Study: Human-caused fires in San Juan forest often occur near roads, trails - The Journal

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Campfire smoke lingers inside the San Juan National Forest at a designated campsite on July 4, 2021, near Lake City. (Hugh Carey, The Colorado Sun)

Hugh Carey/The Colorado Sun

A study of fires in the San Juan National Forest showed that people don’t start the majority of Southwest Colorado’s wildfires, but those they do ignite are near roads and hiking trails

In July 2020, Seth Zachek was volunteering at a wildly popular trail in the San Juan mountains just outside of Silverton. The goal: teaching hikers how to tread lightly in the Ice Lakes Basin, a pristine wonderland high in the range.

The irony wasn’t lost on Zachek when volunteers discovered a plume of smoke and an unsafe, illegal campfire close to the trailhead.

“Some guy had dragged a whole half of a tree into this campfire,” Zachek said. “And it was, like, 8-foot-high flames next to the trailhead with all these people around.”

His trepidation turned out to be warranted. Three months later, a wildfire likely sparked by a cigarette butt burned through the lower basin, forcing a helicopter evacuation of 28 people and closing the trail for almost a year.

It was a scenario that advocates were trying to prevent, and one scrutinized in research published last month in the journal Natural Hazards.

Humans started more than a quarter of all wildfires from 2000 to 2018 in San Juan National Forest, and those fires tended to be closer to campgrounds, trails and roads, clear evidence that people enjoying the outdoors are often to blame, wrote University of North Alabama researchers who reviewed 18 years of data from the southern Colorado forest.

The 2020 Ice Fire started at a boulder about 75 feet from the Ice Lakes Trail. The fire was likely human-caused. (Courtesy of U.S. Forest Service)

Courtesy of U.S. Forest Service

The study affirmed anecdotal observations of people in Southwest Colorado, who grapple each summer with heavy recreational use — and the related wildfire risk — in the 1.8 million-acre San Juan National Forest.

Locals like Zachek have seen more people than ever flock to the treasured region of high peaks and alpine valleys for the hiking, camping, fishing, mountain biking and off-roading. That’s come with a challenge: many new visitors, he said, appear not to come prepared for a safe trip to the San Juans. “I would say it’s been challenging for the locals to get out-of-towners on board with trying to tread lightly and ‘leave no trace’ practices,” he said. “I think it just comes with the volume that we’re having.”

That means trails like Ice Lakes are typically more crowded, campsites are harder to find and sometimes visitors build campfires that escape the ring, burning portions of national forest.

Jian Chen, an associate professor at the University of North Alabama, co-published the study with former graduate student Adam Benefield. The pair used a statistical analysis of more than 1,600 wildfires and found that, when humans did start blazes, they tended to be in remote areas but near access points such as roads and hiking trails.

The burden, they say, is on visitors. They specifically called out “mismanagement of campfire and overnight camping activities” and an overall “lack of outdoor etiquette being practiced by outdoor recreators on public lands.”

A scene from the Spring Creek Fire in southern Colorado during the summer of 2018. (Handout)

Courtesy photo

Advocates told The Sun that many visitors to the San Juans don’t have enough experience to safely use fire in the burn-prone mountain range.

“I would 100% agree that people maybe don’t know and don’t understand their impact,” Adriana Stimax, education director for the San Juan Mountains Association advocacy group, said of the study. She said the summers are often so dry that, “if you flick your cigarette butt, you might start a fire.”

Much of Stimax’s job involves teaching visitors fire etiquette. The work is necessary: Humans start the vast majority of wildfires in the U.S. as a whole. A lit cigarette butt, an idling car and a downed power line can all ignite dry vegetation.

But in the San Juan National Forest, the vast majority of wildfires are sparked by lightning. Historically, most wildfires started by people in southwest Colorado also don’t grow very large, said Cary Newman, fire management planning specialist with the U.S. Forest Service. That’s in part because Forest Service personnel spend much of the summer smothering small blazes in the San Juans. The agency’s internal data, which the Alabama-based researchers drew from, also pegs about a quarter of its wildfires to human activity.