Colorado leaders are facing hard facts on the state’s increasingly strained forests: 1,249 wildfires burned a near-record 524,282 acres last year, five times the average.

The warmest forest temperatures in 124 years baked soil and trees, with precipitation nearly the lowest since record-keeping began, federal data show. Spruce beetles gobbled another 178,000 acres, expanding their total infestation beyond 1.8 million acres, aerial surveys found.

And money spent trying to suppress wildfires — $40 million by the state and $120 million by the U.S. Forest Service, three times what the feds spent in 2017 — drained coffers.

Damage from fires, too, hits increasingly hard as population growth intensifies the West’s water crunch because Colorado forests supply 14 billion cubic meters of water that Denver, Aurora, Colorado Springs and northern Front Range cities depend on — water that is compromised when mountainsides burn and erode, clogging rivers and reservoirs.

Colorado lawmakers digesting this information during committee hearings at the state Capitol last week expressed frustration. “We’ve loved our forests so much that we’re killing them,” Sen. Don Coram, R-Montrose, said at one of the two wildfire sessions.

But Colorado still is locked into what state and federal foresters call a long-term losing approach of trying to suppress wildfires instead of boosting forest health. And lawmakers have yet to propose the bold action many say is needed — other than the impossible task of reversing the impacts of global climate change.

“If we don’t start paying attention to the health of our forests, it is not going to get better,” state forester Mike Lester warned in an interview with The Denver Post. “There’s no way you can have a situation like this, with the forest health issues we have, where you can ignore it and expect it to get better. People are going to have to invest in the health of our forests.”

If current trends continue, “you’ll see some shift in forest species composition, but the health of our forests, as they sit right now, is not headed in a good direction,” Lester said. “I would not want people to be blasé about the health of our forests. The indications are not positive. We need to do active management.”

That means selectively thinning forests to let in light and revive natural processes, rendering forests more resilient in the face of worse wildfires. While this work costs $1,500 to $3,000 an acre, foresters say boosting forest health pays off over decades because the current approach of suppressing most wildfires — prioritizing protection of human property over forest health — leads to bigger, hotter and more ruinous fires in the future. Forests naturally burn, and snuffing wildfires disrupts ecosystems, creating imbalances that eventually erupt.

State and federal foresters issued a new report on Colorado forests that found tree-thinning work in recent years that was designed to mimic the effects of wildfires saved subdivisions threatened by fires last summer at Silverthorne, La Veta and Grand Lake.

Lawmakers acknowledged a need to address forest health but lacked specific proposals, other than trying to minimize the impacts of global warming, which scientists say is more or less assured and could worsen depending on human burning of fossil fuels.

“It is pretty clear what is causing these record fires,” Rep. Dylan Roberts, D-Eagle, who chairs the House rural affairs and agriculture committee, said in an interview. “It is climate change and the lack of cold temperatures in the winters to kill off beetles, and hotter summers that make fires spread. As state legislators, we need to act boldly, and really quickly, to address climate change.”

The latest Health of Colorado’s Forests report, sent to each lawmaker, says the worsening wildfire problem is complicated by more people moving into “wildland urban interface” areas, building houses and shops where fire plays a key role in ecosystem health. These interface areas have increased statewide by 50 percent since 2012, covering more than 2.9 million acres, the report said — practically forcing more firefighting because letting fires burn would threaten more people and property.

Colorado lawmakers for years have balked at tackling urbanization in forests. “These are individual local land-use decisions,” said Roberts, deferring to town and county government.

Wildfire and forest health trends in Colorado mirror those in California and around the West. State lawmakers increasingly run up against natural forces that leave them relatively powerless.

Why are wildfires getting worse?

“Fire suppression certainly is a contributor because it makes forests more dense,” Lester said. “Lack of forest management, which is how you mimic fire, has been a problem. And temperature is a problem, as well. Those beetles over time have been kept in check by cold temperatures and, without extended cold temperatures, it is an issue. There doesn’t seem to be any indication that the trend is going to damp down.”

Compared with the $160 million state and federal agencies spent last year trying to suppress wildfires, the Colorado State Forest Service spent $1 million on forest health, officials told lawmakers. Federal land managers treated 54,000 acres of national forest land in Colorado, and provided $730,000 to state agencies for work to minimize wildfire risks. That’s more than 100 times less than federal money spent on suppressing wildfires.

In a 2018 Colorado College “State of the Rockies” poll, 79 of 197 surveyed voters regarded lack of funding to take care of forests, national parks and other public land a very serious or extremely serious problem.

The U.S. Forest Service has a policy requiring suppression of any fire ignited by humans, a growing number as population increases, deputy regional forester Jacque Buchanan said in an interview.

Buchanan told state senators that, rather than spend tens of millions of dollars on fire suppression, “we would rather be able to take that money and spend it up front on forest management.”

Funding limitations mean Colorado foresters and federal partners must work strategically, Buchanan said. “You pull all the information you can to try to be predictive” even though it’s hard to control where people are most likely to flick the next cigarette or take target practice on bone-dry terrain.

“Where’s the highest risk? Where’s the highest probability? Where can we get the most from our investment? That’s what we’re all trying to figure out,” she said.

Letting wildfires burn where possible, and using prescribed fires to improve forest health, will be essential, she said.

“Policy can always be changed. … We’re constantly looking and considering what might be the best option. Every fire that starts, we make decisions on it that are tied to conditions on the ground, the potential for a fire to spread beyond what we can manage.”

And this past year “a multitude” of wildfires brought benefits to the land where they burned.