Recorded July 3, 2026 – “Colorado Tactics” Lookout Livestream
In this livestream, Lookout wildfire analyst and mapping specialist Zeke Lunder walks through a series of large ongoing fires in Colorado, Utah, and Arizona, using current perimeters and high‑resolution terrain models to explain what firefighters can and cannot realistically do to control wildfire burning under today’s combination of extreme drought, excessive fuel loading, and critically dry and windy weather. The focus of this episode is wildland firefighting tactics: where lines might hold, where they almost certainly will not, and how incident teams thread the needle between firefighter safety, local politics, and reality on the ground.
Aspen Acres / Beulah Valley / Colorado City / Rye, Colorado
The Aspen Acres fire in southern Colorado provides a textbook example of how terrain, fuels, the presence of many homes and other buildings, and weather combine to constrain wildland firefighting tactics. Today’s mapping of the fire shows a significant push to the south and southeast toward Colorado City, through a steep, contiguous green conifer belt above these communities which is essentially “no‑go” terrain for direct fire attack under current conditions. Heavy fuel loading, extreme drought, and very low humidity mean the fire will keep burning through forested areas no matter what firefighters try to do. Air tankers can slow a fast-running fire but cannot stop it when the spread is being driven largely by long-range spotting, and the light, surface fuels are so dry (receptive) that any falling ember can start a new spot fire. Under these conditions, the classic “direct line on the edge” method of firefighting must be abandoned, and the focus becomes structure protection in the wildland–urban interface , while also looking for opportunities to hold the fire’s edge where it is burning in lighter fuels along meadows, pastures, and natural barriers like rock formations or river-bottoms.
Between the Aspen Acres Fire and the town of Rye, the vegetation shifts from heavy conifer into more open, meadowy valleys with scattered timber and grass. Lunder notes that this transition matters tactically, because “it’s a lot easier to fight fire” in these broken fuels than in the continuous forests above. In Beulah Valley, they have already used these advantages to keep the fire out of the heart of the valley on prior days. Tractors and bulldozers can rapidly push firelines in grass and light brush, and firefighters can light ‘back fires’ to burn out the fuels between the control lines and the fire itself in these areas with less of a threat of torching fire up into tall trees, causing spot fires which make holding the line more difficult.
Lunder points out a gap between what the mapping shows and what is actually happening on the ground. Current incident maps for Aspen Acres show essentially no dozer line, yet residents report dozers “driving around here all over the place.” The disconnect illustrates how “fire always moves faster than intelligence”: the mapping and incident documentation lag behind real‑time tactical improvisation by local crews, especially during a major urban interface event where the priority is evacuations and structure protection, not updating the operations map.
Looking ahead, Lunder stresses that the immediate tactical story on Aspen Acres is less about new dozer lines and more about the weather. Minimum relative humidity on 7/3/2026 dropped to around 7 percent, with only modest winds, still enough to support aggressive fire behavior. In the coming days, forecasts show minimum humidity improving slightly into the mid‑teens but with an important and dangerous twist: a pattern shift to stronger east and southeast winds. For days, southwest winds have pushed the fire in a fairly consistent direction. When that pattern flips, what was a relatively quiet flank or heel of the fire can suddenly become the head of the fire.
From a tactical standpoint, this forecast wind shift is a classic “watch out situation.” Homeowners who stayed in place because the fire appeared to be burning away from them could suddenly find themselves in front of the new head. Firefighters working on slopes that had been treated as flanks may now be exposed to rapid runs “with the wind up the slope,” exactly the alignment fires need to do the worst damage. Lunder walks through model forecasts showing that on Sunday morning winds swing to southeast and east, bringing gusts in the mid‑teens at the same time precipitation probabilities creep up into the 40–60 percent range. The potential for showers is good news, but the transition period, he warns, is when entrapments and fatalities often occur.
Fresh infrared mapping reveals that the fire has crossed Highway 165 west of Rye and near Lake Isabel, has burned around Bishop’s Castle, and has made a substantial run on the south side into scattered rural homes. The updated perimeter shows steady outward growth in almost every direction except due east. For the Rye area, he pivots into a tactical view from Google Street View, pointing out how thick, lush willow and cottonwood vegetation that looks benign and green in an August photo becomes explosively flammable under today’s drought. Defensible space and fuels reduction in these heavily vegetated area is essential but the gravity of the hazard can be hard for residents to fully grasp when the landscape looks green and idyllic most of the year.
