About a 45-minute drive west from downtown Denver, nestled in the shadow of Mount Evans, Evergreen flourishes as one of the gems of the Rocky Mountains.

Its dense pine forests give way to craggy ridges that look down on creek beds winding through the dozens of Evergreen’s mountain neighborhoods, centered on an alpine lake whose nearby landscape is dotted by boutiques, restaurants and bars.

The mostly unincorporated community is home to tens of thousands of people, but on summer weekends thousands more can flock to the area to hike, bike, fish, kayak and paddleboard. At between 7,000 and 8,000 feet in elevation, Evergreen offers a respite from Denver’s summer heat to anyone willing to make the short drive.

But the same virtues that draw people to the area carry a lurking danger. The thick forests and steep valley walls are what wildfire experts call fuel and topography. The final piece of the Wildland Fire Behavior “triangle” is weather, and with hotter summers, long-term drought and sometimes fierce winds, Evergreen is one of the highest-risk areas of the state for wildfires.

And while the wildfire risk alone is harrowing, what keeps some residents up at night is that Evergreen faces arguably the most challenging evacuation conditions in Colorado.

A Gazette analysis of U.S. Census Bureau population data and geospatial roadway data, along with

multiple simulated evacuations modeled using emergency management software, shows Evergreen faces a high risk of congestion or gridlock during an evacuation, in addition to the high wildfire risks.

A coalition of Evergreen residents have become engaged on the topic, working with the local and county emergency services to improve preparation and increase safety along evacuation routes, but some say they fear the redoubled efforts still aren’t enough.

Evergreen isn’t alone in its predicament, either. Other parts of the state — Woodland Park in Teller County’s high country and Roxborough Park in the foothills of Douglas County, among others — face similar challenges. All told, more than 100,000 Coloradans dotted up and down the Front Range, or about 1 in every 50 Colorado residents, lives in areas where safely evacuating could be a problem.

And like in Evergreen, some residents in those other areas have raised their voices about what they perceive as a lack of preparation or disregard of the risks, but with little in the way of response.

As wildfires grow larger, faster and more devastating, Evergreen residents say they’ve begun to think about disaster not as “if,” but “when,” and that not enough is happening now to avoid the worst outcomes.

”My biggest worry,” said Cindy Latham, an Evergreen resident who promotes wildfire preparedness through the local Rotary Club, “is that we’re going to become a footnote in a book somewhere, that Evergreen could get wiped out in a tragic event with a lot of loss of life.”

2020 wake-up call

In 2020, roughly 1% of Colorado’s area was burned by wildfire, with some of the largest and fastest-moving fires the state’s ever seen. The Cameron Peak fire burned 209,000 acres. The East Troublesome fire burned 193,000 acres, with a record-setting single-day burn area of more than 100,000 acres — about the size of Evergreen.

2020 was a wake-up call, the U.S. Forest Service explained in a May 2021 report.

“The impacts of the 2020 fire season on people, property, natural resources, and fire suppression budgets have stimulated wide-ranging policy discussions about the role of active forest management to reduce hazardous fuels on federal and private wildlands,” the report explains.

“Wildfire impacts to developed areas are increasing in frequency, driven by multiple social and biophysical factors including the expanding wildland urban interface, increasing fire occurrence from human ignitions, and changing climate.”

The U.S. Forest Service has several ways to gauge wildfire risk, but in 2021 developed new fire planning geographies and a risk metric that’s especially relevant to estimating the need for a wildfire evacuation, called “community exposure.”

It predicts how many buildings, on average, are threatened each year by wildfire. The measurement is based on tens of millions of software-simulated fires that incorporate historic fire data and various other wildfire risk data, combined with population data and 124 million structure locations across the U.S.

Whereas a metric like the Forest Service’s “burn probability” estimates the likelihood that an area will burn in a wildfire, but does so without regard to where people might be affected, “exposure” shows where wildfire risk collides with communities.

Within the Forest Service’s five-state Rocky Mountain Region, Evergreen has the highest exposure risk. The second- and third-highestrisk areas in the region are the planning zones that occupy the rest of the Front Range between Evergreen and Colorado Springs. In El Paso County, the high-risk areas include Manitou Springs, the Ridgecrest area northeast of Garden of the Gods, and the Broadmoor neighborhood. Although their populations are smaller, some pockets closer to Boulder and Fort Collins also show high risk, around Estes Park and Cripple Creek and north of Lyons.

Population data from the U.S. Census Bureau, combined with geospatial roadway data from Open Street Maps, shows that more than 35,000 residents — not accounting for seasonal or weekend visitors — in the state’s highest exposure area, in Evergreen, have only a few possible evacuation routes, putting the number of people per lanes of egress routes near or above the number in Paradise, Calif., where residents burned in their cars trying to evacuate, depending on the particulars of a future fire’s location and behavior. Estimates that include more of the outlying areas put the possible evacuation total as high as 60,000 people for the area.

