2° Out West Podcast

Dispelling Myths About Western Wildfire – Western Resource Advocates

Prop 137 to Invest in Protecting and Conserving Water and Land, Preventing Wildfires, Coming to Colorado Voters This Fall – Western Resource Advocates

How We Can Make Driving Safer for Humans and Wildlife – Western Resource Advocates

[00:00:00] Dave Papineau (Host): Catastrophic wildfires have been one of the main headlines of the summer.

[00:00:04] TV: The Willow Fire near Leadville is growing rapidly. It jumped to nearly 4,000 acres today. That’s 900 acres larger than it was just yesterday.

[00:00:13] Dave Papineau (Host): Every year, millions of dollars are spent fighting wildfires, and across our region, wildfires have burned through our communities.

Social media is littered with videos of the tragic impacts on landscapes and homes. After a fire is contained, communities face another challenge: rebuilding post-fire. While rebuilding structures and homes is an obvious challenge, there is a less obvious challenge, like the impacts on watersheds. The rivers of the West are facing a constellation of threats in 2026.

Drought and pollution both come to mind. Fire, not always as much. For fish, water managers, and municipalities, however, it is very much a top concern. Uncontrolled wildfire is one of many modern threats that not only damages ecosystems, but also creates downstream water quality problems for our communities to deal with.

Today, we’re looking about how we can keep our rivers in the West healthy, how we can solve for modern threats like catastrophic wildfire, and how we can act proactively to make sure that we have the funding to get this work done on the scale that is needed. Welcome back to our series on conservation funding.

We’re looking at all the ways that we can use funding to protect our home in the West. On today’s episode, Watershed Health.

[00:01:14] TV: When you think of our national forests, you think of trees, of the wonders of nature, of sheer beauty. But there’s something you may not think about: the water you drink.

[00:01:32] Hally Strevey: My name is Hally Strevey, and I’m the executive director of the 501[c][3] nonprofit, the Coalition for the Poudre River Watershed, or CPRW.

[00:01:42] Dave Papineau (Host): There’s one important thing to get out of the way with this river, and that’s how do you say its name? Where does the

[00:01:45] Hally Strevey: Poudre

[00:01:46] Dave Papineau (Host): get its name from? Yeah. How do

[00:01:48] Hally Strevey: I say it? Yes, so our river, the full name is called the Cache La Poudre River.

So it is a French name, which means “hide the powder,” and it came from French fur trappers back in the 1800s. So yeah, we affectionately call it the Poudre. And yeah, full name is Cache La Poudre,

[00:02:09] Dave Papineau (Host): The Poudre is a critical water supply for Colorado’s Front Range drinking water and agriculture.

[00:02:13] Hally Strevey: We commonly joke that our watershed is about the size of Delaware, so it’s a very large watershed.

It provides drinking water for over 400,000 people in in this part of Northern Colorado.

[00:02:25] TV: I got a doctor’s appointment. What’s wrong with you? Nothing. It’s my yearly physical. When was the last time you got one? Never. I’ve never been to the doctor. I’m the picture of health.

[00:02:41] Dave Papineau (Host): In the world of protecting rivers, we talk a lot about river health. For Hally, river health is a measure of resilience. How well can that river bounce back against adversity? The challenges like what we’ve been experiencing in Colorado.

[00:02:53] Hally Strevey: What makes a river healthy? That is a complicated question. It feels easy, but it’s not.

So y- I think it varies from basin to basin, ’cause each river has different requirements for what makes it healthy, and it really kinda depends on what the system looks like.

[00:03:09] Dave Papineau (Host): From the perspective of river advocates, resilience gives a more holistic, full-view picture of what a river is actually like and how well it can handle the current challenges of climate change, drought, and wildfire.

[00:03:20] Hally Strevey: Whether it’s water quality lack of riparian vegetation, what are the aquatic insects doing what are… is, does it have wood in the system when it is supposed to and now it doesn’t? What are the things that are encroaching on the river, like a trail or a bridge, and is there anything that we can do to mitigate those impacts?

And sometimes there isn’t, but in a lot of cases, there might be opportunities for us to open up a floodplain and allow the river to access its floodplain. If we’re in the headwaters, there’s opportunities to put wood back into the river where it makes sense, where we don’t have any impacts to downstream infrastructure and where there should be beaver already present, or present and they, they aren’t currently.

So when we think about a healthy river, we’re really looking more towards whether or not a, a r- river is resilient. So how is it going to bounce back after a fire or a flood or some other big impact?

