Tyler Corbin's official title is Fuels Specialist, which is one of those government job descriptions that sounds like it belongs at a refinery but actually means he works for the Bureau of Land Management in southwestern Colorado and his job is to set things on fire. On purpose. Before something worse does it by accident.
This spring, Corbin and his crews had 2,285 acres of prescribed burns planned across Dolores, San Miguel, and La Plata counties, the dry country beneath the San Juan Mountains. In a BLM announcement about a month ago, Corbin said his teams "take advantage of the right weather windows to put good fire on the ground." That sentence is worth sitting with. We take advantage of windows. That's the language of a man watching the sky. It's the language of opportunism, which is what fire management has become in the Mountain West whether anyone wants to admit it or not.
For decades the operational logic ran on a sequence a child could follow. Snow melts, ground stays damp, you burn in spring. Summer dries things out, you suppress. Fall cools down, you take stock. Winter resets everything. The prescribed burn window, roughly March through May in Colorado's high country, existed because snowmelt kept fuels wet enough that a controlled fire stayed controlled. The whole thing depended on a physical fact: snow on the ground in spring.
Drive through Dolores County right now and you can see the problem without consulting a single data set. The San Juans should still be white at elevation. They're brown. Monitoring stations across the West are reporting little to no snowpack. Peak runoff has already passed in some locations, weeks ahead of schedule. Down in Colorado Springs, the fire department issued Burn Restriction Order 2026-R1 citing "critical fire weather conditions and excessively dry fuel moisture levels." In spring. The season Corbin is supposed to be burning in.
Tim Brown, director of the Western Regional Climate Center at the Desert Research Institute, laid out what this means for people in Corbin's position at a NIDIS briefing this March:
"If the underlying conditions are much drier than usual, and then it's also warm on top of that…that's going to reduce the amount of prescribed fire activity and then that, in turn, could also increase the fire potential as we get more into the summer season."
Low snowpack drought-stresses vegetation through reduced soil moisture. That stress increases atmospheric drying. Follow the logic all the way around and you arrive back at Corbin's 2,285 acres. Less snow means the piñon and juniper on his burn units are drier than they should be in April. Drier fuels mean his window shrinks because conditions are too dangerous for controlled fire. Fewer prescribed burns mean more fuel sitting there when July comes. More fuel means worse wildfires. The tool designed to prevent catastrophe becomes impossible to use at the precise moment it's most needed. If you wrote that into a novel, your editor would call it too neat. But there it is, playing out across three counties in southwestern Colorado.
Brown identified this compression as early as 2022: "Folks are starting to see shorter burn windows. And that means that more prescribed fires need to be packed into those short bursts." A thousand-acre treatment might take ten days. A weather forecast at the start might not hold for the duration. With conditions shifting faster, the risk of a prescribed burn escaping its boundaries goes up. The window gets shorter, the stakes of using it get higher, and the consequences of missing it get worse. A trap. And Corbin is standing in it.
Colorado's legislature understood at least part of the problem well enough to pass SB25-007, creating a prescribed fire claims fund backed by a $250,000 transfer from the general fund. The state recognized that fear of lawsuits was suppressing the very burns that could prevent larger disasters. Sensible enough. But a liability fund doesn't manufacture weather windows for a BLM fuels specialist in Dolores County. It doesn't put snow on the ground in March. The legal problem has a fund now. The physical problem has no interest in it.
So here is Corbin this spring with his 2,285 acres that need fire. Conditions that may or may not open a window long enough to burn them safely. A calendar that says he has until May. Fuel moisture readings that suggest May's conditions arrived in March. And the knowledge, supplied by people like Brown who study these things for a living, that every acre he can't treat this spring is an acre that feeds whatever comes this summer. Up the I-70 corridor, his BLM colleagues at the Upper Colorado River fire unit have described the same bind. Chad Sewell, a fuels specialist working on wildfire risk reduction near King Mountain, noted this February that years of drought and warmer temperatures have stressed forests, and that if prescribed burning is used to treat fuel piles, crews will do so "later when conditions are safe." The word "later" doing heavy lifting in that sentence, carrying the full weight of a season that may never open.
The old sequence required a boundary between seasons. A line on the calendar where spring ended and fire weather began. That line was drawn by snowpack, and the snowpack is gone. What's left is a fuels specialist in the San Juans checking his weather instruments each morning, waiting for a window that gets narrower every year, knowing the work he can't finish now becomes someone else's emergency by August. Tomorrow he'll check again. The day after that. Until the window opens or closes for good.