Can you still light the propane grill on your deck this week? Yes, as long as it sits ten feet from anything that burns. Will the crew scheduled to keep thinning the oak brush below your property still show up with a chainsaw? Also yes, provided the saw carries a spark arrester. Those two answers surprise people who hear "fire restrictions" and assume everything outdoors just stopped.
Pitkin County moved to Stage 2 Fire Restrictions at 12:01 a.m. on June 26, 2026, an order Sheriff Michael Buglione issued because of continued dry conditions and elevated wildfire risk across the region. Under Stage 2, campfires, charcoal grills, pellet smokers, wood stoves and any open flame are banned outright, along with fireworks and unshielded welding or torch work. Propane and natural gas appliances with a shutoff valve, the kind built into most gas grills and fire tables, remain legal as long as they sit clear of flammable material.
That distinction matters more on Red Mountain than almost anywhere else in the fire district, because this is the one slope where the vegetation itself has been under active, funded, multi-year revision on purpose, independent of any restriction order. The mountain didn't get thinned because of a fire ban. It got thinned because fire crews and open space ecologists decided years ago that this particular hillside needed to burn a little, on their own schedule, before it burned a lot on its own terms.
The oak brush below Willoughby Way
Start with what's already happened, because it explains what a Red Mountain resident is looking at right now. In 2023, Pitkin County Open Space and the Aspen Fire Protection District began a joint mitigation project on a 25-acre open space parcel called Red Butte Ranch, which was choked at the time with mature Gambel oak. Liza Mitchell, a natural resource planner with the open space program, and Ali Hammond of Aspen Fire led the work: about 5 acres cleared that summer, another 5 planned for that fall, left deliberately as a mosaic rather than a clear-cut so some cover remained standing.
Then the project moved onto private ground. Three property owners along Willoughby Way agreed to contribute between $10,000 and $20,000 apiece to thin the oak brush on the slope below their own homes, tying the cleared line into the Rio Grande Trail on one side and the Salvation Ditch on the other to form a continuous firebreak. Gambel oak is oily and burns hot, which is exactly why the untreated brush had been a problem for decades, and exactly why the new shoots that sprouted after clearing turned into something else entirely: deer and elk browse. Hammond called it one of the few projects where everyone signed off without argument, which is not a small thing on a mountain lined with private lots.
The 900 acres near Starwood
That was the visible, close-in project. A larger one has been unfolding on the section of Red Mountain that faces McLain Flats and the Starwood neighborhood. In fall 2024, Forest Service crews spent weeks cutting roughly 24 acres of control lines near the Sunnyside trail, groundwork for a prescribed burn the Roaring Fork Valley Wildfire Collaborative and Aspen Center for Environmental Studies had been planning for the following spring. The target was up to 900 acres, and the goal matched Willoughby Way exactly, just at a different scale: burn off decades of dead, dry Gambel oak and serviceberry so the plants come back thick enough to matter to a wintering elk herd.
"Wildfire is an undeniable reality in the West, and we have two choices: sit back and wait for a disaster, or take decisive action to manage risk," Aspen Fire Chief Rick Ballentine said ahead of the burn.
The timing of a prescribed fire is unforgiving. Crews need the ground dry enough to carry a moderate flame while snow still lingers on the surrounding ridgelines to contain it, a window that can close in days. Whichever spring week it finally went off, the intent was the same intent behind Willoughby Way two years earlier: treat the fuel now, on terms fire crews control, instead of leaving it for a summer that doesn't ask permission.
Lined up, the record on this one mountain reads like a plan rather than a series of coincidences:
- 2023. Pitkin County Open Space and Aspen Fire begin thinning Red Butte Ranch and the private slope below Willoughby Way.
- Fall 2024. Forest Service crews cut control lines near the Sunnyside trail.
- Spring 2025. A roughly 900-acre prescribed burn targets the McLain Flats and Starwood face of the mountain.
- 2026. Aspen Fire's expanded crew, now ten staff plus a 22-person contract crew from Summit Forestry, continues the same interface work on Shadow Mountain, funded in part by a voter-approved district tax measure.
What Stage 2 does and doesn't touch
| Under Stage 2 | Status |
|---|---|
| Campfires, wood stoves, charcoal or pellet grills | Prohibited |
| Propane or natural gas grills, stoves, fire tables | Allowed, clear of flammable material |
| Fireworks | Prohibited |
| Outdoor smoking | Prohibited unless in a vehicle, building, or cleared area |
| Welding or open-flame torch work | Prohibited unless in a cleared area with an extinguisher present |
| Chainsaws with spark arresters, run by mitigation crews | Permitted |
That last line is the one that matters if you have a fuels-reduction project scheduled or pending on your own parcel. Stage 2 restricts open flame and unmanaged combustion. It does not restrict the professional thinning work that has been the actual point of the Red Mountain program since 2023. A crew can keep cutting oak brush behind your house on the same day you can't light a campfire in front of it.
Why the order landed this summer
Pitkin County's announcement didn't cite one bad day. The county's June 25 release named continued dry conditions, elevated fire danger and increasing wildfire risk across the region as the reasons for the escalation, the same conditions Aspen Fire's own crews have spent three summers trying to get ahead of on Red Mountain specifically. If you own on the mountain and haven't had a fuels assessment done, the district's process is simple: property owners can reach Aspen Fire directly at [email protected], and once enough neighbors on one stretch sign on, the district schedules treatment for the block rather than working parcel by parcel.
The mountain reads differently once you know this
A visitor driving up Red Mountain Road sees thinned hillsides and calls it scenery. A resident who has watched the oak brush change year over year is looking at three years of coordinated decisions between Pitkin County, the fire district, the Forest Service and their own neighbors on Willoughby Way, all aimed at the same outcome from two directions: less fuel for a crew to fight, more browse for the elk that move through every fall. Stage 2 is the temporary layer on top of that, a set of rules that eases or tightens with the weather. The clearings on the hillside are the permanent one. They were there well before this week's order and they'll still be there once it lifts.
If you're weighing what a home on Red Mountain actually asks of an owner, from defensible space obligations to how the mountain's wildfire history shapes insurance and resale conversations down the line, Joshua Landis has spent decades inside these streets and the civic relationships that run them. Let's Connect.