[00:04:18] TV: Once you have familiarized yourself with the potential disaster threats in your area, it’s time to begin formulating your plan Your personal disaster plan, your PDP

[00:04:29] Dave Papineau (Host): As I spoke with Hally, her way about talking about river health really made me think of a more complex three-dimensional organism.

The healthier you are mentally, physically, spiritually, socially, the easier you are going to bounce back from adversity. The concept is similar for rivers.

[00:04:43] Hally Strevey: Have a variety of different ways that we actually look to assess that. So one of those is a thing that we call the river health assessment framework.

And so this looks at various indicators and metrics of river health from environmental to, from river flows to aquatic life, to what is the geomorphology of the river, and can the river move and bounce back and recover?

[00:05:08] Dave Papineau (Host): So how do you protect river health? First, you’ve got to learn about it. That’s what those river assessments are.

Then you make a plan and act.

[00:05:14] Hally Strevey: Say we have broken up the river into different reaches that are more kind of palatable, so one to two mile stretches where we can dive into these different indicators and metrics to really see what’s going on. So generally we assign these scores, so the RAF assigns letter grade scores to these different indicators and metrics.

And this, but you can really dive in to see what might be impacting river health and what are the things that y- we wanna really focus on. Is it flows? Is it lack of riparian vegetation? Is there something going on with the water quality? And that helps to guide where we’re gonna do future restoration.

So

[00:06:00] Dave Papineau (Host): Recently, one of the most important things to plan for in Colorado’s watersheds is fire, specifically the uncontrolled and catastrophic wildfires that we’ve been seeing throughout the West.

[00:06:08] Hally Strevey: Our watershed has a lot of experience with fire. In 2012, we had the High Park Fire.

[00:06:14] TV: 7 News with continuing coverage of the High Park Fire, the third-largest fire in Colorado history, now 59,845 acres and 55% contained.

[00:06:24] Hally Strevey: Which burned over 80,000 acres. And then in 2020, we had the Cameron Peak Fire.

[00:06:31] TV: And 64,000 acre Cameron Peak Fire. Yeah, 164,000 acres. It’s moving closer to Fort Collins. It’s forcing more evacuations from state forest to state park to Horsetooth Reservoir.

[00:06:44] Hally Strevey: Which is currently still Colorado’s largest wildfire to date, burning over 208,000 acres across the Poudre, Big Thompson, and Laramie River Watersheds.

Not all wildfires are bad, right? Our forests need fire. But they need moderate to low severity fire, which is really, most of the time when we see fire these days, that’s not happening. We’re having massive fires that are burning at, really high severity, causing major issues. So in our watershed in particular, the Cameron Peak Fire and High Park Fire we experienced really severe water quality impact.

So you know, in addition to threats to life and safety, to roads washing out, to homes being burned down those longterm impacts we see years after the fire.

[00:07:29] TV: More than 100,000 acres across Colorado. That’s over 150 square miles of scorched land. One week ago today, there were no major fires burning in Colorado.

Today, unfortunately, a very different story.

[00:07:44] Dave Papineau (Host): This caused challenges and heartaches for communities all across Colorado. My current watershed in the Arkansas River Valley is currently going through the process of post-fire recovery.

[00:07:52] Hally Strevey: So what happens when these wildfires burn so severely is that the soil becomes hydrophobic, and so water cannot penetrate that soil.

It almost turns it into cement, so it just sloughs right off, and then we have sediment and ash going directly into our river. Both the cities of Fort Collins and Greeley take water directly off the Poudre River. Following the Cameron Peak Fire for up to three years, so it was 2021, 2022, and 2023, following the summer monsoons, both Greeley and Fort Collins had to shut off their water intake structures on the Poudre for 40-plus days because the water was so full of sediment and ash that it was untreatable from their end.

And our watershed is lucky because we do have backup water supply reservoirs that luckily were not impacted by the Cameron Peak Fire, but not all watersheds have that. And we actually came really close to having kind of the worst-case scenario with Cameron Peak because it started in the headwaters and burned all the way down to almost Horsetooth Reservoir, which is one of our backup water supplies.

[00:08:56] Dave Papineau (Host): Most communities on the Front Range in Colorado have had to deal with some form of post-fire recovery work. Denver Water is still working to address sedimentation in Estanito Springs Reservoir from the 2002 Hayman Fire. The cities of Colorado Springs and Pueblo are dealing with the aftermath of the 2019 Decker Fire and 2024 Interlake Fire in the Arkansas River Basin.

