Meet the Coloradans Working To Save the West’s Wildfire-Ravaged Forests

Maya Daurio’s memories are shaded by ponderosa pines. As a child, she spent her summers about 30 miles up Poudre Canyon on her family’s property, a refuge called Pinehurst for the forest of vanilla-scented evergreens that blanketed the hills behind their house. The trees witnessed her baptism when she was two months old. Their trunks formed “living rooms” and “kitchens” during games of house with her cousins. She spent hours of her teenage years trying to catch her aunt’s free-roaming horses, occasionally succeeding and swinging herself up for a bareback ride through the woods.

When a wildfire ignited near Cameron Pass on August 13, 2020, some 40 miles away, Daurio and her relatives weren’t worried. Pinehurst, which had been in their family since 1895, was well removed from the inferno; surely the fire wouldn’t run that far down the canyon. But the Cameron Peak Fire roared faster and farther through northern Colorado than anyone expected. A Ph.D. student in Vancouver, Daurio watched an online map in real time as the fire’s perimeter crept closer to Pinehurst. In early September, the blaze finally engulfed the property.

Daurio didn’t make it back to Pinehurst to see the devastation for herself until the following summer. “It was completely shocking,” she says. The family house and all its outbuildings had vanished. The outhouse where generations of her family had hung their diplomas and college degrees was gone. Naked slopes dotted with blackened trunks replaced the verdant forest she remembered. A 500-year-old ponderosa—a tree that likely survived multiple other wildfires through the centuries—had been chopped down by firefighters who found it smoldering on the inside. Ten months later, the place still smelled like it was burning.

The Cameron Peak Fire became the state’s largest recorded wildfire, incinerating 208,913 acres of Arapaho-Roosevelt National Forest, Rocky Mountain National Park, and private lands. It consumed almost 500 buildings, affected more than 1,000 miles of waterways, and caused subsequent floods and debris flows in Poudre Canyon that killed six people and thousands of trout. The unusually hot, destructive blaze burned so furiously in places that it scorched the soil, killed many trees outright, and annihilated any source of seed that would enable the forest to regenerate naturally. But as devastating as the Cameron Peak Fire was, its imprint is only one piece in an ever-growing mosaic of burn scars across the West.

The region’s forests are adapted to fire. It’s a natural and necessary part of the ecosystem. Today’s megafires, though, burn longer and hotter than blazes in the past due to decades of ill-considered fire suppression and the drought and heat of climate change. Some species, like aspen and lodgepole pine, have thus far grown back on their own. Others, though—limber pine, Douglas fir, ponderosa pine—struggle to overcome high-severity infernos like the Cameron Peak Fire and the East Troublesome Fire (the state’s second-largest wildfire, also in 2020) because their seeds are heavier and don’t disperse as easily. Left alone, large swaths of torched forests could convert to grasslands or shrublands. One 2024 analysis estimated that there are 3.8 million acres in the West in need of reforestation, a number expected to double or triple (depending on whether people do anything to curb climate change) by 2050.

There are a number of ecological incentives for keeping the West forested. Trees stabilize soil, preventing flooding and landslides. They keep sediment out of rivers and streams, protecting aquatic habitats and drinking water. Forests help preserve mountain snowpack, replenishing groundwater reserves. They provide a home for wildlife, from bugs and birds to elk and black bears. And trees sequester carbon, a crucial tool in the fight against climate change.

Beyond science, though, the desire to preserve forests feels deeply personal. “Forests are like Colorado’s DNA,” says Catherine Schloegel, watershed forest manager for the Colorado branch of the national nonprofit the Nature Conservancy. “We love to hike in them, bike in them, ski through the trees. They’re a huge reason why we live here. The legacy of Colorado is our forests.”

Many are working to protect that legacy, albeit far too slowly. The U.S. Forest Service (USFS) estimates it met only six percent of its postfire reforestation needs annually from 2012 to 2022, mainly because the country’s pipeline for trees, from collecting seeds to growing saplings to planting them to monitoring their survival, hasn’t kept up with demand. But a dedicated ecosystem of foresters, scientists, entrepreneurs, and environmentalists in Colorado aims to change that—not just here, but across the West.

