Rocky Mountain National Park moves to Stage 2 fire restrictions, complete fire ban

As I write this, it is 97 degrees outside my home in Denver, Colorado, with the high temperature today forecast to reach 99. After a brief stint of projectionable afternoon thunderstorms (and the humidity that comes with them), it has dried out to just 11% humidity here, and the forecast through the rest of the weekend looks eerily similar.

Between Denver and Estes Park, Colorado – the town that serves as the eastern entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park (RMNP) – four fires of significance have erupted along the Front Range in the last two days. Each of the Alexander Mountain Fire in Larimer County, Stone Canyon and Lake Shore Fires in Boulder County, and Quarry Fire in Jefferson County have popped up and spread quickly in these incredibly fire-prone conditions, prompting hundreds of evacuations up and down the range and, so far, killing at least one person.

It’s a tinderbox out there, a dangerous combination of high heat, low humidity, and bone-dry tinder grass and standing dead trees. Colorado was fortunate to miss much of the early fire season damage seen further west in Oregon and Idaho, but fire season has nonetheless reached the Centennial State as August arrives.

It’s with those fires and these dangerous conditions in mind that RMNP moved today to a complete fire ban in the park, implementing Stage 2 fire restrictions within its boundaries for the first time since the devastating fire season of 2020. Back then, the Cameron Peak Fire reached park boundaries and burned over 7,000 acres within the park itself, part of the largest fire in Colorado history that burned over 208,000 acres through the Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests.

The 2020 Colorado fire season stands, to date, as the single most destructive on record. Between the Cameron Peak Fire, East Troublesome Fire, and Pine Gulch Fires alone over 540,000 acres of land burned within the state. While the latest fires that have popped up along the Front Range have not reached nearly those gaudy numbers, they’re located perilously close to wildland urban interface, threatening homes and infrastructure in ways that could be financially devastating well beyond the measure of acreage.

On top of that, many of the extremely talented and heroic hotshot crews located within Colorado traveled out of state earlier in the season to assist with the fires exploding further west. That means they weren’t around to be first responders to these particular fires, as over 600 Colorado-based firefighters were out of state when these fires erupted yesterday, per Axios. As that article notes, Colorado Governor Jared Polis is pushing the local fire agencies to recall those firefighters as the state’s resources are already thin, as is the case in the rest of the west (and why the Colorado-based firefighters were already out of state lending help).

As a reminder for now (and the future), RMNP always operates on Stage 1 fire restrictions, meaning there are absolutely no campfires allowed in backcountry campsites and are only allowed in the established, metal fire rings at designated frontcountry sites.