[00:09:14] Hally Strevey: So yeah, those water quality impacts are really critical to target immediately, and so that’s really what our post-fire program has looked at for the last six years. We initially focused on trying to stabilize the hill slopes and the soil in severely burned areas that we had done — we had picked out through another prioritization that we did with a variety of partners immediately following the fire, after the fire, so looking at soil burn severity, values at risk downstream homes, infrastructure, those types of things, trying to predict where we could Would have those kind of issues.

And so we did aerial mulching, which was basically using helicopters and dropping wood mulch onto these burned hill slopes to just try to stabilize that soil and get something on the ground. And then we followed that up with some hill slope stabilization, so tree felling and trying to put in structures in these gullies that were forming, which again, contributes sediment into the river.

And now what we’re really focused on is combining treatments, so areas where we did do aerial mulching and this whole slope stabilization, working then in the streams, trying to enhance these wet meadows that were degraded prior to the fire and bringing back wetland vegetation and opportunities to capture sediment in these wet meadows rather than having the sediment go downstream and into our water supply.

[00:10:40] Dave Papineau (Host): Wildfire recovery is also very expensive. For example, in Colorado, Denver Water, along with the Forest Service and state agencies, have had to spend over $100,000 to deal with soil stabilization. The historic Hayman fire, which burned in 2002, is still having impacts on watersheds. As recently as 2023, major flood events across unrecovered sections of the Hayman fire burn scar caused flooding and sedimentation in the South Platte River, impacting fish, wildlife, and drinking water.

Hally says that it’s much better to plan ahead.

[00:11:08] Hally Strevey: It is absolutely cheaper to do pre-fire resilience work than it is to respond to a disaster. So that is something that we have found time and time again, whether it’s working in the stream so enhancing these wet meadows, or if it’s doing forest resilience work, so cutting down trees, implementing forest prescriptions, and then when possible, implementing prescribed fire.

So these controlled burns that are at a low to moderate severity. So combining all of these things together are, all of those methods of treatment are much less expensive than responding to a massive disaster like Cameron Peak or East Troublesome that we saw in 2020. I think there are some numbers out there that say for every dollar invested in at least like forest resilience, you’re saving $7 that you would have to spend otherwise in the event of a fire, right?

So doing this work in advance is extremely important, and we also save ourselves a lot of heartache, too, in terms of w- the municipalities and things like City of Fort Collins and City of Greeley what goes into them even being able to treat the water when it’s full of sediment and ash and not being able to rely on our Poudre River for our main source of drinking water for a few months.

That’s a huge impact, right? So doing this work well in advance is extremely important. And of course, having those funding resources in advance is really the only way that we can do that.

[00:12:39] Dave Papineau (Host): So if it’s so much better to plan ahead and solve these problems in advance, why don’t we? You guessed it, it’s a money problem.

[00:12:52] TV: That was Bobby McFerrin’s new one, I’m Worried. Need money. Okay. If

[00:12:56] Hally Strevey: you want- after a fire happens, there’s a huge influx of disaster money that comes in, which is really great. But if we could have those influxes of dollars coming in yearly to our state to continue to do this work in advance of the fire, we’d be much better off when the next fire happens.

[00:13:14] Dave Papineau (Host): Building river resilience takes time, but a large part of that time is just getting the money to do the work.

[00:13:19] Hally Strevey: It would really allow us to better plan out in advance, the next five to 10 years of work that we can actually do on the ground, and then getting those projects in the docket, right? So when we’re working with the Forest Service, it can take upwards of a year of planning one project just to get it on the ground because of all the permitting and approvals and things that you need.

And so when we’re… Even now, when we’re doing post-fire restoration on Forest Service land, we propose that work to them over a year in advance. And so if we knew that we had these doll- this, the steady stream of money coming in, we would be able to constantly be doing this work every year, and we would have a plan to be able to work with across boundaries and across agencies, right?

And it would be huge.

[00:14:05] Dave Papineau (Host): And when the funding is there, everyone is a winner.

[00:14:07] Hally Strevey: You don’t just pick a site and then go out and put things in the river. You- they take several design iterations. It takes permitting, it takes planning and collaboration. And so just to get one project on the ground, sometimes that’s a culmination of seven years plus of work.

And, but, and a lot of that is slowly acquiring dollars just to make sure you have enough to implement the project. So being able to have a more steady stream of funding would also allow organizations like CPRW to leverage other funding sources as match, because a lot of grants require one-to-one match, sometimes 25% match, sometimes more, sometimes less, right?

And the, and for us, one of the hardest things to get enough funding to do a project is finding that, those matching dollars. And so having that steady funding stream would also open up additional dollars to do more on the ground work.

[00:15:00] Dave Papineau (Host): There is no shortage of things to be done.

