Leanna Jepkes was on her way home on a late summer night last year when she spotted flames on the hillside near where she lives with her husband and two children in the Jefferson County foothills.
It was the start of the Quarry fire, a blaze that over the next week would grow to nearly 600 acres. It prompted the evacuation of more than 500 homes in Deer Creek Canyon. Jepkes and her family received their evacuation notice at 2 a.m. — a mere four hours after the fire started.
The wildfire would turn out to be Jefferson County’s biggest of the year.
“It was a very apocalyptic feeling,” Jepkes said. “It was surreal and terrifying.”
Jefferson County, considered to be one of the Colorado counties most at risk for the loss of homes due to a wildfire, is standing up a new wildland fire management program that aims to reduce the terror of an out-of-control blaze ripping through brush and trees and into neighborhoods. The goal for the county west of Denver, which is now staffing up, is to increase its capacity for fire preparedness and response.
“What do we need to do to lower wildfire risk?” Commissioner Lesley Dahlkemper said. “We’re very excited that this brings this all together in one place so we can tackle this in a holistic way. For Jeffco, this initiative is transformational.”
The county is in the midst of hiring 37 people into new positions — ranging from fire management officers to geographic information specialists to several firefighting crews — to ensure rapid responses to fires that break out.
Perhaps more importantly, the new program will focus heavily on wildfire mitigation through activities like reducing fuel loads across the county and educating homeowners on how to create defensible space on their properties and how to incorporate more noncombustible building materials into their homes. Microgrants to do such work are part of the new program.
The new positions will bring the full contingent in Jefferson County’s wildfire mitigation program to 39 full-time employees.
“It will be one of the more robust programs in the state,” said Brian Keating, the wildland fire project manager for the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office.
The cost to run the program is $4.5 million annually, using funding secured last fall when Jefferson County voters approved Ballot Measure 1A. That approval allowed the county to keep tax revenue beyond the limit the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights imposes. The county is also setting aside $2.5 million in the first year to buy a Type VI wildland fire engine and firefighting gear.
“Over the next two weeks, we’ll fill out the rest of our leadership team,” Keating said. “By sometime this fall, we hope to have everyone on board.”
Jepkes, the Quarry fire evacuee, said last summer’s fire, which didn’t reach her home, was “a wake-up call for us.” The preventative underpinnings of the new fire management program, she said, will be invaluable for her family and her neighbors.
“Being proactive is always going to be less expensive than dealing with the aftermath,” she said.
Jeffco a top county for wildfire risk
This year has been Colorado’s worst wildfire season in five years, with more than 200,000 acres burned so far. Most notable among 2025’s fires — most of which have burned on the state’s Western Slope — has been the Lee fire in Rio Blanco County, which is just shy of full containment. It is among Colorado’s top five largest wildfires on record.
In a report released last month, a property data analytics company called Cotality ranked Colorado as the No. 2 state in the country in terms of the most homes at risk of being impacted by wildfire — with 318,783 homes at moderate-or-greater risk and a $146 billion reconstruction cost value attached to those homes.
The top state for wildfire risk is California, Cotality reported.
In Colorado, Jefferson County ranks in the top five among the state’s 64 counties for wildfire risk. Old-timers will remember the 1996 Buffalo Creek fire, which destroyed 12 structures across 12,000 acres of the county. Jefferson County was also part of the nearly 138,000-acre footprint of the 2002 Hayman fire, which stood as the state’s largest blaze for nearly two decades.
The Lower North fire near Foxton in 2012 proved deadly, killing a couple in their home.
While the county has “largely escaped any significant fires” so far this year, Keating said, the fire season’s not over.
“Our grasses have grown a lot this year — we have a lot of fuels out there,” he said.
After the wind-whipped Marshall fire ripped through Boulder County at the end of 2021, destroying nearly 1,100 homes and killing two people in a matter of mere hours, suburban homeowners who might once have thought themselves safe from wildfires reconsidered their chances.
“We made a shift to an understanding that we can’t put out all fires,” said Jim Webster, the wildfire mitigation program manager for Boulder County’s Community Planning and Permitting Department. “So we had to change our approach — our strategy is to live with wildfire. We can’t stop wildfire.”
Not even a year after the Marshall fire tore through neighborhoods in Superior and Louisville, Boulder County voters in fall 2022 overwhelmingly passed Issue 1A, a 0.1% wildfire mitigation sales and use tax. The money from the tax hike, which Webster said would amount to $8 million to $9 million a year, will pay for forest and grassland management projects, protection of drinking water supplies, and the creation of more resilient forest and grassland ecosystems.
“We understood a long time ago that the federal government wasn’t going to solve the problem, the state government wasn’t going to solve the problem,” Webster said. “It’s the responsibility of these local governments to take the lead on these wildfire mitigation efforts.”
To the 580,000 residents in Jefferson County just a few miles to the south of Boulder County, he said, “now is the time” to tackle the risk head-on.
‘A huge complement to what we’re doing’
John Mandl, a captain with the wildland division of the Conifer Fire Protection District, said Jefferson County’s new wildfire mitigation program will be “a huge complement to what we’re doing.”
“If it’s burning in the county, it’s the local jurisdiction’s and the county’s problem,” he said.
The value of deploying mitigation measures — forest thinning and fuels reduction, among other strategies — became clear when his crew attacked the lightning-sparked White Hawk fire in Jefferson County in late July, Mandl said. The area south of Conifer had been treated five or six years ago, making the fire less ferocious and firefighters’ jobs that much easier.
“This was an engageable fire,” Mandl said.
Crews kept the blaze to just an acre.
Laura Dean lives with her 81-year-old mother on 27 acres on South Deer Creek Road. For the first time in 40 years living there, she was evacuated last summer during the Quarry fire. The flames came within a half-mile of her home.
She is “100%” behind Jefferson County’s efforts to bolster its fire suppression and mitigation efforts.
“It’s not if fires will come,” she said, “it’s when.”
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