Above a Colorado Springs Utilities reservoir north of Pikes Peak, crews have been thinning hundreds of acres of trees in recent weeks to help improve the forest health and decrease the danger of a wildfire.

The sound of a masticator’s large metal teeth making easy work of chewing through entire trees has been filling the otherwise quiet mountain air west of U.S. 24. The machine the size of a front-loader leaves behind splintered wood, that blankets the forest floor and will eventually break down into soil. The heavy machinery also opens up the forest so that if a fire burns, it won’t be as devastating. 

“If there was a wildfire, it would have been catastrophic,” explained Mike Till, lead project forester with the State Forest Service. It would have burned the soils so hot they would have been sanitized and it would have consumed the trees, known as “a stand-replacing fire.”

The Colorado State Forest Service is overseeing the $1 million grant project across 379 acres near north Catamount Reservoir. The mitigation is not visible to those visiting the lake, but taking out dead and beetle-damaged trees nearby is meant to prevent massive fires that would damage the lake, watershed and drinking water infrastructure. 

The project is a continuation of mitigation work that’s been completed around both North and South Catamount Reservoirs. 

The goal is to treat 30 to 40 percent of the northside of the Pikes Peak landscape, an area stretching across, 45,000 acres, Till said. At that percentage of treatment, the fire behavior is altered. To date, 5,000 acres have been treated, about 10,750 acres short of treating 35 percent of the landscape, he said. 

“Our current treatments are only a small piece of the puzzle when looking at the landscape approach,” he said. 

The fire mitigation project that is underway is shown on the map in light green.

COLORADO STATE FOREST SERVICE

Left untreated, dense and partially dead forests can give rise to fires similar to the Waldo Canyon fire. The 2012 blaze was a stand-replacing fire and when the rains came the next year, without trees and plants to hold the water back the rain washed mud, rocks and trees down into Manitou Springs. 

The large debris flows that can follow similar fires can also damage reservoirs and pipelines necessary to deliver drinking water. 

The mitigation work that the State Forest Service is doing in coordination with Colorado Springs Utilities, the U.S. Forest Service Pikes Peak Ranger District and the Colorado Department of Natural Resources, is meant to prevent similar damage to infrastructure. 

The mitigation work will leave open space between the trees, to prevent the fire from jumping through the crowns of the trees and hopefully if the landscape burns, the fire will smolder along the ground and the trees will survive, Till said. 

The change is intended to make the landscape more resilient, he said. 

“We will see more grasses and shrubs come up, which is beneficial to the wildlife,” he said. Thinning the trees will also ensure those left behind have more water and sunlight to thrive. 

Many of the trees the crews are taking out are smaller, Douglas fir and spruce trees, that moved in over the last 100 years, Till said.

The chips from the masticated trees will stay on the forest floor where they will help improve the soil quality. 

The area does not have any biomass plants that could take the product and the area doesn’t have any roads to haul logs out, he said. Biomass plants can burn waste wood and turn it into electricity. 

A masticator grinds through a tree as part of fire mitigation work being done near North Catamount reservoir on Wednesday, Dec. 20, 2023. The Colorado State Forest Service is overseeing a $1 million grant project across 379 acres. (Parker Seibold, The Gazette)

Parker Seibold

The work started this fall after a year and a half of preparation, including a computer analysis to determine the areas of highest fire danger, based on factors such as tree species and insects and disease damage to the forest. 

Including in-kind contributions of workers, the project is expected to cost $1.5 million, far less than fighting and cleaning up after a catastrophic fire. 

“Over the last 20 years, how we have approached forest management has completely changed and evolved as more information comes online as far as fire regimes, fire intervals and return intervals,” Till said. 

A masticator grinds through a tree as part of fire mitigation work being done near North Catamount reservoir on Wednesday, Dec. 20, 2023. Clearing dead and insect-damaged trees and thinning the overgrown forest will help prevent a catastrophic wildfire that could damage the watershed and drinking water infrastructure. (Parker Seibold, The Gazette)

Parker Seibold

Joshua Drown, a forest fire technician at Markit! Forestry, uses a chainsaw to cut down a stump on Wednesday, Dec. 20, 2023. (Parker Seibold, The Gazette)

Parker Seibold

A masticator is driven down a makeshift road through a section of mitigated forest on Wednesday, Dec. 20, 2023.(Parker Seibold, The Gazette)

Parker Seibold