Behind every dozer line on a map, every firing operation along a ridge, and every decision not to engage directly with the flames, there is a legacy of hard-learned lessons about risk, trauma, and the human cost of aggressive firefighting. A recent broadcast of The Lookout Livestream used ongoing fires in Colorado and the broader West to show how safety concerns can shape tactical decision-making on the fireline, and the impossible calculus of weighing costs vs benefits.
“We Don’t Want to Put People Up in There”
On the Aspen Acres Fire south of Pueblo, Colorado, part of the active perimeter has pushed into extremely steep, broken terrain on the flanks of Greenhorn Mountain, west of the town of Rye. Heat signatures show fire burning in “deep, gnarly mountain” country—terrain that is hard to walk in even when it isn’t on fire.
Incident operations leaders made it clear in their July 5th briefing: they do not want to put crews into that section of the fire. Alaska Complex Incident Management Operations Chief, Brad Washa, said, “We don’t really want to put people up in there,” as he described ground so rough it’s “difficult to walk on when it’s not on fire.”
This is a pivotal moment in the long-term trajectory of this fire. The new fire front to the west of Highway 165 opens up tens of thousands of acres of potential new spread – the fire could burn here for weeks without running out of fuel.
“Going direct” here, putting handcrews right on the fire’s edge, cutting handline to flank and contain the flames, could shorten the Aspen Acres firefight by weeks or months, but current weather and fire behavior conditions have been driving explosive growth on this fire, and the location of the fire, with multiple fingers and spot fires scattered across very broken terrain, makes the risk of entrapment of firefighters highly likely if the fire decides to make a run while they are engaged, right up inside of it.
When you weigh the potential costs of NOT going direct, (potentially burning tens of thousands of acres of forest, potential for future mudslides and flash floods, firefighting costs, weeks of poor air quality for the entire region, disruption to the local economy, and commitment of hundreds of firefighters through the heart of fire season), it might seem like the best decision would be to accept a very high level of risk for the few crews that could be tasked to tackle an extremely difficult ‘direct attack’ assignment here.
But this tough math is increasingly checked against a more sobering question: What are we risking, and what are we protecting?
In the Aspen Acres case, multiple factors are affecting a decision to back off from direct attack: The fire is burning through dense stands of beetle-killed timber on extreme slopes where manual firefighting, without heavy equipment, is nearly impossible. There is a lack of immediate threats to homes and infrastructure, and faced with extreme, ‘road-runner geography’ there is an acknowledgement of the deadly consequences of getting it wrong.
Bias to Action vs. the Cost of Tragedy
There a deep cultural tension in wildfire operations: Firefighters and managers are trained, and wired, to do something to solve the immediate problem. We’ve got this bias to action, even when the odds of success are very low, “We’re like, well, we gotta do something, we gotta try something.”
When direct attack is impossible, “something” is often a major firing operation: building long control lines along roads or ridges, far ahead of the fire, then intentionally lighting fire off them under conditions chosen by the team. Done well, this can safely create large blackened buffers that stop or slow the main fire when it arrives.
But the same bias to action can push firing operations into marginal windows—during extreme drought, under record heat, or in alignment with strong winds. These ‘hail Mary’ firing operations can escape control, spot far ahead of the control lines, and burn tens of thousands of additional acres that the original fire might never have reached without the firefighters’ help. As we fight fires under exceedingly difficult weather and fuels conditions, an entire generation of wildfire leaders is learning new lessons about the limits of our abilities.
An a vocal, social media-empowered old guard is shouting from the sidelines that we need to go back to the ‘one foot in the black’ tactics they used 40 or 50 years ago, when men were men, the timber was still big, and our vision was unclouded by visions of fire as a necessary force on the landscape. But their zeal for putting out every fire is one of the primary causes of the ridiculously dangerous conditions firefighters work in today. Many of these well-intentioned old dudes refuse to take any responsibility for their role in creating the overstocked, sick forests of today, even denying that things are radically different from the woods they worked in half a century ago:
“Elite crews are increasingly declining direct assignments, refusing to line and cold-trail a fire while it is small, and pushing instead to fall back and burn. The country is too steep, the packs are too heavy, the ground is too rough. Never mind that firefighters worked that same ground safely for decades. What we are witnessing is the selective refusal of lawful assignments being used to dictate large-fire strategy from the tactical level upward. The people best equipped to end a fire early are, too often, the ones talking themselves out of it.”
– Franklin Carroll, ‘Why We Fight’, July 2026.
So why are crews and overhead turning down assignments or backing off of direct attack? Is it because, as Frank Carroll rants, they are ‘self-absorbed Gen Z weaklings, obsessed with self-care’, or are they seeing the fireground in ways that outsiders cannot?
