The forests and wildlands around Colorado Springs are a major draw for people looking to build or move to the city. If left unchecked, more homes in the city increase the risk of massively damaging and fast-spreading wildfires similar to what Los Angeles has battled for the past week.

The Colorado Springs Fire Department Wildfire Mitigation Section has two continuing projects to reduce the risk of fires on 400 acres of land on the city’s west side. Mitigation work in Stratton Open Space and Palmer Park began in the fall, and both are on track to be completed in March.

Cory Ashby, wildfire program administrator, had been a forester for years with the U.S. Forest Service before joining CSFD to lead the fire mitigation efforts.

The city’s forestry department and the wildfire team had last done clearance work in Stratton Open Space eight years ago. The new mitigation efforts began in October as the area grew back to a wild phase. Ashby said the area was a high priority to revisit because of the nearby South Suburban Reservoir and Gold Camp Reservoir, two major sources of drinking water for Colorado Springs Utilities.

“It may seem expensive, but it’s not insanely expensive when it stops a fire from going through,” Ashby said.

A team of contractors from N&D Tree Services worked Wednesday afternoon in the southeast corner of Stratton. A mulcher drove through stands of dying shrubs, grinding them up and spreading the broken-up wood across the ground.

A nearby slope into a gulley was too steep for the mulcher to drive down. Instead, the workers used saws and chainsaws to remove trees and branches, bundled them together and hauled them uphill to be fed into a woodchipper.

N&D Tree general manager Logan Ediger said the company worked throughout the Front Range, but Colorado Springs was a main focus of their mitigation work. Ediger said the manual removals replace the natural fire cycle that would have moved through Stratton before homes and city infrastructure had been built nearby.

“You’d have fires going through the underbrush that keep the scrub oak and species like that in check a little bit. You would have less-crowded areas around the base of your trees,” Ediger said.

The goal of the fire prevention work is to remove half the oak tree biomass across 267 acres of Stratton Open Space. The tree removals are not evenly spread out across the region, but Ashby said that was an intentional part of the forestry process. Creating clumps of trees and remaining thickets limits the options for the fire to easily catch.

The mitigation efforts also focus on making it tough for fires to “ladder,” or climb from brush along the group to low tree branches and eventually the canopy.

“We realize there doesn’t need to be heterogeneity. It doesn’t have to be uniform because that’s not what the forest is,” Ashby said.

The Fire Department has been offering wildfire mitigation since 2002. Ashby’s department received a major boost in 2021 when Colorado Springs voters approved providing $20 million in excess taxes to create an official fire mitigation program.

Ashby said his team received around $1 million of the funding per year to split between major mitigation efforts like Stratton Open Space, tree removals organized by homeowners or homeowner associations, and public education efforts around fire risk.

The next round of fire mitigation projects is still being finalized. Ashby said that mitigation work across roughly 70 acres of Blodgett Open Space was planned for later this year. A larger, 300-acre project was being organized.