Colorado is on track to see its worst wildfire season since 2020, when flames raced across nearly 1,163 square miles, but the start of monsoon season could dampen this year’s infernos.
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“We have seen a pretty quick and large start to the fire season that’s really brought on by our lack of snowpack and spring precipitation,” said Camille Stevens-Rumann, a wildfire researcher and associate professor of Forest and Rangeland Stewardship at Colorado State University. “Our fuels and our forests are really, really dry right now, in a way that we have very rarely seen, and that doesn’t bode well for future events.”
So far in 2026, fires have consumed more than 270,000 acres in Colorado, or 423 square miles. That’s bigger than all Colorado’s wildfires between 2021 and 2024 combined and more than half the acres burned in 2025. It’s only July.
On average, since 2020, Colorado wildfires have burned roughly 58,000 acres by July 9, said Travis Hartsburg with the National Interagency Fire Center. The state normally sees 17 “large” fires, or those that consume more than 100 acres in timber or 300 acres in grass. As of Thursday, it had reported 31 for 2026.
Colorado wildfires consumed 355,232 acres in 2025, or 555 square miles; , or 126 square miles; , or 64 square miles; , or 88 square miles; , or 87 square miles; and , or 1,163 square miles, according to reports from the Rocky Mountain Area Coordination Center.
Colorado is several weeks ahead of schedule compared to the normal fire year and is experiencing wildfire activity not normally seen until late July or early August, Hartsburg said. Many large fires in previous years — including the Alexander Mountain, Stone Canyon, Quarry and Bucktail fires in 2024 and the Lee, Elk, Stoner Mesa, Derby and Crosho fires in 2025 — started at the end of July or in early August. This year, the state’s already massive wildfires sparked in the last week of June.
While wildfires consumed a massive amount of land in 2025, the destruction was minimal. The Rocky Mountain Area Coordination Center recorded 34 fires in Colorado that together destroyed 71 structures. Most of the damage came from the Lee fire, Colorado’s fifth-largest on record, which alone consumed 137,758 acres and destroyed 30 structures.
The Aspen Acres fire, Colorado’s largest active wildfire, had already destroyed 851 structures as of Friday. It’s unclear how many of those are homes, but law enforcement in Pueblo and Custer counties previously announced that at least 337 homes and four businesses had been destroyed.
It’s the state’s most destructive wildfire since the 2021 Marshall fire, which devastated 1,084 homes, and the fifth-most destructive blaze in Colorado history by buildings destroyed, according to the Division of Fire Prevention and Control. The Marshall fire remains the most destructive on state record, followed by the 2013 Black Forest fire, which destroyed 489 homes; the 2020 East Troublesome fire, which destroyed 366 homes; and the 2012 Waldo Canyon fire, which destroyed 346 homes.
The number of homes confirmed destroyed by the Aspen Acres fire knocked the 2012 High Park fire, which destroyed 259 homes, out of fifth place. The Aspen Acres fire also surpassed the High Park fire in size, taking its spot as Colorado’s seventh-largest wildfire on record.
Other large fires this summer include the mostly contained Snyder fire, which killed three firefighters as it spread onto Colorado’s Western Slope from Utah; the Gold Mountain fire north of Ouray, a popular mountain town; and the Ferris fire, which was sparked by lightning in southwestern Colorado’s San Juan National Forest.
The Rocky Mountain area — including Colorado, Wyoming, South Dakota, Nebraska and Kansas — is experiencing “a historic wildfire year,” Hartsburg said.
It’s rare to see this many large, destructive wildfires in Colorado this early in the year, Stevens-Rumann said. Wildfires aren’t burning in “an unprecedented realm” on a national scale, but Colorado and the surrounding region are on the “more extreme side,” she said.
“We are only going into a world with more fires globally,” Stevens-Rumann said. “The likelihood of us having bad summers like this and bad winters like we did this last year is increasing. … That really bad fire season of 2020 is more like the mean conditions of the next decade.”
Colorado’s three largest wildfires on record sparked in 2020: the 208,913-acre Cameron Peak fire, the 193,812-acre East Troublesome fire and the 139,007-acre Pine Gulch fire, according to state fire officials. When the Aspen Acres fire took spot number seven, it bumped the 2020 Logan fire — which consumed 32,546 acres — off the list of Colorado’s 20 largest fires.
As of Sunday, 38,956 wildfires reported in the United States in 2026 had burned more than 3.5 million acres, or 5,469 square miles, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. Fire behavior advisories were active at that time for parts of Colorado, Wyoming, Nevada, Utah and Arizona.
The hope is for a strong monsoon season to douse Colorado, abating the worst of the fire danger that hits in late summer, Stevens-Rumann said.
Dry, hot and windy weather is expected early this week, but then moisture enters the forecast, Colorado State Climatologist Russ Schumacher said.
“It’s too early to say how much rain there’s going to be, but the pattern will shift to make it a bit more favorable for fighting fires and less favorable for fires to burn huge amounts of acreage in a short amount of time,” Schumacher said last week.
Most of the precipitation will be confined to the western half of Colorado, National Weather Service meteorologist Stephen Rodriguez said. It’s not yet clear how much of the rain, if any, will make it across the Continental Divide, he said.
“It’s still a question mark at this point,” Schumacher agreed.
Colorado’s monsoon season is expected to be more active than usual, at least west of the Continental Divide, which will increase humidity and make it easier for firefighters to tackle new fire starts, Schumacher said. Late-summer storms and the El Niño expected to bring more rain to the fall and snow to the winter won’t fix the drought, but Schumacher said both are reasons to be “cautiously optimistic” that the state’s wildfire risk will decrease.
In both 2020 and 2025, Colorado’s monsoon season was nearly nonexistent, prolonging dry wildfire weather, Schumacher said.
“If the monsoon does come through and we start getting that higher humidity, more cloud cover, chances of rain … then that will go a long way to limiting the potential for those really big, fast-growing fires that we’ve seen in the last few weeks,” he said.
But rain poses its own problems where fire has already struck. In the Aspen Acres burn scar, even half an inch could cause flooding and mudslides “given the severity of the burns,” Rodriguez said.
While rain can help extinguish active flames, it doesn’t change the landscape’s overall dryness and may only decrease fire risk for a few days, Stevens-Rumann said. The state needs consistent precipitation through the end of the summer to ward off the worst fire danger, she said.
“The concern about that, as we’ve seen already with the Aspen Acres fire, is a lot more unstable weather conditions,” Stevens-Rumann said. “A big thunderstorm means those winds are moving erratically, which can make fires bigger in unpredictable ways.”
Thunderstorms also come with the risk of lightning-sparked fires, Schumacher said, but the humidity limits the potential for rapid growth.
Colorado Gov. Jared Polis declared a statewide drought emergency in June, fueled by the winter’s record-low snowpack and an abnormally warm spring. All of Colorado’s 64 counties are ranked as abnormally dry, and 91% of the state is considered to be in moderate to exceptional drought, according to data released Tuesday by the U.S. Drought Monitor.
An El Niño weather pattern took effect in June, which forecasters expect to strengthen through the end of the year. El Niño years primarily bring drier weather to the northern United States and wetter conditions across the southern United States. Colorado falls on the cusp, but often experiences wetter weather, Schumacher said.
El Niño’s effect is strongest in the United States in winter, and this year is likely to be one of the strongest in recorded history, according to the National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center.
With plenty of hope for wet weather on the horizon, Coloradans just need to make it through the heat wave expected this weekend, Schumacher said.
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“Hopefully, after that, things start to turn in a better direction,” he said.
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