Wildfires Cut Trips, Prescribed Burns Boost Visits

In 2020, two massive fires in Colorado—Cameron Peak and East Troublesome—devastated popular spots around Rocky Mountain National Park and nearby forests. Even five years later, the landscape still shows blackened slopes and closed trails, hinting that people are avoiding these areas. Recent research suggests the fires have caused a noticeable drop in visitor numbers. The park remains a major draw, pulling 4. 2 million tourists in 2024 and earning $862 million for local towns like Estes Park. Public lands nationwide attract close to a billion visits each year, supporting not only economies but also mental health and cultural ties. Yet the growing frequency and intensity of wildfires threaten these benefits. To gauge how fires affect recreation, scientists turned to digital footprints. Hikers logging routes on AllTrails, posting photos on Flickr, or recording bird sightings on eBird leave data that can be matched with official visitor counts. By training a model on monitored sites and applying it to millions of digital traces, researchers could estimate visitation across thousands of burned areas in Colorado and California—places where traditional counts are missing. Comparing each burned site to a similar unburned one helped isolate the fire’s impact. The findings show that not all fires are equal. In Colorado, an average wildfire cut visits by 8 % in its first year, with losses that linger for at least five years. Larger, more intense fires caused 15–20 % declines, especially in forested regions where the canopy and trail structure take decades to recover. Grassland fires, like the 2020 Cherry Canyon blaze, barely affected visitor numbers because open landscapes rebound quickly.

California’s fires tell a similar story but with sharper effects. Wildfires reduced visits by 18 % on average, and high‑severity forest fires led to a 33 % drop that did not recover within five years. Interestingly, small California fires sometimes increased visits by 8 %, suggesting that locals have grown accustomed to modest burn scars. Prescribed fires, which land managers use to reduce fuel loads and prevent catastrophic blazes, have a different effect. In Colorado, they raised visitation by about 8 % in the year of the burn—likely due to cleaner trails and better wildlife habitat. In California, the increase was only 3 %, and any decline returned to normal within three years in both states. Importantly, prescribed burns lower the chance of future extreme fires, indirectly protecting recreation. The economic ripple is clear. Towns that depend on outdoor tourism—Grand Lake, Durango, Gunnison—felt the steepest drops in visitor spending. Sustained declines threaten local businesses and public services that rely on tourist tax revenue. These insights underline the need to factor recreation into climate impact assessments and land‑management plans. By quantifying how fires alter human use of natural spaces, decision makers can better balance fire suppression, ecological health, and community well‑being.

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