Colorado wildfire season in numbers

State officials urge personal responsibility while laying out their readiness for what could be a particularly challenging summer

by Allen Best

Rain and snow have arrived in Colorado during early May. It’s comforting. State officials know what lies beyond. This could well be Colorado’s most challenging wildfire year yet.

Firefighters through April had already used aircraft to dump 200,000 gallons of what they call “product” — foam, gels or other fire retardants — on wildfires. That compares with over a million gallons in all of 2025.

It’s been an exceptionally dry year. The heat has been extraordinary. Hundreds of high temperatures across Colorado have been broken. Some of the new high marks set during the March heat dome surpassed the all-time highs of April as well.

It will get hot of course, and it may well turn dry again.

“The weather on a particular day or two-day or three-day period doesn’t affect the fire outlook in a significant way,” said Gov. Jared Polis in a press conference held in a hangar at the Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport in Broomfield on April 30. He explained that moisture can produce vegetation, which can become fuel once it becomes hot and dry again. “It all kind of fits together,” he said.

Polis and his top lieutenants made remarks and took questions in announcing the 2026 Wildfire Preparedness Plan. You can see the video here.

Two themes emerged during their remarks:

• The risk of wildfire has grown, but Colorado’s preparedness has grown “exponentially,” said Polis The state now has two dedicated aircraft at its disposal and has in other ways beefed up its potential to fight fires. Part of that strategy, said the officials, is to jump on fires quickly, to prevent them from becoming bigger fires. How this differs from the past wasn’t clear. The state officials also emphasized having partners ranging from local fire districts to the federal crews.

• Every individual in Colorado must be part of the solution. If camping, put out your campfire. If you smoke, put out your cigarette. If you are target shooting, make sure you don’t set something afire. Some places will never be safe for shooting this summer. Target shooters near El Jebel caused the Lake Christine Fire in 2018 that nearly put Aspen in the dark during the July 4^th weekend.

As for fireworks, leave them to the professionals, said Stan Hilkey, the executive director of the Colorado Department of Public Safety.

“We can control our destiny,” was a refrain along with some acknowledgement that heat, drought, and fuels were beyond simple human control.

Creating defensible space has been a mantra now for many years. In other words, don’t allow vegetation to remain that can enable flames to more easily reach your buildings.

“We know mitigation works,” said Matt McCombs, director of the Colorado State Forest Service. “We’ve seen numerous examples over the years of structures and neighborhoods protected from fire damage, thanks, in part, to the work done prior to the fire to harden homes, create defensible space, and reduce fuels around homes and communities that influence the fire’s behavior.”

McCombs illustrated it with a story about a fire earlier this year near Elizabeth, northeast of Castle Rock. You probably didn’t hear about it – and that was the point of the story, he explained. The fire was on Feb. 27 in the open space adjacent to the Gold Creek subdivision in Elizabeth.

“Thankfully, the residents of that neighborhood had worked with Elizabeth Fire Protection District, the Colorado State Forest Service and other partners to reduce fuels in this open space. And with the help from a state-funded grant and other resources from the community, when that wildfire reached the treatment boundary, the flames dropped to the ground. Firefighters were quickly and safely able to contain the fire.”

The Gold Creek homeowners’ association received a grant for its work, part of $15.4 million in such grants awarded for similar projects. Overall, said McCombs, the Polis administration has spent $165 million in forest and wildfire mitigation.

Mike Morgan, chief of the Colorado Division of Fire Prevention and Control, described mounting challenges to firefighters. Fire seasons have lengthened, temperatures are rising, drought has become more common, plus beetle kills of both Ponderosa and lodgepole pine trees are mounting.

“All those are compounding factors that are driving these conditions that we used to think were unprecedented,” Morgan said. “And the reality is, it’s happening every year. It’s our new normal.”

“We can control our destiny when it comes to wildfire, and it starts at the individual level, reducing that ignition, because the geography, the fuels, and the weather are kind of beyond our control.”

Polis said that the most elevated risks posed by drought are found in the Front Range and Western Colorado, particularly in the northwest part of the state, an area hit hard by the 138,000-acre Lee Fire and smaller Elk Fire last summer.

Following are numbers that were mentioned during the hour-long session:

90% How many fires are caused by human activity. 7% is attributed to lightning. Unexplained was the cause of the final 3%.

54 That’s the number of days Colorado’s aircraft devoted to firefighting efforts have been active during the first 117 days of this year.

6,000 to 7,000 That’s the number of wildland fires in Colorado during an average year. In a moist year, said Hilkey, Colorado might have 5,000 fires.

8,000 to 9,000 The number of fires in a dry year.

95% The percentage of Colorado that is expected to be in some level of drought during June and July.

30 or less Colorado hopes to respond to reported fires in 30 minutes or less.

50% or more That’s how many Coloradans live in what is often called the wildland-urban interface, or areas most vulnerable to wildfire.

9 months Colorado has two helicopters for use in firefighting fires, one of them available for that purpose 9 months of each year and the second for 4 months.

1,500 The number of federal wildlife firefighters devoted to Colorado and four other states.

12,000 The number of Colorado firefighters.