---

I. Gathering

All the signs pointed to seeds. It was summer 2019, and Schloegel was spotting green cones the size of her hand sprouting from bough after bough in the ponderosa pine forest around her home in Boulder. A few phone calls confirmed others across the state were seeing the same thing. This was a lucky omen indeed. Cones mean seeds, and seeds are in short supply.

The shortage can be traced back to the contraction of the Rocky Mountain timber industry, beginning in the 1980s. Because loggers replant what they cut down—they’re legally required to, but future profits also depend on more trees—a robust industry had resulted in lots of seeds being collected and stored. But when the lumberjacks disappeared, so too did the seed stockpiles. “There’s no amazon.com to order your seeds [from],” Schloegel says. To make matters worse, you can’t plant varieties from just anywhere and expect them to thrive in the wild. Most foresters seek native, locally adapted seeds gathered from as close to the intended planting site as possible to give seedlings the best shot at survival.

Things get even trickier with ponderosa pines, which reproduce at an irregular clip. Ten years can pass with the species putting out few or no cones. Then, suddenly, a cone bonanza breaks out. Scientists don’t fully understand this phenomenon, called masting, or know what sparks it. Consequently, organizing a cone-collecting project “is like planning a big event like a wedding,” Schloegel says, “but we don’t know what year the wedding will be in.”

The Nature Conservancy decided to get into the cone-collecting game in 2019 after its research began raising alarm bells about Colorado forests’ abilities to regenerate on their own after wildfires. Schloegel took charge of the project. When it became clear 2019 was a mast year, she chose Ben Delatour Scout Ranch in Poudre Canyon for her first collection site. She made regular trips into the ponderosa woods there throughout August to monitor the developing cones. Then, when they matured in early September, “I called everyone I’ve ever met and asked them to help,” Schloegel says. Over a five-day period, volunteers dispersed into the ranch’s forest at dawn, each holding a bucket for pine cones. It was strenuous, hot work that lasted until the sun went down. Their reward? Fifty pounds of ponderosa seeds, all adapted to thrive in the Poudre River watershed.

Though local ponderosas haven’t had a mast year since 2019, collectors have still been able to harvest cones in more limited numbers. The Fort Collins–based nonprofit Coalition for the Poudre River Watershed rounds up several dozen volunteers most years to gather from trees in targeted elevations and climate zones. Armed with 40-foot pole saws, they roam ponderosa forests in private lots and state parks. They’ve amassed about 20 pounds of seeds since 2022, many of which have already grown into seedlings.

Private businesses are also getting into reforestation. Dean Swift, a bespectacled septuagenarian with a slow drawl, grew up working at his parents’ tree nursery in Denver. He opened his own seed-collecting and -processing operation in 1971. “I couldn’t figure out what else to do when I got out of college,” he says. From his home base in Alamosa, Swift travels to forests across Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and South Dakota every fall to gather cones from a variety of conifers and ecotypes. Swift doesn’t often climb trees or carry saws. Instead, he taps an unusual partner. “Squirrels cut the cones down and stash them away for their winter food,” he says. Swift and his contract crews spend field days on their hands and knees, raiding middens (always leaving enough for the rodents). “Squirrels cut the cones when they’re mature, not before,” Swift says. “They’re totally infallible.”

For decades, Swift exclusively supplied ornamental growers, such as Christmas tree farms and landscape nurseries. But as wildfires and beetle epidemics have ravaged the West’s ponderosa forests, he’s seen demand increase for reforestation of everyday trees. Swift has supplied seeds to projects in New Mexico’s Santa Clara Pueblo and on private land near La Veta, just across the Sangre de Cristo Range from his office. Last year, for the first time, he made a trip specifically to gather Douglas fir and ponderosa pine seeds in anticipation of rising reforestation demand.

“It was very small quantities—three pounds of this, five or 10 pounds of that,” Swift says. “But ponderosa pine is in the neighborhood of 12,000 seeds per pound. A few pounds can go a long way.” To repopulate the West’s burned forests, they will need to.

