Routt County, Colorado moves to Stage 1 fire restrictions amid dry, warm October weather

The general thought throughout the Rocky Mountains is that when the aspen trees begin turning yellow and the night comes early, fire season has become a thing of the past.

Not so this year.

As Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming moved their fire danger level to ‘Very High’ at the end of last week, so too are fire restrictions creeping into Colorado, a state that so far has maintained a greater level of moisture and fewer drought conditions than most of the rest of the mountain west. While no currently burning fires in Colorado have reached the 58,000+ acre magnitude of the now-combined Pack Trail and Fish Creek fires outside Grand Teton, low humidity, higher than normal temperatures, and gusty winds have prompted another paradise for outdoor enthusiasts to put restrictions in place, too.

Routt County, Colorado – home to Steamboat Springs, much of the Routt National Forest, the Elkhead Mountains, dozens of miles of the Yampa River, and the Mount Zirkel Wilderness (among many other notable locations) – has moved to Stage 1 fire restrictions as of October 7th. In doing so, it becomes the first Colorado county west of the Front Range to put in restrictions so far this year, a year that fortunately has seen the bulk of the western half of the state avoid extreme or abnormal drought.

For the record, Stage 1 fire restrictions include a ban on all campfire activity outside of developed recreation sites, i.e. no backcountry fires and no campfires outside of the metal rings at designated and approved campgrounds. Those restrictions also include limits on when and where you can smoke, weld, use chainsaws, or shoot off fireworks, too.

Below is an interactive map courtesty of the Colorado Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management that details the Routt County restrictions while also highlighting current fire restriction statuses of surrounding counties.

You can see where Routt County stacks up to its neighbor counties in terms of current drought conditions here courtesy of the U.S. Drought Monitor, a partnership between the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the National Drought Mitigation Center.

It’s paramount the check every level of fire restriction before attempting to do any sort of camping in the mountain west that includes the intention of having a campfire. Local, county, state, and federal regulations overlap constantly, with the multiple silos at the federal level (US Forest Service, National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, US Department of the Interior, and US Fish & Wildlife) also often having their own specific regulations in place, too.

And, as always, if you’re intending to have a fire anywhere in the backcountry, make sure you practice Leave No Trace principles and extinguish all embers before moving on. Don’t be that person who lazily left a fire smoldering only to see it turn into a devastating blaze.