In essence, tactics on Aspen Acres and around Beulah Valley, Colorado City, and Rye are a mix of opportunistic line construction in lighter fuels, aggressive structure protection, and a cautious eye on a looming wind shift that could re‑orient the whole fire. A Complex Incident Management Team from Alaska has taken command of the fire, but their maps do not yet articulate any strategy for how the NW or west flanks of the fire might eventually be contained.
Willow Fire near Leadville, Colorado
The Willow Fire above Leadville provides an example of a drought-driven high‑country timber fire that resists nearly all conventional/direct firefighting tactics. Lunder describes a fire perched on a steep mountain, with the valley at roughly 9,500 feet and the top of the fire near 12,000 feet, creating nearly 2,500 feet of vertical relief. The fuels are thick mixed conifer, and the fire is spotting aggressively in all directions.
In that kind of terrain and timber, “direct attack is not happening”. Not for lack of bravery, but because history has shown that crews trying to go direct on a long‑range spotting timber fire on steep slopes do not “get away with it.” The accepted strategy instead is to let the fire burn upslope into non‑burnable rock outcrops while preparing control features downslope well-away from the fire, where the terrain and access are more forgiving.
Lunder pulls up the operations map to show what that looks like in practice. Around Turquoise Lake and a nearby fish hatchery, crews are prepping potential holding lines, in some places along roads. Road prep often includes sending crews with chainsaws and and chippers along the road to prune and cut trees, remove snags that could fall and spread fire across the line when the fire arrives, and chip or pile the cuttings. The goal is to create a corridor that is clear enough to safely conduct a backfire or burnout later, if and when the main fire comes down the hill.
Along some stretches, dozer line is being pushed to connect roads to powerline easements and other linear features. But when each map grid square represents one square mile, Lunder notes, the distance to cover is immense. Clearing, snagging, and preparing even a mile of road can be a huge workload. In the meantime, the portion of the fire burning in steep, inaccessible rock country is essentially being left alone to burn into rock, because there is little meaningful or safe work firefighters can do there that would change the outcome.
Tactically, Willow is an exercise in patience and triage. The team’s priority is to keep the fire from going around the lake and into more populated or infrastructure‑rich areas, and to let it burn out to natural rock barriers where possible. Active/direct suppression is limited to areas where the fuels allow somewhat safe access. Elsewhere, ‘point protection’ is used, and firefighters prepare structures and other assets at risk for the fire’s arrival, setting up pumps, sprinkler kits, and cutting back brush and trees near ‘assets-at-risk’.
Gold Mountain / Ouray Area Fire, Colorado
Shifting to the Gold Mountain Fire, in Ouray, Lunder describes a fire burning in some of the steepest and most unforgiving country in Colorado. One focal point is Cutler Creek above Portland. Operations briefings have singled out this location as a tactical linchpin: the main fire edge is controlled on one side down to the creek, but across the creek lies “basically like a cliff.”
The challenge is simple to describe and hard to solve. Fire is burning in a steep gully below, with heat lingering in deep pockets that can smolder and flare for days. Above that gully is a narrow ridge with very difficult terrain. Putting crews “uphill of a fire that’s burning” in that configuration is extremely dangerous. If the fire makes a sudden run, it can rush up the chute and overrun any firefighters working on the ridge. Lunder points out that working from the bottom up is safer, but in this case, the bottom is full of heat and nearly inaccessible.
He uses this example to push back on online commentary that accuses modern hotshot crews of being too cautious. From an easy chair or office desk, it is easy to criticize crews for not going direct. On the slope, in “super steep and gnarly” terrain with no anchor points and fire below, the calculus changes. He argues that there is almost nothing—certainly no lodge or high‑end private resort—that is worth killing firefighters over.
Zooming out on the map, he shows how the fire has been backing off Baldy Peak into adjacent drainages, including Owl Creek Pass and up toward Courthouse Mountain and Cimarron Ridge. The terrain is a maze of cliffs, deep canyons, and broken ridges. There are few trails and even fewer continuous ridges suitable for dozer line. Operations have begun to sketch a “box” they might use to control the fire, tying roads, pastures, existing fuel treatments, and rocky knobs into a composite line that they might be able to hold.
One conceptual box brings line up County Road 12, skirts around a green pasture that will not be hard to hold, then looks for ways to stitch together ridges and fuel breaks into a defendable perimeter. This is classic indirect strategy: start from roads and other accessible features, then figure out how to connect them into a coherent line that can be held with the resources at hand.