---

II. Sowing

When Matt McCombs was a kid, he and his father planted 20 trees in their half-acre backyard in Littleton. It was the younger McCombs’ job to water them. “I hated it,” he says. McCombs started his career in politics (he was an aide to former U.S. Senator Ken Salazar of Colorado) and veterans affairs (he’s an Iraq War vet). But he eventually discovered that public lands played a crucial role in connecting people and government. “There’s nowhere else where you can have more influence over what’s important to the American people than as a district ranger in the U.S. Forest Service,” McCombs says. He joined the USFS in 2009. A dozen years later, he became the state forester and director of the Colorado State Forest Service. Today, McCombs likes to drive by his childhood home when he’s in the area to admire the tiny suburban forest he and his dad planted.

If McCombs has his way, Colorado will soon replicate that success on a much grander scale. Housed at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, the 130-acre Colorado State Forest Service Nursery has been doing reforestation work for the past 20 years or so, since foresters realized that areas burned during 2002’s Hayman Fire, which torched 138,000 acres between Lake George and Deckers, weren’t recovering as expected. McCombs believes the state’s tree-growing facilities, currently undergoing a $15.4 million renovation, can become “a major player in the national reforestation strategy.” Upon completion in 2026, the nursery will sport new greenhouses and shade structures, modernized equipment, a new seed freezer, more employees, and the ability to produce up to two million seedlings per year—a big leap up from the previous annual output of about 650,000. McCombs calls it “the architecture of recovery.”

“We know that the megafires will return,” McCombs says, adding that the Colorado State Forest Service Nursery is in the perfect position to restore the resulting burn scars. The nursery’s improved facilities reside at a relatively high elevation, which is useful for growing seedlings for mountain terrain, and the nursery’s neighbors at CSU include scientists at the Warner College of Natural Resources, the Colorado Forest Restoration Institute, and the USFS’ Rocky Mountain Research Station. “My philosophy is that we don’t have any excuses to be anything other than an epicenter for reforestation policy, research, and application,” McCombs says. He hopes the new state nursery will create seedlings for the USFS, among other clients, and he has been in talks with the agency about taking on federal contracts. (At press time, no deals had been finalized, but the USFS contributed $5 million in grants for the cost of the renovation.)

The country will certainly need more seedlings. According to a 2021 paper by the Nature Conservancy, the USFS, and a number of universities, reforesting all the acres that need it in the United States would require growing 1.7 billion more trees every year, twice our current nursery production. Nurseries are a key piece of the reforestation pipeline, because you can’t just toss seeds across the landscape and hope for the best. The Nature Conservancy’s soon-to-be-published research about burn scars on the Front Range found that that method, called direct seeding, resulted in a germination rate of less than one percent. In contrast, a 2024 study, to which Schloegel contributed, reported an 80 percent survival rate, on average, for nursery-grown seedlings planted across nine wildfire scars in Colorado. (Schloegel is quick to assert that direct seeding can still be beneficial for harder-to-reach areas.)

The USFS leads reforestation efforts across the country because it has both vast tracts of public lands under its purview and expansive infrastructure for tree growing. Six federal nurseries, located mostly in the West, produce seedlings for all kinds of land disturbances—not only wildfires, but also hurricanes, timber harvests, and insect infestations. The Charles E. Bessey Nursery in Nebraska alone grows 1.5 million baby trees every year, currently including almost all the ones bound for national forest land in Colorado. The need for new trees is so great, however, that the feds now have to buy seedlings from other growers to fill the gaps.

About 20 miles south of the state facility, in Loveland, a patch of tiny Douglas firs headed for the Western Slope anchors one corner of a 14,000-square-foot greenhouse. Outside, baby limber pines selected for their genetic resistance to white pine blister rust await their forever homes on the shoulders of Longs Peak. This nursery, a private enterprise called OneCanopy, produces 350,000 seedlings per year for reforestation projects throughout the Rockies. “But we could get to two million without changing much,” says Katelynn Martinez, the company’s director of operations and business development. Indeed, that’s the plan.

Founded in 2022, OneCanopy feels like a cross between a high-tech operation and a scrappy startup. On a gloomy afternoon this past November, employees with earplugs babysat a $150,000 seed-planting machine the size of a living room. (The assembly-line-style contraption produces seedling trays five times faster than humans can.) Yet, in the freezer next door, the company stored seeds—which it buys from collectors, including Swift—in Tupperware containers and repurposed pickle jars.