A small tactical mistake or misreading of the landscape can be deadly. We learn the stories, and work them over. We hike the fireground, read the reports and books, and retell the stories again. The early summer calendar is full of sad anniversaries, and we keep adding new ones. Last week’s triple fatality in Colorado wasn’t far down the Colorado River from Storm King Mountain, where the 1994 South Canyon Fire killed 14 firefighters. If you were driving from one tragedy to another, you’d go right past Battlement Creek, where 3 firefighters died on a similar fire 18 years earlier. Some local firefighters here call their district ‘Death Alley’.
Fire world is a small place, and we end up connected through these searing events. Some people who are personally connected to someone who has died adopt their story and carry it forward. I spent a training assignment in an engine with a really hostile dude who eventually opened up and told me he quit working for the Feds after his buddy got killed by a snag, fighting a fire that my trainer had urged the Forest fire leadership to back off from because of the danger posed by all of the standing dead trees. The victim was from my hometown; I see stickers in his memory all over the West.
These shared traumas are part of our firefighter DNA. When I survey a forest subdivision that is so dense you can’t see the sky, I can easily imagine the neighborhood devoid of trees, with only the chimneys of the homes remaining. When an Operations Section Chief looks at a grassy desert side-canyon he might feel the sudden wind shift that trapped and killed a couple local kids on an engine in Eastern Washington. Across a career, the stories grow heavy.
Indirect Tactics, Bigger Fires, Higher Overall Exposure to Risk
Prioritizing safety does not come without tradeoffs. One of the clearest, and most politically visible, is fire size and duration.
Because the Aspen Acres and other Colorado fires are burning in heavy forests, under extreme drought conditions, management teams are increasingly relying on indirect strategies:
- Using ridges, roads, and rivers as natural or built control features
- Reopening old roads and historic dozer lines far from the active flame front
- Planning and conducting large-scale firing operations under more favorable conditions
- Accepting that some areas—especially steep, snag-filled, beetle-kill forests—are too dangerous for direct engagement
In some cases, the constraints to direct attack are both safety-related and institutional. Running bulldozers in wilderness or high-value recreation areas is often politically difficult.
On Aspen Acres, in Division D, for example, firefighters are building a massive indirect control line around the SW flanks of the fire through beetle-killed timber.
When the fire originally made its run up into these slopes, the operational planners concluded:
- Constructing indirect firelines to contain this flank of the fire would resemble a “major logging operation” taking up to two weeks.
- Even if completed, the line might not hold under extreme fire behavior.
- The environmental and recreational impacts—especially in Colorado’s recreation-focused forests—were significant.
- The risk to crews working under dense snags and dead trees was high.
Since then, the weather has moderated, and crews have been prepping roads and dozer lines for the fire’s arrival. The fire still may race up to these lines when weather conditions change for the worse, but for now, they have to try something, anything.
The decision not to engage the fire, directly, is now increasing the exposure to risk of the hundreds of firefighters that are working in snag-filled forests to build indirect lines. Hundreds of firefighters are driving to and from their assignments every day (more firefighters die in vehicle accidents than burnovers). They are cutting down standing dead trees to prepare firelines where they may eventually confront a running crown fire. The cumulative exposure to risk is much higher than it would have been with a strategy of direct attack, but that direct attack would have likely failed anyway.
When Homes Compete With Perimeter Control
Firefighter safety also intersects with another hard reality of modern fire: there are more homes, cabins, and small communities embedded in fire-prone landscapes than ever before.
On multiple fires, including Aspen Acres and the Willow Fire near Leadville, structure protection draws resources away from perimeter control. Trees don’t vote, and so oftentimes when you have a lot of structure protection to do, perimeter control—or actually putting the fire out—suffers.
When a fire heads toward a town like Beulah, incident commanders may order dozens of engines. Most of those will end up in driveways and along streets, preparing to defend homes as the fire front arrives. Only a fraction of the available resources remain to build and secure control lines out in the wildland.
The outcome:
- More homes saved, if things go well.
- Larger fire footprints, as perimeter work lags behind the fire’s spread.
- Higher exposure to deadly toxins, intense fire behavior, and urban fire hazards for firefighters operating in and near communities under chaotic, smoke-filled, ember-driven conditions. Wildland firefighters are not issued protective breathing equipment that their urban counterparts wear, yet they can be exposed to deadly vapors from the burning homes, chemicals, garbage, boats, and other plastics they are surrounded with when they attempt to save neighborhoods from wildfires.
