Mike Babler

Mike Babler is a long-time Coloradoan who grew up west of Boulder. He has an impressive resume of work on behalf of the natural world, including work with the State of Idaho, the Department of Defense and the Colorado State Forest Service. For many of those years his main training in fire management had been what he learned in 1967—how to suppress them.

Now, as the Colorado chapter's Fire Initiative program manager, his expertise in “prescribed burning”—setting safe, carefully monitored and ecologically-important fires in specific areas—is helping launch a new era of fire management in the state. He is involved with an initiative that is addressing fire management called the Front Range Fuels Treatment Partnership Roundtable.

“Fire management is just getting ramped up in Colorado. Over the past decade, across the West, we’ve seen a significant need to use fire as a restoration tool, and there’s a growing groundswell of interest. There is now lots of long-term research documenting how important fire is to our landscapes,” he said.

To get a “bug’s eye view” of how important fire can be, imagine that you are a tiny Pawnee Montane skipper, a butterfly whose wingspan is about as long as a matchstick. Winter breaks, the snows thaw and you are on your way, flittering in search of flowers that depend on open patches of ponderosa pine forest blanketing Colorado's Front Range.  As you make your way, all you see is acres of “dense trees,” says Mike. You search for a place where the aftermath of a burn has created openings, oases for the blue gramma grass and prairie gayfeather that you need to survive.

Mike’s hope is to see thousands of acres of prescribed fires burn yearly across Colorado. Working with  public agencies, ranchers and other large landowners who participate in the Roundtable is a start toward realizing that hope. 

While being responsible for the complicated calculus of weather predication, winds, soils and humidity that must be factored before the start of a safely-executed prescribed burn may not be many people’s idea of fun, Mike is in his element. “It’s lots of hard work, but there’s the adrenaline, being outside—all those good things,” he says. 

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