Fourteen years after the Waldo Canyon fire burned to the edge of Colorado Springs and destroyed 346 homes, crews are being recruited to thin another stretch of Cheyenne Mountain in a new wildfire prevention project targeting Cloud Camp Ridge.
A government agency in Colorado has posted a competitive bid for the Cloud Camp Ridge Fuels Mitigation project, listed on the Rocky Mountain Bid System, inviting forestry contractors to do the chainsaw-and-chipper work of cutting back overgrown trees and brush to reduce what a future fire could burn. The full acreage and budget aren't publicly visible in the solicitation summary, and the agency behind the project isn't identified in the record.
Cloud Camp is a historic site on Cheyenne Mountain, southwest of Colorado Springs, near Pike National Forest and the Broadmoor resort area. The ridge sits squarely in the wildland-urban interface, where dense residential neighborhoods and nationally significant facilities, including NORAD, back directly up against fire-prone forest.
Source: NationGraph.
Colorado's forests have been primed for catastrophic fire by more than a century of fire suppression and widespread bark beetle die-off, leaving stands of dead and overcrowded timber across the Front Range. The 2020 fire season produced the three largest fires in Colorado history, and the 2021 Marshall Fire showed that even suburban subdivisions are vulnerable. Fuels mitigation, the mechanical removal of fire-carrying vegetation, has become the primary tool for communities trying to get ahead of the next disaster.
Funding for this kind of work has grown sharply in recent years. The federal Bipartisan Infrastructure Law committed roughly $3.5 billion for wildfire risk reduction nationally, and the U.S. Forest Service designated Colorado's Front Range as one of its priority treatment landscapes. State programs including the Colorado Strategic Wildfire Action Program have added more dollars, creating a pipeline that has pushed work outward to specific ridges and drainages like this one. Similar prevention efforts using unconventional approaches are underway elsewhere in the region, including a parks department turning to livestock for fuel reduction.
El Paso County voters have also approved dedicated wildfire preparedness funding, and Colorado Springs Utilities has run watershed protection treatments in the Cheyenne Mountain corridor for years, making this project part of a sustained local effort rather than a one-time response.
Contractor selection will follow the competitive bidding process, after which work timing and scope should become clearer.