But here, too, safety and ethics intersect. Allowing a fire to burn unchecked into a town is not a realistic option. The priority shifts from containing the fire’s footprint to preventing civilian casualties and structure loss, even if that means the fire will keep growing into the surrounding wildlands for days or weeks.
Dangerous Landscapes, Subtle Traps
Dangerous terrain doesn’t always mean steep alpine ridges. Some of the most treacherous terrain for firefighters is deceptively flat country with fast-moving grass and brush, shifting winds, and long, exposed flanks—in places like the Modoc Plateau in northeastern California.
We’ve been mapping of the current 3-1 Fire in Lassen County. Though this fire burned intensely for only one afternoon, it had many of the hallmarks of dangerous fires in the high desert.
- Wind-driven fires that run 10–12 miles in a single burning period.
- Wild terrain, with deep canyons, rocky shrublands, poor road access, and lots of fine fuels to spread the fire.
- Wild winds – here a frontal passage can cause winds suddenly shift 90 degrees, turning a quiet flank into a deadly head fire.
“Park your truck in the black”, says veteran wildfire instructor Dan Kelleher, of working in the desert. “You don’t have to have a very big fire to have bad things happen.”
Looking at the 3-1 Fire, I realized it was just a few miles for the 2004 Straylor Fire, where one of my colleagues broke his back in a mapping helicopter crash. They were flying too low, out ahead of a wind-driven fire, and hit a tree. Nick Bliss and Jimmy Rust, two of my old high school buddies rescued the 3 victims from the jet fuel-soaked crash site right before the fire overtook it, only to be trapped in a small safety zone as the fire burned all around them, melting the taillights on their truck as they waited it out with the critically-injured crash victims. ‘Everything went into slow motion”, said Jimmy, “and I knew that I needed to disengage mentally from the rescue to make a plan for the rest of us so we wouldn’t all die”.
A takeaway for incident commanders: Fire size is a poor proxy for risk. A 50-acre wind-driven fire on flat ground can be more lethal than a 20,000-acre fire creeping in heavy timber and steep terrain. When fire crews travel all over the country, chasing fire season from place to place, engaging your people safely requires an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the geography, weather, and nuanced fire regimes of the entire West. We build this knowledge in our people, and carry it forward through our lore.
Climate Change: Fewer Safe Windows, Harder Choices
Overlaying all of this is a climate that is hotter and drier than the one many veteran firefighters spent their early careers in.
The Dixie Fire in California—over 900,000 acres – provides a key example of how rapidly shifting climate conditions are eroding traditional tactical assumptions:
- Some fires no longer reliably “lay down” at night; instead, they can keep spotting and running.
- Prolonged heat waves—for example, 10+ days of 105–115°F in the days leading up to the 2024 Park Fire—precondition fuels so thoroughly that any ignition can grow explosively.
- Once a large fire is established in continuous heavy fuels under drought, it may simply “do whatever it wants until it runs out of fuel, or the rains come.”
In that environment, the windows for safe aggressive action are narrower, and the penalties for misjudging conditions are higher.
Command staff are forced to ask, repeatedly:
- Is this really a good night to launch a major firing operation?
- Are we sure we can hold this line if the wind shifts or the column builds?
- Are we risking firefighters’ lives to save forest that is already 2/3 dead due to severe drought-stress—or to protect structures that could instead be hardened and made defensible ahead of time?
- Why are we taking these risks when we know that this fire is actually generating beneficial effects on the landscape?
The trend is clear: when conditions are at their worst, more teams are choosing to step back, steer the fire into natural barriers where possible, and live with larger burned areas rather than chase containment at any cost. However, stepping back is not the default reaction in most places. Rather, some fire managers choose to fight the fire directly and aggressively for days, potentially squandering time and resources that might be better used prepping indirect lines, far ahead of the fire.
A New Ethic for a New Fire Era
Wildland fire leaders have always prioritized the safety of their crews. The first list of the ten standard ‘Fire Orders’, drafted in 1957, concludes with ’10. Fight fire aggressively but provide for SAFETY first.’ For as long as we have put people into the field to fight fires, we have had to balance our desire to put the fire out with the necessity of bringing our firefighters home in one piece. But changes in the climate, fuels, fire behavior, and the built environment are increasingly forcing fire managers to adapt their tactics, especially when enormous fires like Dixie, Carr, Camp, Bear, or Aspen Acres rage under extreme conditions.
And the weight of history, of those stories in our bag—Storm King, Thirtymile, Yarnell Hill, Knowles, and the countless helicopter crashes, people who died because medivac took too long, near misses, and career-ending injuries grows heavier by the year. There is no easy math to support life and death operational decisions. At the end of the day, we are accountable to the people we are asking to bear the risk.