[00:15:03] Hally Strevey: With our Cameron Peak Fire restoration work, we’ve had some consistent funding through the Colorado Water Conservation Board and then also the National Forest Foundation, which is US Forest Service money.

They allowed us to have several pots of money that were for unanticipated needs, and so that was the task, was unanticipated needs. Because we don’t know what’s gonna happen after a fire, right? So we’ve been able to use those dollars to put them towards projects that come up that are high priority, and those have changed over the years, too, right?

And we have 100-plus years of work to do, at least, right? There’s no shortage of work to do in the Poudre Watershed, and that is to be said for any watershed across the West. So having a steady stream of funding would allow us to really just continue to have these projects in the docket. And, we have these priorities identified already.

We… It just is sometimes is really slow going trying to pool together all the funding and resources to implement one project sometimes. But if we already had that money identified and we knew it was gonna be coming in every year, we could really plan out.

[00:16:13] TV: No matter how many times you save the world, it always manages to get back in jeopardy again.

Sometimes I just want it to stay saved, for a little bit.

[00:16:22] Dave Papineau (Host): In the west, watersheds are one of the fundamental things that sustain and connect us. Everyone is connected and dependent on their watershed, whether you’re a farmer, whether you’re recreating, or whether you’re depending on drinking water from your local river or stream.

Every single day, you get to interact with your watershed, even if you don’t always think about it that way. When you turn on the tap, that water is coming from somewhere, and you’re interacting with water quality. Bad water quality is a direct impact on you and your health.

[00:16:46] Hally Strevey: The community in the Poudre Watershed is really well connected to this river.

I think you, you talk to anyone in Fort Collins, and the majority of them live here because of the Poudre River. They love this river. They love to recreate on this river. They love to walk along it on the Poudre River Trail. Our watershed and our river is one of those special places in this country and in this state that, it’s my home watershed, right? I’m from Fort Collins originally, so the Poudre Watershed is my home watershed. Working for an organization that is so place-based like a watershed coalition, is very rewarding because we’re able to do work on the ground a lot of the times in a much more efficient and quick manner than other entities are.

We can build that bridge between the federal government and private landowners and help do on-the-ground work. We also do a really good job of convening people together to accomplish our mission and their missions, which really are pretty similar. We want this watershed and our river to be resilient for future generations, right?

We want to be able to continue to rely on this watershed and for it to continue to provide for us and also to give back to it. Yeah, there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of scary things happening in the world and in our watershed, but working for this small organization that is really impactful is so rewarding.

And the work every day, n- it’s not nothing… We’ll never be bored. So and it’s just such a privilege to work in this community and with the stakeholders and with my team.

[00:18:35] Dave Papineau (Host): Over the past few months, we’ve covered several stories of how threats to Colorado’s lands, water, and wildlife could be addressed with sustained sources of annual funding.

We’ve shared specific stories of how land managers have been able to leverage conservation funding to protect land, protect wildlife, and protect habitat, from reducing the risk of wildfires to creating new wildlife crossings to protecting watershed health. Our lands and waters are not renewable resources.

Once they’re damaged or developed, it’s very difficult to get them back. Forest and wildfire scientists estimate Colorado needs up to $200 million more every year to limit the risk of catastrophic wildfire, conserve clean water, and protect the state’s most important waters from development. All of this is why WRA and our partners worked to get Proposition 137 on the November ballot in 2026.

Prop 137 provides Colorado the chance to act now and protect our most valuable asset, nature. Without raising taxes, 137 will raise about $175 million per year by using existing sales tax already collected to help fund under-resourced programs just like the ones that Hally is describing in this podcast.

It would help mitigate catastrophic fire, help protect our watersheds, conserve land, and expand outdoor recreation opportunities. If you wanna learn more about Prop 137, stay tuned for our next episode where we talk about this ballot measure and what it can accomplish to help protect Colorado

Please consider leaving a review after listening so more people can find our podcast. Also, please check out the further reading list below to check out all of the articles and resources that we mention throughout the episode.

2 Degrees Out West is a podcast from Western Resource Advocates, a regional non-profit organization fighting climate change and its impacts to support the environment, economy, and people of the West. WRA works across seven states to protect our climate, land, air, and water.

2 Degrees out West is a podcast for advocates and decision makers who want to fight climate change and its impacts across the West.

On 2 Degrees Out West, we talk with climate experts and advocates to bring you stories, experiences, and insights from their work in the places we call home.

WRA Mini Pods are quicker, educational shorts to keep you in the loop on key issues in the West. We want to bring you information in a digestible format about the most relevant issues we’re dealing with.

It is hosted by Dave Papineau. 

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