However, when Lunder turns on a terrain “x‑ray” view, the optimism fades. He sketches a conceptual dozer line down a ridge and then pulls up an elevation profile. The slope ranges from 13 percent near the bottom, which is workable for dozers, to 51 percent near the top, which is not. That means only certain segments of the ridge are dozer‑friendly. Other segments would require hand crews to hike in and build handline, then come back and “snag” the line, cutting hazardous dead trees that could fall across it later.
In practice, this means any real line will be a patchwork: dozer line where slope permits, hand line in the steep pockets, and then days of additional work to cut snags, widen the corridor, and set up for eventual firing operations. Under the current drought and spotting behavior, even a well‑prepared line can fail if a firing operation throws embers far ahead of itself in the same way the main fire has been spotting. Lunder notes how, under these conditions, you can “do all this prep and everything else,” start a firing operation, and then watch it spot across your own line, erasing a week of hard work and forcing you to retreat to an even larger box.
Overlaying all of this is politics and values at risk. This fire threatens high‑value assets like the Cimarron Mountain Club, a private resort owned by extremely wealthy people with, as Lunder puts it, “senators on their speed dial.” There is enormous pressure not to let such properties burn. At the same time, there is unrelenting pressure inside the fire organization not to risk firefighters’ lives in steep, sketchy ground. The Incident Commander’s job becomes less about personally directing line location and more about navigating competing demands from landowners, agencies, politicians, and safety officers, all while staying within the bounds of what the terrain and weather will actually allow. Sometimes the most logical tactical plan is to “back way off” to the ridge that makes the most sense, but political pressure may demand a more aggressive, riskier approach.
On the NE flanks of this fire, the operations planners face a recurrent tactical dilemma: It can take over a week to prep an indirect fireline adaquately to conduct and hold a firing operation. How far will the fire move in the time it takes you to do all of that work? What will the weather do? Direct attack is not possible in the areas with the heaviest fuel, but under the conditions we have been seeing on this fire, major indirect campaigns often fail, as well.
Ferris Fire near Cortez, Colorado
The Ferris Fire, near Cortez in southwestern Colorado, offers a different kind of tactical case study: what happens when a fire burns into a landscape that has been heavily treated for hazardous fuels, but where large amounts of logging slash and unburned piles remain on the ground.
The information shared in this section came from Forest Service officials working on the District which is burning who were authorized to speak publicly.
The Ferris Fire started as three fires which merge into a larger complex that eventually crossed the Dolores River. Early tactics tried to keep the fire out of Doe Canyon with dozer line, but the fire spotted and slopped past those lines. Once it became clear that the fire would cross the river, the incident team shifted to preparing indirect lines on the west side of the Dolores, taking advantage of a powerline easement and road systems. The plan is to tie that powerline corridor into roads on the adjacent plateau and conduct firing operation to the east of the fireline, creating a broad black buffer as the main fire runs ahead. There are also plans to fire off of roads on the northern and NW flanks of the fire, eventually tying these back into the Dolores River Canyon.
Layered onto this tactical picture is a complex forest management story. The area north of the river has been the site of extensive mechanical thinning and logging over thousands of acres. The intention of these projects has been to reduce the density of ponderosa pine forests here, hopefully making them less-susceptible to damage from bark beetles (which have killed millions of trees across the Intermountain West). Using national hazardous fuels treatment data from the US Forest Service —described as a “nightmare” of inconsistent fields and overlapping or incomplete datasets—Lunder shows how hard it is even to determine what kind of work was actually done where. On satellite imagery from 2025, though, he points out vast units that were mechanically logged, with the remaining slash being machine or hand‑piled and many of the small logs being ‘decked’ in huge piles. The result is many tons of dry fuel per acre, scattered in thousands of piles and in large amounts of red slash on the ground.
The District’s plan had been to burn those piles under controlled conditions, outside of fire season, but persistent drought and a shortage of ‘burn windows’ has prevented the work from happening. The local district has only a 20-person hotshot crew and two engines to cover nearly 500,000 acres, and when they set out to burn piles, they then have to leave people behind to patrol and mop up each set of piles, quickly diminishing the production rates of the burn crews. The San Juan National Forest had many thousands of unburned piles, even before they undertook the logging that created thousands more. It is, Lunder notes, much easier to build a pile than it is to get it burned. Now, instead of being eliminated in a controlled way, those piles and slash are being consumed in an intense wildfire that is likely killing a high percentage of the overstory trees the thinning was meant to protect.
