Fire is transforming the US West’s public lands – research shows overlooked cost to recreation

Colorado’s two largest fires on record, the Cameron Peak and East Troublesome fires, burned hundreds of thousands of acres across some of the state’s most visited landscapes in 2020.

The fires scorched trails, campgrounds and beloved ecosystems in and around Rocky Mountain National Park and the Arapahoe and Roosevelt national forests.

More than five years later, the scars remain stark: blackened hillsides, closed trails and bare slopes where forests once stood. According to our recent research, which has not yet been peer reviewed, the fires caused significant and lasting declines in visitation at the burned sites.

Even after the 2020 fires, Rocky Mountain National Park attracted 4.2 million visitors in 2024, generating US$862 million in economic output in local gateway communities such as Estes Park and Grand Lake. Rocky Mountain National Park is a significant contributor to the nearly 1 billion annual visits and $700 billion in spending that public lands generate nationwide as outdoor recreation continues to grow. It also supports a variety of important social values beyond the economy, including mental health and well-being, cultural and spiritual connection, and the sense of place that binds people to landscapes.

But these landscapes are changing fast. Wildfires are affecting our public lands at an accelerating scale and increasing intensity. Yet how fire affects recreation has remained poorly understood.

That’s the question I set out to answer with an interdisciplinary team of researchers. As a scientist who studies the benefits nature provides to people and how those benefits are affected by climate change, I wanted to know whether fire is eroding one of the most recognized and valued benefits of nature: recreation.

Tracking visitation across burned landscapes

Our first challenge was gathering data about visits to these outdoor areas.

A handful of monitored public lands track visitor counts, but those counts can tell us only so much about how fires affect recreation. Wildfires often cross boundaries, for example from a national park into a national forest, and span dispersed remote areas where no one is monitoring visitation.

Alternatively, every time someone logs a hike on AllTrails, posts a nature photo to Flickr, reports a bird sighting on eBird or simply carries a phone into the backcountry, they leave a precise digital trace of where and when they spent time outdoors. We trained a visitation model on the on-site counts that do exist at monitored sites, using millions of these digital traces, alongside other recreation drivers such as weather, land cover and site characteristics, as predictors.

Across Colorado and California, this approach let us track visitation in burned areas across hundreds of wildfires and prescribed burns for years before and after each fire, even in the remote, unmonitored landscapes where most fires burn. But changes in visitation can have many causes, including weather, broader recreation trends, even pandemic effects. So we statistically paired each burned site with a very similar unburned site elsewhere on public lands. This let us measure not just what happened after each fire, but also what we could expect would have happened without it. The gap between those two is how fire actually affected recreation.

We found that it’s not simply fire itself that drives people away, but a confluence of the type and severity of a fire, the ecosystem that burned and the social values connected to the fire-impacted landscape.

Wildfires that empty trails – and ones that don’t

In Colorado, the average wildfire reduced visitation to burned sites by 8% in the year of the fire. Those declines never recovered to prefire levels for the five-year postfire period we tracked.

As fires grew larger and burned more intensely, recreational losses sharpened. Visitation dropped 15% to 20% at sites burned at higher severity. These declines lasted years. Take the Cameron Peak Fire, for example. The Arapaho and Roosevelt national forests typically see about 8 million visits a year. Our model estimates that the area burned in the Cameron Peak Fire drew nearly 500,000 visits annually before the fire. Applying our 15% to 20% average declines estimated for moderate- to high-severity wildfires, that translates to roughly 70,000 to 100,000 fewer trips annually, losses our analysis finds persist for years.

But these postfire recreational losses were largely concentrated in forested landscapes. Wildfires that occurred in grasslands, such as the southeastern Colorado Cherry Canyon Fire in 2020, by contrast, seemed to barely register with visitors. Visitation at these grassland-dominated burn sites showed essentially no change. This pattern reveals something important. People’s recreational responses to fire are not just about the physical damage and accessibility impacts. They reflect the particular relationships people hold with different landscapes. Grasses recover within a season or two, and the wide-open vistas that draw people to those landscapes remain intact, even after a fire.

Forests are different. The towering canopies, shaded trails and old-growth character that people value may take decades or centuries to return, if they return at all in a changing climate.

In California, our analysis reveals how these human-nature relationships also vary across regions, with much sharper and more persistent losses than in Colorado. Californian wildfires reduced visitation by 18% in the first year on average, and high-severity forest fires produced losses of 33% that showed no recovery five years after the fire. California’s fires tend to be significantly larger, more severe and more concentrated in forested landscapes.

However, small fires in California actually increased visitation by 8%. This suggests that after years of megafires, a small burn may barely register. Californians have grown accustomed to a fire-shaped landscape, and a modest fire scar may not be enough to keep them off the trails.

Prescribed fire tells a different story

As wildfire intensifies, land managers are responding by expanding prescribed fire programs. They are intentionally setting lower-intensity fires to clear out the dead trees, dry brush and accumulated debris built up from over a century of fire suppression that can feed catastrophic wildfires.

Current prescribed fire planning tends to focus on reducing fire suppression costs and protecting properties, as well as managing ecosystems by reducing fuel loads and improving wildlife habitat. But managers are scaling up these programs without knowing how prescribed fire affects the recreationists who visit these landscapes, a gap our analysis sets out to fill.

In Colorado, we found that on average prescribed fire actually increased visitation by about 8% in the year of the fire. This increase may reflect improved trail conditions, enhanced wildlife habitat that attracts birders and hunters, or positive public perceptions of proactive management.

In California, prescribed fire on average decreased visitation by about 3%. Crucially, in stark contrast to wildfire, impacts were short-lived, with visitation returning to prefire levels within three years in both states.

Beyond their direct effects on recreation, prescribed burns also reduce the likelihood of future extreme fires – the very fires that drive the largest and longest-lasting recreation declines.

Why this matters beyond fire

Some of the Colorado communities that are most dependent economically on recreation experienced the steepest visitation declines in the period we studied. These are towns such as Grand Lake, Durango and Gunnison, where shops, hotels, restaurants and seasonal workers rely on a steady flow of visitors, and where sales tax from those visitors funds the infrastructure and daily life of the community. Persistent declines in visitation threaten the long-term viability of these places.

The implications run beyond fire. Calls to consider less tangible benefits of nature, such as recreation, into climate impact assessments, extreme events research and conservation planning have grown recently. Turning those calls into action requires evidence that can help land managers make decisions. Our work provides some of that evidence for fire and a framework that can be used for other disturbances, such as floods and droughts. Without accounting for these less tangible values of nature, increasingly extreme climate impacts will keep eroding the experiences, livelihoods and connections that sustain the well-being of millions of Americans.

Read more of our stories about Colorado.

Kyle Manley receives funding from the CIRES Visiting Fellows Program, funded by NOAA cooperative agreement NA22OAR4320151.