In 2020, Colorado experienced some of the most devastating fires to ever touch the state. This summer, the U.S. Forest Service went to work to help restore the burn scars left behind by these wildfires.
The East Troublesome Fire, which began in the Arapaho National Forest near Kremmling, grew 100,000 acres overnight, jumped the Continental Divide towards Estes Park, and ended up becoming Colorado's second-largest wildfire ever.
Matt Bendell was working with a timber crew in 2020, marking trees for future harvest, and remembered watching smoke fill the air as the Cameron Peak Fire burned just 50 miles from his job site.
Four years later, Bendell led a crew to plant nearly 300,000 seedlings in the burn scars the 2020 wildfires left behind. Bendell now works as a U.S. Forest Service silviculturist, which is someone who controls the growth, composition, and health of forests and woodlands.
"Before 2020, we rarely saw wildfire activity this intense, let alone in one year," Bendell said. "What's hard to capture in these numbers is the sheer devastation left behind when wildfires burn that hot and fast, which prompts reforestation efforts at this scale."
Wildfires can help rejuvenate fire-adapted tree species like the lodgepole pine. The heat coaxes the lodgepole pine cones to open and allows the seed to spread and start the regeneration process. When a fire is too hot or intense, however, the cones are destroyed completely, resulting in patchy, slow or nonexistent regeneration.
When there isn't regeneration, problems begin to arise, according to Bendell.
"When we don't see regeneration like we would expect, problems start compounding when spring storms roll in. Major flooding occurs, roads wash out and watershed quality can deteriorate. We're experiencing that throughout the forest. Hundreds of thousands of people depend on water that passes through our forests, so we start exploring avenues for reforestation to mitigate these issues," Bendell said.
For many living near the East Troublesome burn scar, the devastation was apparent. Forest Service crews collected data in the aftermath of the fires and confirmed that regeneration was occurring only in parts of the burn scars and not at the scale and speed needed.
Emma Enebo, who is a forester with the Forest Service, said that without helping these landscapes, they risk being changed forever.
"If left unmanaged, we could see a change in the landscape, a grassland could start to form where the forest once stood, and it could be much farther down the road before we see trees growing in the area again," Enebo said. "This could cause major changes in the watershed and affect thousands of lives. It also wouldn't meet our goals as an agency to sustain the health, diversity and productivity of the nation's forests and grasslands to meet the needs of present and future generations."
In 2020, Enebo was finishing her degree in Fort Collins while the fires burned. She remembered calling her mom in Tabernash while the area was being placed into pre-evacuation status.
Four years later, Enebo is helping her community build a more resilient landscape.
"I'm happy I ended up here . I get to serve my community and help rebuild after the fire," Enebo said.
Gravel Mountain, located in the East Troublesome burn scar, has been struggling to regenerate, according to the Forest Service.
"We identified over 1,200 acres in the Gravel Mountain area that wasn't regenerating favorably," Enebo said. "The road into that area is currently closed due to a wash out, and the highway to the road has had a lot of flooding and landslides; they just try to keep it open at this point. The area is right next to Kauffman Creek, too, so there are major watershed implications there."
In the aftermath of the fires, the Forest Service placed an order with Bessey Nursery in Nebraska for nearly 300,000 tree seedlings.
Bendell explained that Bessey Nursery is a regional nursery for the Forest Service.
"They have seed and cone inventory going as far back as the 1970s, and from the specific seed zones and elevations where these fires burned, so we were able to get seed from trees that grew in these locations originally for replanting," Bendell said.
By June 2024, the seedlings that were sown in 2022 had grown to 5 inches and were ready to be planted. Arapaho and Roosevelt National forests timber crews spent three weeks planting and supervising contractors, including Tovar's Reforestation.
Crews planted a total of 282,619 seedlings over several weeks in June, with nearly 90% of the seedlings going into the Gravel Mountain area and the rest going into the Williams Fork burn scar near Kinney Creek.
"We couldn't have done this work without the crews from Tovar's," Enebo said. "It was a lot of long days, sunup to sundown, with crews carrying thousands of seedlings in packs across some of the roughest, most burned areas of our forest."