Tactically, the Ferris Fire is a blend of direct and indirect suppression on the actively spreading flanks, combined with an uncomfortable recognition that some of the “treated” areas are now burning more intensely than they might have if they had been left alone. The fire is exposing the limits of logging as a fuels treatment without adequate follow‑up burning, and it is forcing the team to fight a campaign‑style fire through a patchwork of mechanically altered, slash‑heavy stands.
Babylon Fire, Utah
The Babylon Fire near Blanding, Utah, is another example of a blaze that has moved beyond the point where tactics can do much other than steer and monitor it until weather changes. Progression maps now show that in the span of about five days it has “gobbled a large proportion of the only timber in southwestern Utah.”
The Babylon Fire illustrates how, in remote, timbered plateaus broken by canyons, the primary tactical levers are time and topography. There is little in the way of road infrastructure to anchor firing operations or dozer lines. Once the fire is established and weather is hot, dry, and windy, incident teams are mostly in the business of point protection and keeping an eye on which flank might threaten communities like Monticello if the monsoon fails to materialize. Lunder notes that one flank on the northwest remains quite active per satellite heat detections, while other segments have burned out into red rock and self‑limited on natural barriers.
In short, Babylon is doing “what it wants” until a material change in weather or fuels – not a fire where tactical brilliance alone will draw a tidy line and stop it.
Pocket Fire near Flagstaff / Sedona, Arizona
The Pocket Fire, in the hoodoo‑filled canyon country between Flagstaff and Sedona, provides a contrast: a fire burning through a mosaic of previous burns where teams have been able to use firing operations and old fire scars to shape the outcome more deliberately.
Lunder explains that this area has burned repeatedly since around 2014, leaving a patchwork of surviving ponderosa pine with thinned canopies. This prior fire history is one reason the current fire is not producing the kind of wholesale crown fire destruction currently being seen in parts of Colorado. Tactically, crews have repeatedly used the same roads and trails that were employed on earlier incidents, where snags have already been removed and fuel loading is lower.
Early on in the Pocket Fire, they anchored to the edge of a previous burn scar and fired from a road–trail system that had been used in past fires. When a period of stronger winds hit, the main fire jumped over what had been a fairly controlled north flank, and made a multi-mile run in a single day. Crews then shifted to a more distant road system to the north, again taking advantage of a network of trails and prior treatments, and conducted a large firing operation along that alignment. Over the last four or five days, they have been working slowly down the long western flank, firing along ridges and tying into roads, creating a black buffer between the main fire and key values along that side.
Satellite imagery shows the main fire backing slowly into rugged canyons while the fired edge holds along accessible high ground. The overarching tactical picture is clear: in this terrain, you hold where there are roads and prior treatments, and you accept that “fire is going to do what it wants” in the inaccessible canyons.
The Pocket Fire is a case where extensive prior fire and fuel work has at least given firefighters options: familiar control lines, reduced fuels along key corridors, and opportunities to use fire on their own terms for large firing operations in stands which have already been tested by previous fires. It is still far from tidy, but it is a much more manageable fire than many others now burning.
Cottonwood and Wild Goose Fires, Utah
Toward the end of the tactics segment, Lunder offers quick updates on the Cottonwood and Wild Goose fires in Utah, both of which demonstrate how some fires run hard early and then largely put themselves out when they run out of fuel.
The Cottonwood Fire made a massive run in a single burning period, threatening to take out an entire mountain range. It then burned into the footprint of the Twitchell Canyon fire, a roughly 15‑year‑old burn scar with limited remaining forest. Once it hit that area, spread slowed dramatically. Most of the perimeter has not moved significantly for over five days. The main tactical focus now is on a stubborn piece in North Canyon and some spots into older burns and rough terrain. Crews have been working up a ridge line with line construction and dealing with isolated pockets of heat, but the broad perimeter is essentially being held by past fire rather than present suppression.
Wild Goose, near Scipio, has generated alarming headlines but in reality has shown very limited growth in recent days. Lunder notes that only a small area—on the order of a few dozen acres—expanded yesterday. Most of the perimeter is cold or in patrol status, making it a lower tactical priority compared to the fast‑moving incidents in Colorado.
These two incidents show the other side of the coin: sometimes “tactics, schmactics” as Lunder jokes. The fire makes its big run, then runs out of receptive fuel and quietly lays down. In those cases, the most important containment tool often turns out to be a previous fire.