SILVERTHORNE, Colo. — After years of work to clear dead trees and vegetation from around her Silverthorne home to protect it from wildfire, Lisa Lewis had to stop just 60 feet from her back porch because of a wilderness boundary.
“We have always been worried about wildfires," Lewis said. "We have completely mitigated our lot, but the Forest Service wilderness is only 60 feet away."
That started a three-year process to get approval to do fire mitigation in the wilderness that EJ Olbright with the Willowbrook Metro District says is a first-of-its-kind project.
“It had never been done before in the country, so we are ground-breaking with this project,” Olbright said.
Since July, crews have been working in the wilderness where power tools are not allowed. Instead, Kat Gray with the Dillon Ranger District says teams cut down trees with axes, used handsaws, and carried trees on their shoulders to thin the forest and create a fire break up against private property.
“We have strict management rules for what we can and can’t do in the wilderness and the environmental management plan took that into consideration,” Gray said. "That’s why you see these hard-working men out here with handsaws instead of chain saws, which is what we usually do this work with.”
The project took three years of environmental studies and planning, and then six weeks to mitigate 23 acres along a mile in a half boundary with the neighborhood.
It costs $500,000 with the cost split between the U.S. Forest Service, Summit County, and the Ruby Ranch Homeowners Association. The efforts could save hundreds of millions of dollars worth of homes from a wildfire.
“We will see less intense fire behavior," Gray said. "The flames will be 4 feet instead of 10 feet. That means me and other firefighters can get in here and safely engage the fire and control it before it gets into the neighborhood.”
Another proposal is being looked at in Vail to do a prescribed burn in the wilderness next to private property in the Booth Creek neighborhood.
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