Services Offered

The Four Mile Fire Crew offers the following wildfire mitigation and forest restoration services to the Four Mile Fire Protection District and Sugarloaf, Sunshine and Gold Hill areas. Fill out an inquiry form to arrange a consultation and cost estimate.

Defensible Space Treatment

Slash Chipping

Hazard Tree Felling

Landscape Scale Thinning Projects

Forest Agriculture and Forest Health Projects

Defensible Space

Homeowners can find a useful guide for wildfire mitigation on private property here. This guide offers many measures homeowners can take to mitigate their property against wildfire risk. It also provides an overview of the standards recommended for timber and brush thinning to achieve wildfire defensible space.

Residential Discounts

The Four Mile Fire Protection District offers discounted wildfire mitigation services and hazard tree removal to residents of the Four Mile Fire Protection District.

Discounted services are only available to homeowners who are not availing themselves of other funding incentives. For example, Agricultural Tax Credit projects or grant funded projects would not be eligible for the discounted rate.

Discounted services are only available for projects that address hazard mitigation objectives.

Slash Pile Burning

As part of our district’s forest restoration and wildfire mitigation work, we execute controlled burns as a method of disposing of biomass on some project sites.

Woodchipping is generally our preferred biomass disposal method, but for many projects this is not an available option: we cannot create too deep of a layer of wood chips for several reasons, and sometimes we cannot access our projects with the wood chipper.

In these cases, we build slash piles that are left to cure, and then are burned in the winter. We acquire all permits through Boulder County, and we have several highly trained firefighters with years of experience managing and supervising pile burns.

There are many items in our checklist that we review to ensure any planned burn will be safe and successful, including: air quality, snow coverage and quality, forecasted and observed wind speeds, forecasted temperatures, communication with property owners and communication with the county emergency communications center.

When you see more than several inches of snow on the ground, you will commonly see smoke from one of our burns. Also, many landowners are trained in slash pile burning, and are permitted to conduct their own pile burns, so you may notice smoke originating from multiple locations in the foothills on ‘burn days’.

Pile burning is always a multi-day project. On day one, we ignite the piles and work throughout the day to ensure that they will be secure for the night. Throughout the night it is normal and safe for smoldering smoke and flames to be visible—If we aren’t comfortable leaving the piles smoldering overnight, we do not conduct the burn in the first place. On the following day, we work to fully extinguish the piles. If there is no detectable heat at the end of the second day, we call the pile burn complete. If there is any detectable heat, or there is a forecast of warmer temperatures or increased wind, we return to check the piles on the third day.