the other hand, allow managers to facilitate low-intensity fires that do help the landscape.
But prescribed fires are no small undertaking. Fire crews from as near as Aspen Fire and as far away as Cortez and Utah are assisting on this burn. (The Roaring Fork Valley Wildfire Collaborative played a key role in organizing the project.) For the White River National Forest itself, the operation is all hands on deck.
"It's not just fire people," Nielsen said. "To pull these prescribed burns off, we have input from a lot of other disciplines: wildlife, soils, geez, even timbershop. There are a lot of different aspects that go into planning these projects, just so we're not harming the overall forest there as well."
While this fire is unique because it's so close to private property, any prescribed fire is going to have its logistical complexities, says Anna Lopresti, a PhD candidate in Dee's lab at the University of Colorado Boulder.
"The slope of the landscape, is it accessible?" she said. "Will the Forest Service be using drones or will they be using hand tools? How many staff and red-carded folks would they need on the ground in order to get that burn done in the time that they have?"
"Red card" is the nickname for an incident qualification card, which certifies someone to work on wildland fire crews across multiple federal agencies. Red card workers aren't always full-time firefighters, and often assist on projects like prescribed burns.
And then, of course, there's the timing. Wind, temperature, snow on the ground, and soil moisture all play a role in the perfect prescribed burn conditions, Nielsen says.
"Springtime in the Rockies! It could be snowing right now, getting a powder day, or it could be 70 degrees and blowing wind," Nielsen said. "So we're very fortunate to have this weather window we are having right now."
In Colorado, the fire season has historically lasted from May to August, with June seeing the biggest uptick in fires. Human-caused climate change has extended the fire season by 78 days, according to Colorado's Division of Fire Prevention and Control. Wyoming had a record fire season in 2024, according to WyoFile. In Utah, KUER reports the 2024 fire season overlapped with a period of extreme heat for the state.
At the burn site, the staff are constantly monitoring weather conditions to determine the perfect time to ignite. There's also the helitack crew in the air, doing the primary ignition, as well as hand crews on the ground, maintaining fire lines, and igniting small patches if necessary.
All in all, that makes a little over 80 staff members on this one project alone.
But the ability to carry out prescribed burns could be in jeopardy, with thousands of Forest Service workers laid off or taking early retirement under the Trump administration.
The Forest Service says no firefighting positions were cut during a mass firing of probationary workers this winter. However, Lopresti said, cuts to other positions mean less flexibility for the agency when it needs to manage mitigation and active fires.
"That type of moving around gets a lot trickier when staff are getting cut, and also when funding is getting cut," she said. "It makes it difficult to pay people overtime, and it makes it difficult to pay people to come from one unit to another."
Dee also notes that funding cuts—like $3 billion from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act—could also hurt the ability of land managers to do prescribed burns at the state and local level.
"When the funds are being frozen or retracted, it makes it hard to plan," she said. "It makes it hard for non-federal people to be actually implementing these things because it can take a lot of money and specialty training that requires the funding."
Officials say they don't have a number on how many cuts affected workers with red cards, but Colorado lawmakers estimate that number is around 3,000 across the agency, with another round of job cuts likely coming to agencies like the Forest Service.
The lawmakers, which includes all the Democrats in Colorado's congressional delegation, along with freshman Republican Jeff Hurd from the Western Slope, is asking the Forest Service to restore red card workers that had been cut.
That's not to mention that hiring for wildland fire jobs has always been a challenge, according to Nielsen.
"Every year it's a moving target, how many people you get, and just hiring in general is difficult," he said.
But for now, this piece of the Rockies near Aspen will get the benefits of fire, as new vegetation moves to fill in the burned areas, hopefully strengthening the landscape far into the future.
Copyright 2025 Rocky Mountain Community Radio. This story was shared via Rocky Mountain Community Radio, a network of public media stations in Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico, including KDNK.