The chief of the U.S. Forest Service is warning that a billion acres of land across America are at risk of catastrophic wildfires like last fall’s deadly Camp Fire that destroyed most of Paradise, Calif.
As we head into summer, with smoke already drifting into the Northwest from wildfires in Alberta, Canada, Vicki Christiansen said wildfires are now a year-round phenomenon. She pointed to the hazardous conditions in forests that result from a history of suppression of wildfires, rampant home development in high-risk places and the changing climate.
“When you look nationwide there’s not any place that we’re really at a fire season. Fire season is not an appropriate term anymore.”
Christiansen’s agency is the nation’s lead firefighting apparatus. It’s trying to prioritize treatments such as thinning, brush clearing and prescribed burning on 80 million acres of its own land, mostly in the West. (Her billion acre estimate includes land across multiple federal, state and local jurisdictions as well as private land.)
Even with the push for more mitigation under Christiansen, the Forest Service is predicting it could spend upward of $2.5 billion just fighting fires this year alone. The agency was budgeted $1.7 billion and will likely again have to transfer money from existing forest management and fire mitigation programs to cover the difference.
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I am Jeff Clark, founder of Internet Brothers, producer of this blog, and passionate about hiking. I live in Western NC near the Blue Ridge and Great Smoky Mountains. Pisgah and Nantahala National Forests are just out my door, so the content will focus on these areas, but let me know what you would like to see on the site. 
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