A computer program designed to simulate evacuations, called the Fast Local Emergency Evacuation Times Model (FLEET), operated by Old Dominion University in Virginia, similarly shows the Evergreen area has the longest evacuation time for wildfire-prone parts of the state.

Roxborough Park and Woodland Park are not far behind Evergreen, either for computer-simulated evacuation times or the simpler people-per-lane of evacuation rates ratio.

“There’s a heightened awareness of the wildfire danger here,” Chuck Newby, a resident of South Evergreen who was recently elected to the Elk Creek Fire Board in the southwest portion of the larger Evergreen area.

Conversations he’s had with other residents, he said, are more and more often about evacuations.

“After seeing the Camp Fire, East Troublesome, Marshall, these major fires,” Newby said, “you have people asking what would happen? What would happen if this happened here? What would I do?”

Mitigation efforts

The buzz, flutter and gurgle of chainsaws pierced an otherwise calm June afternoon, emanating from the home of Rich Mancuso, in the Echo Hills neighborhood near the center of Evergreen.

Mancuso, who grew up in Staten Island, N.Y., and moved to Evergreen in 1980, watched as the crew from Lam Tree Services strategically felled trees on his property and prepared them for disposal.

Mancuso said he had his property’s vegetation thinned to keep his homeowners’ insurance, after his agent told him about the company’s new approach to proper fire mitigation in the high-risk area.

“They told us to do it,” Mancuso said, “or they would cancel our policy.”

The science behind mitigating fire-prone vegetation echoes the natural cycle of wildland fire and puts a mirror to the now broadly panned fire-suppression strategy of forest management deployed in the West for more than a century.

Without human intervention, wildfires burn through forests, destroying saplings but sparing the oldest and largest trees, which has the multiple effects of renutrifying the soil, clearing space around and strengthening the bark of the forests’ largest trees, and helping new seeds take root. The sparser forest left behind is healthier overall, and less susceptible to larger fires that spread through the forest canopy instead of closer to the ground.

In the American West, however, the longstanding forest management that favored rapid fire suppression led to forests that are denser than they would be naturally, making fires more intense and harder to fight.

Forest management practices have begun to move toward allowing the natural fire cycle to play out, but it’s estimated that millions of acres of forests in the western U.S. would need to see small-scale fires that naturally restore forest health, to get back to equilibrium — a dangerous prospect, given the proclivity of the forests to burn more intensely, because of the misguided policies of the past.

An alternative is manual forest mitigation and restoration, like the work done recently around Mancuso’s home.

Mancuso has never experienced an evacuation, he said, but he recognizes that his recent mitigation could one day save his home or prevent a fire from spreading to nearby areas.

“If it happens, if a house out here catches, and the conditions are bad,” Mancuso said, “it won’t just be one house. It will be total destruction.”

John Putt, an Evergreen real-estate agent who previously worked as a San Francisco Fire Department firefighter and rescue captain and who recently won election to the Evergreen Fire Protection District, said Mancuso’s experience could be a harbinger, and that the whole community will be made safer if so, though at a high price.

“Rates have already gone through the roof,” Putt said, noting that some people have seen their annual premiums rise by thousands of dollars in recent years. “But the best mitigation enforcement tool coming down the pike is going to be the insurance industry.”

Worst-case

The FLEET tool estimates evacuation times based on population data, roadway data and traffic simulation modeling. The Gazette’s roadway analysis looks only at population and road data.

But things could be even worse than they indicate.

What neither accounts for is the condition of roadways and the threats that could arise from roadside trees becoming a conduit for a fast-moving fire, catching fire and falling into the roads or making them impassable, or the size of roadway shoulders and how that could affect the flow of vehicles.

The threat to roadway access posed by overgrown vegetation becomes obvious on any drive through the Evergreen area. In many of the area’s neighborhoods, the narrow, winding roads are lined with dense thickets of lodgepole and ponderosa pine.

Older, larger ponderosa pine trees along the roads, if they were to catch fire or fall over, could easily stop vehicles from passing.

Some of the younger pines just feet from the roads’ shoulders, with 3- or 4-inch trunk diameters, can be found growing in tight clusters. They’re the first trees that would be cleared to prevent rapid wildfire spread or threats to road access, experts say, indicating that years have passed since serious mitigation has happened there.

The Evergreen Fire Protection District’s wildfire protection plan, updated in 2020, includes a roadway analysis that estimates “nonsurvivable” evacuation routes are spread throughout the area, meaning the roads risk putting drivers adjacent to 8-foot or larger flames, based on the fuels along the roads.

Bernie Weingardt, an Evergreen resident who worked for the U.S. Forest Service for 37 years, said the report told him and other residents what they had long suspected.

