Editor’s note: This is the first story in a two-part series from Aspen Journalism about how local governments are using new advanced modeling data to guide wildfire mitigation. This story examines landscape-level work that is meant to change the trajectory of wildfire and prevent any wildfires from reaching the core of Snowmass Village, while the second story, planned for later this week, looks at the challenges of incentivizing homeowners to contribute to mitigation efforts while also protecting their privacy.
Communities across the arid West are grappling with an existential question about what it will take to adapt to drought, warmer temperatures and increasing wildfire activity. Advanced wildfire modeling data has provided Snowmass Village with an answer: It will take $25 million, and lots of community cooperation and coordination.
Several local municipalities have partnered with the Wildfire Collaborative Roaring Fork Valley to use the only scientifically validated model, developed by Hussam Mahmoud of Vanderbilt University, to predict the most probable path that a wildfire would take through their communities.
Results from the modeling are in for Snowmass Village, Marble, and the Three-Mile and Four-Mile areas of Glenwood Springs; the data-gathering process is now underway in Aspen and Carbondale. Each community is expected to see a unique prescription that highlights the most-impactful mitigation strategies and areas.
In Snowmass Village, the model shows that mitigating 9,000 acres of wild lands in and around the village — which the wildfire collaborative estimates would cost $25 million — would provide a “community-surrounding fuel break [that] eliminates high vulnerability for all structures,” according to the collaborative’s website.
The hefty cost reflects the town’s current vulnerability. The same characteristics that draw residents and visitors to Snowmass Village — its forested location and steep slopes — make it vulnerable to fire. There are scenarios in which a hot, fast-moving fire reaches the entirety of the town; protecting the village means preventing fire from reaching it.
The mitigation involves thinning the forest — including removing all the dead and dying vegetation — by about 50% to create fuel breaks while maintaining a healthy, diverse forest ecosystem, including shade and cover for wildlife.
Snowmass Village, which paid for the modeling work from its 2025 wildfire mitigation budget, is one of the first communities across the country to implement wildfire mitigation strategies based on Mahmoud’s modeling, called AGNI-NAR (Asynchronous Graph Nexus Infrastructure for Network Assessment of Wildland-Urban Interface Risk). Angie Davlyn, executive director of the wildfire collaborative, said the goal is to move quickly.
“It’s data that’s meant to be immediately actionable,” Davlyn said. The collaborative and the town of Snowmass Village have chosen not to write a report based on the modelling analysis.
“It’s expensive and time consuming, and I would rather just show community members the data and get machines on the ground, tackling what we know is a significant problem,” Davlyn said.
The collaborative has presented some relevant data during Town Council meetings and published some details on its website.
The ratings can help prioritize and focus mitigation efforts, providing a roadmap for each community to understand how to prevent catastrophic losses. Mahmoud’s model has been validated against the 2018 Camp fire in California and the 2021 Marshall fire near Louisville, Colorado. In a 2025 presentation, Mahmoud showed that his model replicated the damage of the Camp fire with 85% accuracy and that of the Marshall fire with 72% accuracy.
“In the past, people were applying mitigations without knowing what that does to the vulnerability across the community. Right now, we know what it would do,” Mahmoud said in an interview with Aspen Journalism. “The solution has to be tailored to each community.”
In Snowmass Village, the most effective defense against wildfire includes the 9,000-acre mitigation, combined with home-hardening efforts from residents that address the 30 feet closest to homes. According to the collaborative, that combination would drop the number of high-vulnerability homes in the model from 1,531 to zero.
Although Snowmass Village is also working to incentivize homeowners to do the work around their properties, the town’s sustainability coordinator, Elyse Hottel, said the biggest impact will come from mitigation efforts in wildland and open spaces near and around the village.
“Mitigating the wildlands surrounding the town has infinitely more impact than home hardening,” Hottel said. “If we don’t do the landscape-level mitigation, the home mitigation is not really going to be effective.”
The complete 9,000-acre mitigation effort would require major fundraising. The town and wildfire collaborative received an $850,000 grant from the Colorado Division of Homeland Security and Natural Disaster last November, and the town has committed about $100,000 toward mitigation in the 2026 budget. That’s a small fraction of the millions needed to complete the work.
Snowmass sets smaller initial goal
The model also showed that a more targeted, 2,400-acre mitigation effort “removes fire’s primary entry corridors” into the village, according to the collaborative’s website.
Hottel said the town has set a five-year goal to mitigate those 2,400 high-priority acres, which would drop the number of highly vulnerable homes to 992 — 41% of homes in the village — at a cost of about $5 million.
Snowmass Village has had the data in hand since spring and hired Hottel, a member of Basalt Town Council, on a part-time basis in April. She has been tasked with orchestrating the village’s wildfire-mitigation strategy.
