Bosque fully reopened after non-native trees weeded out to prevent wildfires

The Rio Grande bosque fully reopened Friday after sections of the popular cottonwood forest were closed for wildfire prevention efforts.

Under the green-orange and yellow transitioning of color on the trees, the floor of some parts of the forest has gray stumps and sticks after certain non-native trees were killed to tamp down wildfire risk.

Dustin Chavez-Davis, the city’s Open Space project coordinator, said crews finished work a few days ago and the entirety of the forest was open to the public again by Friday morning.

“We’ve seen a bunch of fires, and we’ll see more, we know that they’re gonna come. We just have to be prepared, and we have to do what we can to try to mitigate that and create defensible space, create areas where firefighters can get in,” Chavez-Davis said.

David Simon, the city’s Parks and Recreation director, explained that because of its urban setting, the bosque is at an increased risk of a severe blaze.

“Unfortunately, we have the risk of human-caused wildfire in the bosque and I’d say most of the fires lately have been human-caused because of the issues we face with the unhoused populations in the bosque,” Simon said. “Once a fire starts, it doesn’t matter if it was naturally caused or human-caused, because once a fire starts, it’s going to be agnostic about what it burns and where it’s burning.”

The number of fire incidents jumped from 86 reported blazes in 2019 to 235 reported in 2023, according to Parks and Recreation.

“Fires that start more remotely, or at night, sometimes those are the ones that, if you don’t get on it right away, can start to spread in these environments, and then you get a bigger problem,” Simon said. “But there are hundreds of (reported fires) between Central and Cesar Chavez because it happens to be a busy area for humans and also an area where a lot of unhoused people are traversing.”

The last time the bosque experienced a severe burn was in May 2022, when a 30-acre fire torched the forest on both sides of the river near Montaño Road.

Among the most notable non-native species Chavez-Davis and the Open Space team were tasked with killing were Siberian elm, Russian olive and tamarisk.

Many of the small sprouting trees were sprayed with herbicide, and the ones that haven’t died already will in a couple weeks.

Simon said, due to climate change and drought, the bosque has gone from a flood-driven ecosystem to a fire-prone forest.

“Fire ecology is changing in the Southwest and has changed. This started a couple of decades ago, with hotter, more intense forest fires as a result of drying, less moisture and fuel buildup in forests, and we have that to a lesser extent here in the bosque, but it’s a factor,” Simon said.

Most of Bernallio County is currently in a moderate drought.

The closures were in place for roughly 10 days beginning Oct. 15. Treatments took place on 193 acres, or roughly 4% of the forest.

“We’re grateful to the Open Space Division for their hard work to protect and restore the bosque, and for completing this project quickly to get trails back open for folks to enjoy,” Staci Drangmeister, spokesperson for Mayor Tim Keller, said in a statement.

The project was funded by a $1 million Federal Emergency Management Agency grant awarded in 2019 to prevent catastrophic wildfires from happening.