“They ran the simulations on it, and in Evergreen, you see it will bottleneck really fast,” Weingardt said. “Just a normal day out here, with everyday traffic, you have cars backed up at the main intersections. So the small roads feeding into the main arteries, they’ll end up gridlocked, with traffic backed up into the neighborhoods.”

The plan goes on to show where traffic-pattern analysis suggests congestion could form, based on the roadway capacity and number of possible evacuees.

“If high congestion and nonsurvivable roadway are in the same place,” the plan explains, “there is a high risk to life safety.”

The plan’s introduction nods to the most prominent example of such conditions, when the Camp fire devastated Paradise, Calif.: “Failed communication, poor evacuation routes, and unmitigated vegetation were all contributing factors in the 83 casualties that took place in November 2018.”

Woodland Park

In Woodland Park, about a 30-minute drive northwest from Colorado Springs, about 11,000 residents live in the area of the state with the next-highest wildfire exposure rank. Colorado 24 is the only way in or out, save for a winding, two-lane road through the mountains to the north.

FLEET simulations predict multiple significant delays near Woodland Park’s highway entrances during an evacuation.

Teller County Sheriff’s Office Cmdr. Lad Sullivan said despite the challenging terrain, he thinks Woodland Park could be evacuated safely.

“There are so many roads that lead out of Woodland Park and out of Teller, I know we could get it done,” he said. “It wouldn’t have to be everybody crammed on Highway 24.”

Traffic could be diverted down Rampart Range Road, he said, a winding, two-lane road that snakes north, through forest canyons for almost 40 miles before intersecting Colorado 67 west of Sedalia.

The Sheriff’s Office would call an evacuation through the news media, social media and Peak Alerts, Sullivan said, a cellphone alert service that residents sign up for, the news media and social media.

Some Cripple Creek Mountain Estates residents, however, complained about the system at a recent community meeting, saying notifications that came during the High Park fire in Teller County in early June were confusing.

“It was a simple mistake that to some meant a lot,” Sheriff Jason Mikesell told the crowd.

The episode echoed problems that arose during the Marshall fire evacuation, where notifications were significantly delayed and omitted large portions of the residents it was supposed to alert.

Teller County does not publish evacuation plans, Sullivan said, because wildfires are highly unpredictable and where residents should go can’t be predicted ahead of time.

“So many factors play into what’s safe,” he said.

Government response

With such an outsized portion of Jefferson County’s population living in the Denver metro area, away from the wildfire risk and evacuation, Evergreen residents say they feel the county government is not as responsive to their concerns as they’d like.

Evergreen, like many communities in Colorado’s wildland, is mostly unincorporated, which brings with it some structural challenges for wildfire preparations. Without a municipality that could adopt and enforce regulations about clearing dangerous vegetation along the roadways, the decision to mitigate the winding residential roads — which also serve as critical evacuation routes for Evergreen’s spider web of neighborhoods — is largely left up to private landowners.

The county’s shape and composition also pose structural challenges, as only 1 in 8 Jefferson County residents lives in the high-wildfire-risk mountainous western portion. The vast majority of the population lives in the suburbs that make up the southwestern corner of the larger metro Denver.

And while evacuation routes are generally not as constricted in the areas between the urban metropolis and the mountain communities above, neighborhoods that sit against the foothills and amid sloping grasslands, like Rocky Flats, Golden and Ken Caryl, can present their own dangers in escaping fire, as the Marshall fire demonstrated.

County sheriffs are tasked with managing evacuations, and elected county commissioners decide how to allocate the county’s resources. And the three Jefferson County commission districts each run east to west, like a stack of pancakes, meaning the nonmetro portion of the county is split three ways, with each of the three mountain-area slices paired with a dramatically larger urban population. The three county commissioners, like 88% of the county’s population, live in the metro portion of the county.

The county commissioners launched a Wildfire Risk Reduction Task Force that met in 2019 and 2020, then produced a report in November 2020.

But Cindy Latham, of the local Rotary Club and who was appointed as a designated community leader on the task force, said she was disappointed that the group didn’t adequately address evacuation.

“It was just never a priority,” Latham said. “They were working on figuring out mitigation, trying to educate the public, and trying to get more money coming in to support these things, but every time safely evacuating came up, it just got put off. I felt like they weren’t addressing the right thing.”

The report notes that “the impact of a 100,000-acre wildfire in west Jefferson County could result in the evacuation of 60,000 people; the destruction of 10,000 homes and 100 businesses; and an estimated minimum of $5 billion in losses,” but does not directly take on how a safe evacuation of the area would be achieved.

Jefferson County Sheriff Jeff Schrader said residents have asked him about evacuation routes more in the past couple years, but that he doesn’t support proposing evacuation routes ahead of an emergency.

