A wildfire in July was a tipping point. Two men from Alabama pitched camp without permission on a privately owned hillside near Nederland, lit a campfire and read their Bibles, they told the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office. The men told officials they put some rocks on the fire to put it out, and though they discussed whether they should do more to smother it, they decided not to.

One smoldering cigarette or lightning strike can ignite an entire hillside in the parched, fuel-filled forests across the West, and officials say the campfire galloped away and burned 600 acres of canyons and forests around Nederland. It destroyed eight homes, including that of a fire captain.

The two men who started the campfire, Jimmy Suggs and Zackary Kuykendall, were arrested and charged with fourth-degree arson. The day before their arrest on July 10, the two men and a female companion — who was not criminally charged — happened across a reporter for The Boulder Daily Camera who was interviewing evacuees from the still-burning fire.

“We were pretty close,” Mr. Suggs told the newspaper. “It looked like the whole mountain range was on fire.”

Citing the fire danger, some residents have asked the Forest Service to do what many cities have done in cracking down on the homeless: impose tighter rules on camping, or ban it in parts of the woods that have attracted the most people.

The Forest Service says it is working with thin law enforcement resources. One officer is assigned to Boulder County, which encompasses Nederland and the Roosevelt and Arapaho National Forests, which dominate the western part of the county. The service is spending more and more of its budget fighting wildfires, and has pared back on filling some law enforcement posts, said Chris Boehm, the agency’s acting deputy director for law enforcement and investigations.

“There may be some regions where we have one officer assigned to an entire forest or area,” he said. “That’s not what we want, but fires are expensive.”