OneCanopy has grown trees for everyone from federal agencies, such as the National Park Service and the Bureau of Land Management, to state entities, like Colorado Parks & Wildlife, to wildfire restorers on private lands across the state. “The goal is to be the number-one seedling producer in the Rocky Mountain region,” Martinez says. “And we’d love to be a one-stop shop for reforestation.” That would mean expanding the business to include reforestation project management, like planning and planting.

Despite both the Colorado State Forest Service Nursery’s and OneCanopy’s ambitions, however, there’s no rivalry between the two: There are enough burn scars to go around. “If we get to the point where we’re competing, I’d say that’s a win for all of us,” Martinez says, “because that means we’ve tackled the problem.”

---

III. Planting

Fat snowflakes drifted down from the sky as Daniel Bowker arrived in Poudre Canyon for a planting day in May 2022. The late-spring flurry was unexpected but welcome: Extra moisture is always a good thing. This will be awesome for the seedlings, thought the forest program manager for the Coalition for the Poudre River Watershed.

He and his colleagues from the nonprofit delivered a crash course in tree-planting best practices to a volunteer crew of about 15 Odell Brewing Company employees. The group scrambled up a snow-slicked slope behind a burned-out house, while Bowker pointed out the best spots for the ponderosa seedlings they’d brought: just northeast of a stump or rock for shade on broiling afternoons, out of the wind, and in tiny depressions that hold water. “We’re using the best available science and planting practices to make sure we’re not just out there making people feel good, planting trees that have no chance of surviving,” Bowker says. Fully trained, the planting crew stuffed seedlings into backpacks and back pockets and dispersed across the property, using tree-planting tools called dibble bars to dig holes and settle each seedling into its new home. Four hours later, the slope was officially reforested. Everyone high-fived and headed down the canyon for a celebratory beer.

Volunteer planting crews like this are one solution to another major obstacle in America’s reforestation pipeline: a shortage of people willing, and skilled enough, to do the work. (That’s also true for seed collecting and nursery growing.) “Everyone thinks about planting seedlings in the ground as a fun thing, in terms of natural resource management,” says Marin Chambers, a research associate at the Colorado Forest Restoration Institute, which is part of CSU and gets federal funding to advise land managers on wildfires and forest health. “But the honest truth is that it’s incredibly grueling work, and in postfire environments, there’s an added level of safety [concerns].” On top of hauling 40-pound bags of seedlings across rugged terrain, planters also have to contend with the threat of toppling trunks. That’s a big reason why the vast majority of plantings happen within two miles of a road and on flatter landscapes.

Kyle Rodman, a research scientist for Northern Arizona University’s Ecological Restoration Institute, says land managers will have to think creatively to solve the labor problem. Perhaps they could turn seasonal tree-planting gigs into year-round careers by adding seed collection, thinning, prescribed burning, and even firefighting to the job description. Or maybe youth corps could pitch in for seasonal surges. Technical colleges might add reforestation training programs, he suggests. But, notes Chambers, “we can teach all the students all the things, but until we have a demand signal from management agencies willing to hire those people…that’s the challenge.”

Which raises the question: Where will the money for increased reforestation projects come from? Fortunately, a recent influx of cash is helping the USFS level up its efforts on federal lands. Previously, the government paid for most of its replantings through a pot of money called the Reforestation Trust Fund. That pot, filled by a tariff on softwood imports, was capped at $30 million per year. The REPLANT Act of 2021, which was part of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, lifted that cap, a move projected to pour up to $260 million into the fund annually.

The money has allowed the USFS to begin tackling its 3.6-million-acre backlog of landscapes in need of recovery, putting 23 million seedlings in the ground over 63,295 acres nationwide in 2023. Colorado is home to 1,998 of those acres. (At press time, future staffing levels for the USFS were unclear due to large federal layoffs, but experts worry that fewer employees will be available to carry out reforestation projects.)

Still, someone will need to make a profit on reforestation to get it done at scale, argues Solomon Dobrowski, a professor of forest landscape ecology at the University of Montana. “It’s going to be a drop in the bucket compared to the need,” he says of the REPLANT Act. “If you can build an economic engine to support [reforestation] that is something beyond timber, that’ll accelerate it dramatically.” A leading idea for what that engine might be? The carbon credit market—not a new concept, but one that’s beginning to cover more ground in Colorado.