“When the question comes up: ‘how do I get away from trouble?’ You have to ask questions before that. And the question is, ‘what is the trouble, and where is it?’

“To give pre-planned evacuation routes, in my view, may be irresponsible,” Schrader said. “We can’t necessarily go post signs that say ‘evacuate this way in case of a fire’. Because we don’t know if that’s going to be the best way if a fire does occur.”

Hal Grieb, the county’s emergency management director, said he intends to have upcoming updates to the county’s formal wildfire plans include an “evacuation annex,” modeled on San Diego County’s 2018 annex, or a document that describes how multiple agencies should cooperate during evacuations.

“We are doing plans, but they’re not at that tactical street level,” Grieb said. “What it does is give a framework and modeling, based off roadways and the transportation engineering plans.”

Jefferson County Commissioner Lesley Dahlkemper said the county is planning to search for a consultant who the county will hire to guide more of the county’s wildfire planning.

“I think we’re looking at what is potentially an 18-month process from start to finish,” she said.

The county adopted one portion of the International Wildland-urban Interface (IWUI) Code, an international set of standards designed to help governments employ best practices for managing wildland-urban interface.

“We’ve already adopted Appendix Z of the IWUI codes, which means that we have more stringent hardening codes,” Dahlkemper said. “We think there’s even more we can do, and we’re working with our fire chiefs on that right now.”

Residents with a close eye on the county’s wildfire preparations say they think the rest of the IWUI codes should be adopted already. Their criticisms of the county are often contrasted with how nearby Larimer, Boulder or Douglas counties have approached wildfire preparation.

In the Larimer County approach, as described by Lori Hodges, the county’s emergency management director, the county coordinates across departments in ways that other counties don’t, like having a land-use code that connects the planning and development departments with county emergency management staff to ensure that any new development meets standards for mitigation and safe emergency planning.

Justin Whitesell, the Larimer County emergency operations director, said he’s pushed not just for mitigation on public land, but that his department has had success with leading mitigation efforts on private land, using what he describes as an initial-attack module.

“The Girl Scout Ranch, the Boy Scout Ranch, some HOAS, on green belts, but we’re trying to push more into communities,” Whitesell said. “And a lot of the roads are choked out, or the vegetation has grown up against it on private land. And so we’re working with a lot of HOAS, trying to get that using our initial attack module, and using some county money to open up those roadways so that if we are doing evacuations that we can get people out.”

Wildland surveillance

On a recent cloudless, midjune day about 11 a.m., Andy Sprouse and Ryan “Squirrel” Heisler hooked into their safety harnesses and began climbing the 150-foot communication tower that looms above the Elk Creek Fire Station No. 3, high above Evergreen, atop the 9,750-foot Conifer Mountain.

Once the two Thinair Communications tower technicians reached the top of the tower, they got to work, installing a state-of-the-art, “near-infrared” video camera with the ability to swivel and capture an almost 360-degree view of the Evergreen area.

The camera provides real-time surveillance of wildfires in the area, using a camera monitoring system operated by Advanced Environmental Monitoring, a Canadian company that specializes in wildland surveillance. It can help to identify, within its field of view, where a fire is with high precision, and it can provide useful information about the fire’s behavior.

The cost of the camera and the real-time monitoring system is being picked up by Core Electric, one of the utility companies that serves electricity to the Evergreen area. Their communication tower was an optimal place to mount the camera, and as Mark Riggs, the Core Electric engineer who oversaw the camera’s installation, said the cost — a few thousand dollars for the camera, a few thousand dollars to install the equipment and a few thousand per year for the online hosting and web services for the camera — is negligible, compared with the benefit of the early detection of fires.

Colorado Springs resident Walter Lawson has urged El Paso County to put in a similar system after firefighters failed to find the Waldo Canyon fire, then left the area, allowing it to take off the following day.

“These are sentinels that watch your city,” said Lawson, a member of Westside Watch, a Colorado Springs advocacy group that works on wildfire preparedness.

Cameras are only so useful, though, others say. Quick wildfire detection can help save time and even lives in the worst-case scenario, by alerting residents earlier about potentially devastating wildfires. But if the roadways can’t handle an evacuation, then early detection can give some people a head start, but it still might not prevent people from getting stuck.

“It’s another step in the right direction,” said Bill Wysong, another Westside Watch member, but he said doesn’t think they can replace evacuation planning.

For a fire that moves fast, Wysong argued, like the Marshall fire that destroyed more than 1,000 homes in Boulder County in December, it’s unlikely infrared cameras would have made much of a difference for the firefighting effort.

“Under the right conditions,” the Mountain Shadows resident said, reflecting on the hundreds of homes that burned in his neighborhood during the Waldo Canyon 10 years ago, “nothing is going to stop them.”