Eagle County's wildfire experts are bracing for the summer season after a winter of historic drought.
"The term I'm using is ... the eve of the worst wildfire season ever," said Hugh Fairfield-Smith, division chief of wildland for the Eagle River Fire Protection District.
As of Thursday afternoon, the U.S. drought monitor put all of Eagle County in either extreme or exceptional drought, and the warm and dry weather is only expected to continue. The monitor cites "large fires develop" as one historical condition experienced in areas under extreme drought.
With snowpack levels currently measuring not only well below average, but also below drought indicator levels, there is very little chance of things turning around in time to prevent a dry summer.
Firefighting organizations like Fairfield-Smith's team at Eagle Valley Wildland, a cross-jurisdictional collaborative that has been preparing for and fighting wildfires in Eagle County since its inception in 2018, measure the dryness of the trees that might fuel fires throughout fire season.
In November, when Eagle Valley Wildland stopped taking fuel samples, "we were near critical conditions in the timber," Fairfield-Smith said. "We were above 90 percentile in energy release components. I am anticipating that we will be writing new ERCs for the timber this year."
An Energy Release Component, or ERC, is a National Fire Danger Rating System index for measuring the amount of heat fuels might release in a fire, which is essentially an indicator of how hot the fire will burn.
After such a dry winter, which followed a dry summer in 2025, Eagle County's fuels are generally quite dry.
"Even if it started pouring rain and snowing right now, the timber will still burn," Fairfield-Smith said.
Larger fuel sources, measuring 10 inches in diameter or larger, are known as 1,000-hour fuel. "What that means is it takes a thousand hours of saturated moisture to move that one fuel percent plus or minus. That's 42 days," Fairfield-Smith said. "So really, the only thing that can make the trees not burn is days and months of wet snow. And we don't have that snow sitting on the trees right now."
Fairfield-Smith compared the upcoming summer to summer 2020, the year of Colorado's three largest fires, as well as the Grizzly Creek Fire in Glenwood Canyon, which burned over 32,000 acres and shut down Interstate 70 for an unprecedented period of two weeks.
"In 2020, we were at the 98 percentile (critical fire danger), or historical ERCs, for most of the summer. We are going to be way past that," Fairfield-Smith said. "It is not looking good."
Despite the threat the upcoming wildfire season poses, there is one bright spot: Eagle Valley Wildland is "as prepared as we can be," to fight the fires likely coming this summer, Fairfield-Smith said.
"Since the inception of EVW (Eagle Valley Wildland) and all these partnerships, we have been planning for this," Fairfield-Smith said. "All the effort that we have put in is basically in preparation for this type of a year."
Eagle Valley Wildland has been working on methodically treating potential fire fuel sources throughout Eagle County since 2018, which included building pathways through forests and taking down grassy stretches.
"We are the national standard," Fairfield-Smith said. "Nobody has ever done anything like this before."
All 10,000 acres of treatment done in Eagle County has been mapped and is now in the federal databases, easily accessible should federal resources like planes be called in to help fight fires.
The treatments also make dropping fire retardant from planes -- already one of the most effective wildland fire fighting strategies -- more impactful.
"If you don't do fuel treatments and the retardant is unable to hit the forest floor, it might have a 20% success rate. But when we can open up a canopy and introduce grasses, it has the ability to hit the forest floor, which has an 80 to 90% success rate," Fairfield-Smith said.
The fuel treatments also provide Eagle Valley Wildland with the option to "backburn" around homes, which means burning the grasses to control and corral a wildfire. "If there is no fuel treatment, then we are just starting another problem," Fairfield-Smith said. "But we have the ability, with all the mitigation that we have done, to create a tactical advantage to have those two positive outcomes for us."
Backburning allows firefighters to redirect large fires by literally fighting fire with fire.
"We've been planning to burn around all of the homes in Eagle County since 2017," Fairfield-Smith said.
Eagle County is also providing funds to help Eagle Valley Wildland hire up to 10 additional firefighters this summer.
In summer 2025, Eagle Valley Wildland responded to more than 100 wildfires in summer 2025, including 17 on the interstate.
While weather and drought conditions are relatively effective indicators for the type of wildfire season coming this summer, and Eagle Valley Wildland said it well-prepared, wildfires are unpredictable by nature.
"Wildfire is so dynamic, you can't have a plan," Fairfield-Smith said.
"We can't say where the next fire is going to start," said Micah Rader, area wildfire manager with Eagle Valley Wildland. "If we could, then we could just remove those trees."
"It's tricky, because we get asked about this upcoming fire season, and I don't have a crystal ball," Rader said. "But I've been telling people which actions they can take now."
Rader and Fairfield-Smith recommended homeowners harden their homes against wildfires -- this starts with a home assessment -- and take advantage of Eagle Valley Wildland's chipper program to dispose of dead, downed, diseased and dying trees on their property.
Everyone in Eagle County this summer should be prepared to evacuate in case of fire. This includes building evacuation kits that might contain cash, cell phone chargers, clothes and other emergency items and planning a meeting point to connect with loved ones in case cell service collapses.
If an evacuation order does come, public safety members, including police officers, sheriff's deputies and possibly firefighters, will help guide residents toward evacuation routes if needed. For single entry and exit communities, "What we want people to do is go out the normal way unless otherwise advised. They don't need to know because public safety will be there, and the sheriff's office, guiding them where to go," Fairfield-Smith said.
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