Chelan County, Washington has burned so many times in the past decade that residents around Lake Chelan and Leavenworth have come to expect smoky summers as a fact of life. Now the county's conservation district is trying something different: teaching private landowners to set fire to their own land before the next wildfire does it for them.
The Cascadia Conservation District, based in Wenatchee, is hiring an outreach specialist to run a prescribed fire education program across Chelan County. The goal is to close a stubborn gap between state policy and what actually happens on the ground. Washington has invested heavily in prescribed fire in recent years, including a landmark $125 million wildfire funding package in 2021, but much of the county's most fire-prone land is privately owned, and those landowners often lack the permits, training and neighbor coordination to conduct burns safely.
The stakes are high in a county that has been ground zero for Washington's worst fire seasons. The 2014 Carlton Complex burned more than 256,000 acres, then the largest wildfire in state history. The 2015 Chelan Complex threatened the city of Chelan itself. Repeated evacuations around Entiat and Plain have underscored how vulnerable the region's growing wildland-urban interface has become amid a century of fire suppression that allowed fuels to accumulate in forests that once burned regularly.
Source: NationGraph.
The program aims to build both knowledge and trust. In a county with a strong private property ethic, voluntary landowner engagement is the only workable path, which makes education more important than regulation. The effort also targets cross-boundary burns that stitch together private land with adjacent U.S. Forest Service and state DNR holdings, the kind of coordination that can make individual burns far more effective at reducing regional fire risk.
The work is funded by the Washington State Conservation Commission and the Washington Department of Natural Resources. The source document is posted on the Cascadia Conservation District's website, though the contract value was not disclosed. For more on how the county is approaching this challenge, see earlier coverage of how Chelan County is working to convince private landowners that intentional fire can protect their property.
Cascadia expects to select a contractor June 7 and begin the work by mid-June. Whether landowners across the county will embrace the idea remains the open question the program is designed to answer.