In 2018, the Spring Creek Fire burned 108,045 acres in southern Colorado, including Karen Pursch’s gated community of Tres Valles West, outside of La Veta. Her home was spared, but 250 acres of mature ponderosa pine woods in the community’s common area were reduced to matchsticks. “You’d see nothing but burned trees,” Pursch remembers. “It was really sad.” Four years later, however, Netherlands-based Land Life put 40,000 baby ponderosas into the ground there. A for-profit business, Land Life didn’t charge the landowners a dime. Instead, an undisclosed private company looking to reduce its carbon footprint picked up the tab, with Land Life doing the heavy lifting. By financing a reforestation project, the company in question claimed a credit (aka an offset) for all the carbon the new trees would sequester over their lifetimes. “It’s a win-win situation,” Pursch says.

The Tres Valles West planting is one of nine carbon-credit reforestation projects Land Life has completed in Colorado since 2021, for a total of 1.5 million trees over 6,456 acres. Some of the seeds came from Dean Swift, the Alamosa seed collector; OneCanopy grew many of the seedlings. “The timber markets in the Rocky Mountain region have been suppressed,” says Brian Lawson, Land Life’s North American director. “Landowners have to look to other innovative ways of financing replanting and restoration.”

---

IV. Growing

About 30 miles up Poudre Canyon, on a steep, north-facing slope, grows a baby tree. It’s a ponderosa pine, only about three and a half years old and four inches tall. Resembling a tuft of spiky green hair sprouting from a twig, the seedling is years away from developing the jigsaw bark of a mature ponderosa. This tree could one day reach 150 feet or more in height. Five hundred years from now, it might shade squirrels and deer—and the memories of future generations of Daurios.

Almost five years after the Cameron Peak Fire, living trees—400 of them, to be precise—have returned to Pinehurst. The seeds came from the Colorado State Forest Service Nursery in Fort Collins, which raised them into seedlings. The Coalition for the Poudre River Watershed, along with those 15 Odell employees, planted them. They’re set to be joined by 500 to 800 more baby trees this spring.

The first time Maya Daurio spotted a new tree growing at Pinehurst, she couldn’t help but cry. “It’s absolutely thrilling to see new seedlings,” Daurio says. “We recognize the value—both for ourselves, of wanting to be involved in cultivating a new generation of forest, but also the importance of doing that for a healthy ecosystem overall.”

Even as the country’s reforestation process spins up, the people behind the research, planning, and planting are clear-eyed about our ability to restore what we’re losing. “Things will burn,” Dobrowski says. “Things will change. You won’t have the same kind of forest.” Certain trees might struggle to survive in hotter, drier places, like the Southern Rocky Mountains. Farther north, south-facing slopes could lose some of their typical species. Deciduous trees could creep up hillsides in places, displacing the conifers we’re used to seeing.

Still, we plant trees. “Will we be able to reforest every place that burns in the future?” asks Rodman of the Ecological Restoration Institute. “Probably not. But being able to target places that we value—that’s a realistic goal.” Reforesters can identify areas that are at high risk of devastating future wildfires—based on variables like tree density and climate projections—and prioritize collecting seeds from those places. If and when fire does occur, the recovery process can begin immediately. Dobrowski also points to more efficient tactics. “Don’t go out there and try to plant 300 trees per acre,” he says. Instead, strategies like nucleated plantings, in which small clusters of seedlings eventually provide seeds for natural regeneration, can do the work, even if it takes centuries rather than decades.

Many reforesters are also experimenting with a technique called assisted geneflow: taking seeds from warmer, lower-elevation spots and planting their seedlings a bit upslope in anticipation of future climate conditions. The Nature Conservancy and the Coalition for the Poudre River Watershed have been trying it. In fact, the baby trees planted at Pinehurst, which sits at 7,500 feet in elevation, came from seeds gathered about 500 feet lower.

The Daurios might not live to see those trees grow into a mature forest. But their grandchildren will. “There’s hope in a baby tree,” McCombs says, tears forming in his eyes. “They’ve got a fighting chance to endure beyond your own life. There are very few things in this life that have that kind of promise, other than your own children. It’s just about the most beautiful thing I’ve ever experienced. It’s something worth fighting for.”