Town of Snowmass Village staff — including Hottel, Josh Zeeb of the Geographic Information Systems department, and the town manager’s office — and the wildfire collaborative used the modeling to develop a list of priorities for landscape-level mitigation in wildland and common areas in and around Snowmass Village.
“We’re trying to create a series of connected areas that will shift how fire moves, both slowing it down and changing its trajectory away from where people live,” Davlyn said.
Ten project areas were identified for mitigation this fall based on risk levels and logistical factors, including land-ownership and availability of crews and machinery. Stage 2 fire restrictions, which prohibit the use of equipment such as chainsaws and masticators, caused delays this past summer.
Hottel said work has been completed in five of the project areas as of mid-October. Masticators, which are the heavy machines used to thin the forest, can work in up to 6 inches of snow, and the town intends to continue the mitigation until completed or until there is too much snow on the ground.
“We put our collective energy into what we felt like would be the highest impact work, which was making sure we could get contractors and machines on the ground in this relatively small weather window this year,” Davlyn said. “It’s the work we knew we could move the quickest on at scale given ownership, jurisdiction and the money we had available to us.”
The projects that Snowmass Village has identified for this fall are primarily on land owned either by the town or a homeowners association, but working with other landowners will be key to completing the work that could change the trajectory of a wildfire.
So far this year, the mitigation work has included about 8 acres of HOA land on Ridge and Faraway roads and 5 acres of town land near Upper Brush Creek and Owl Creek roads. The remaining projects include 15 acres of HOA land, 4.5 acres of town-owned property and 4 acres of Aspen Skiing Co. land near Fanny Hill on Snowmass Ski Area.
SkiCo collaboration is critical
Mahmoud’s maps show that the most probable path of a fire in the area would move through Snowmass Ski Area, and the town of Snowmass Village is including one property owned by Aspen Skiing Co., near Snowmass Village’s water treatment plant on Fanny Hill, on its priority list for this year’s mitigation projects.
Mak Keeling, Aspen Skiing Co.’s vice president of mountain planning, has been tracking recent fires at ski areas around the country to help understand fire resiliency and mitigation planning. Keeling points to three ski areas that have been badly damaged by wildfires: Sierra-at-Tahoe resort, which was badly damaged in the 2021 Caldor fire; Utah’s Eagle Point, which burned in the Cottonwood fire in June; and Montana’s Maverick Mountain, which lost its only chairlift in the Sand Creek fire in August.
“It has absolutely destroyed their business,” Keeling said. “This is near the top of the list as far as things that keep me up at night.”
The model shows a significant drop in risk to the ski area under the gold-standard $25 million, 9,000-acre mitigation approach identified by the Vanderbilt team and the wildfire collaborative. SkiCo clearly stands to benefit from mitigation efforts, and Keeling said the company supports the work.
“We’re a contributing member in our resources and our assets,” Keeling said. “We have timber equipment, we have timber crews, we have experience, we have, frankly, permitting through the [National Environmental Policy Act] process.”
Much of Snowmass Ski Area is in the White River National Forest, and any projects that happen on U.S. Forest Service land need approval through NEPA. In some cases, SkiCo has NEPA approvals to conduct fuels mitigation work through the ski areas’ permits, although specific proposals need to be approved in annual summer construction plans.
Both the White River National Forest and SkiCo participate in the wildfire collaborative, helping to identify and coordinate projects.
Keeling said SkiCo has identified forest health as a priority for the past five years and will align the 2027 scope of work with the Vanderbilt modeling data. The company awarded the wildfire collaborative a $10,000 grant in 2024 through its employee-led Environment Foundation, and another $10,000 grant this year to support mitigation that will be identified in forthcoming modeling in Carbondale.
“Unlike some of the partners in the collaborative, we have a really unique and special capability that allow us to provide in-kind services at our expense that are delivering on the collaborative’s plan,” said Chris Miller, senior vice president of sustainability at Aspen One, which is SkiCo’s parent company.
Wildfire is an important piece of SkiCo’s climate action, Miller said, alongside responding to variations and uncertainty that affect the winter season.
“This is an equally important part of how we think about resilience in the face of climate change,” Miller said. “We want to continue to be advocates for solutions that address these issues at scale, both in terms of mitigating future risk through the reduction of emissions and a transition to renewable energy and managing the impacts that we’re already seeing that are in the pipeline, like this. I think this is super important.”
In the concluding installment of this two-part series expected later this week, Aspen Journalism explores the role that homeowners can play in preventing damage from wildfire and the challenges Snowmass Village and Marble face in using the modeling data while protecting property owners’ privacy.
