Chelan County, Washington has burned hard and often over the past decade, and local officials are increasingly convinced that the best way to protect what's left is to teach private landowners to light fires of their own.
The Cascadia Conservation District, based in Wenatchee, is seeking an outreach and education contractor to help build awareness and technical know-how around prescribed burning on private lands in Chelan County. The effort, funded by the Washington State Conservation Commission and the Washington Department of Natural Resources, will also support cross-boundary burn projects that straddle private and public land.
The stakes are not abstract here. The 2014 Carlton Complex burned roughly 256,000 acres nearby, still the largest single fire in Washington history. The 2015 Sleepy Hollow Fire destroyed 29 homes inside Wenatchee itself. The 2020 Labor Day fires added to a decade of destruction. The eastern Cascades carry a century's worth of accumulated fuel, the legacy of aggressive fire suppression policies that stamped out the frequent, low-intensity fires that once kept these forests open and resilient.
Source: NationGraph.
Climate change has made the problem worse: hotter summers, earlier snowmelt and longer fire seasons mean that fuel-choked forests are increasingly volatile. State and federal agencies have ramped up treatments on public land, backed by Washington's 2021 wildfire funding law and billions from federal infrastructure legislation. But wildfire doesn't stop at a property line, and Chelan County has extensive private inholdings and wildland-urban interface areas, from orchard country along the Columbia to tourist towns tucked into flammable hillsides near Leavenworth.
That's where the education campaign comes in. Cascadia Conservation District operates as a non-regulatory local government unit, which gives it more trust with rural landowners than state or federal agencies tend to carry. The outreach work will need to navigate real concerns: liability exposure, smoke impacts on Wenatchee's already-strained summer air quality, and skepticism about government-directed land management in a largely conservative, agricultural county. Cascadia has previously run Prescribed Fire Training Exchange events and helped support the North Central Washington Prescribed Burn Association, one of the first landowner-led burn associations in the state, as earlier coverage of the county's prescribed fire push has documented.
The contract value and duration have not been disclosed. The district plans to select a contractor by June 7 and begin scoping the work by mid-month.
