Grace Hood/CPR News (left to right) Tony Cheng with Colorado State University, Stefan Reinold with Boulder County and Peter Brown of Rocky Mountain Tree-Ring Research inspect an 85-acre plot of lower elevation forest that saw a restoration treatment based on historical information gathered at Hall Ranch in Boulder County.

Take a moment to picture Colorado in your imagination. You’re probably seeing mountain vistas with postcard-perfect evergreen forests. There’s a good chance what you're imagining looks like Hall Ranch — a 220-acre carpet of pointy green trees flooding the landscape in Boulder County.

Ecologists who know the state’s forest history say it wasn’t always this way. Colorado’s lower elevation vistas have become too crowded.

“The first thing I see is we’re missing the meadows. Where are the meadows?” asked Tony Cheng, director of the Colorado Forest Restoration Institute at Colorado State University.

Euro-American settlement in the 1860s dramatically changed Colorado’s lower elevation forests. Before 1860, there would have been plenty of large open meadows. Small stands of ponderosa pines of various ages would have broken up the negative space. And low intensity wildfires would have moved through the stands of trees far more regularly.

Compare that to today where some crowded forests haven’t seen wildfire in more than a century. When fire comes it’s more likely to burn hot and intense, killing off all the trees.