Crews are heading back into the forests above Colorado Springs to thin trees and clear undergrowth on Cloud Camp Ridge near Cheyenne Mountain, part of an ongoing push to reduce wildfire risk in one of the most fire-scarred urban corridors in the country.
The project focuses on fuels mitigation, the mix of mechanical thinning, ladder-fuel removal, and slash disposal that breaks the chain allowing a ground fire to explode into the forest canopy. Cloud Camp Ridge sits in the wildland-urban interface directly above neighborhoods like Mountain Shadows, Cedar Heights and Broadmoor Bluffs, where tens of thousands of residents live where city streets end and ponderosa pine begins.
That geography carries painful history. The 2012 Waldo Canyon Fire burned into Mountain Shadows, destroyed 346 homes and killed two people. A year later, the Black Forest Fire erased 509 homes northeast of the city, the most destructive in state history at the time. Both fires burned through stands where a century of aggressive fire suppression had allowed tree densities to reach five to 10 times their historic norms, giving flames an almost unlimited fuel supply.
Source: NationGraph.
The urgency has only grown since then. The record-breaking 2020 fire season and a cascade of federal dollars, including roughly $3 billion from the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and another $1.8 billion through the Inflation Reduction Act, have pushed mitigation spending deeper into local landscapes. The U.S. Forest Service's 10-Year Wildfire Crisis Strategy, launched in January 2022, named the Colorado Front Range as one of its 21 national priority landscapes, and money has been flowing to state agencies, counties and fire districts ever since.
The specific agency behind this project was not identified in the solicitation, which was posted on the Rocky Mountain Bid System on Sept. 25, 2026. Contract value, acreage and timeline were not included in the public posting. This work follows earlier thinning efforts on Cheyenne Mountain that have targeted the same high-risk slopes in recent years.
The stakes extend beyond public safety. Since 2023, several major insurers have non-renewed policies in Colorado's wildland-urban interface zones, making visible fuels work a factor in property values and homeowner insurance access across El Paso County. Contractor selection will determine when ground crews can start work.
