Colorado is a wildfire state.
There are the notable ones — the Cameron Peak fire, a 208,000-acre inferno, and the Marshall fire, which burned about 6,000 acres and destroyed hundreds of houses and businesses. And there are the smaller ones, such as the Devil’s Thumb fire that burned 81 acres in 2023.
As fires explode around the Front Range, we wanted to map out where they were in relation to each other. But taking it further, we stepped away from the minute-by-minute updates to take a historical view of fires and where they burn.
We looked through the National Interagency Fire Center’s records on fires since 2009 and plotted them on a map — all 10,849 of them. What resulted was a galaxy of blazes, but one with a clear message: Reported fires tend to happen most often where people live.
Take a look for yourself. You can search this map by fire name or by year. Fires from this year are shown in red.