Learning to Burn

By Alex Brown, Stateline
August 27, 2026

AUBURN, Wash. — In the back row of a small community college classroom, I sip my coffee and consider a cumulus cloud, a puffy white pillar over an expanse of blue. I’m not staring out the window, but at a presentation on a screen at the front of the room.

Cumulus clouds are a telltale sign of an unstable atmosphere, Matthew Dehr, wildland fire meteorologist with the Washington Department of Natural Resources, tells our class. Fifteen students, clad in hoodies and flannel, nod along. They know what an unstable atmosphere means: Smoke will disperse instead of settling over the ground. In other words, ideal conditions for setting stuff on fire.

My classmates and I make up the fifth group to take Washington’s Certified Prescribed Burn Manager course. It’s put on by the state DNR to encourage more residents to light carefully planned fires in overly dense forests to help ward off megablazes.

After decades of warnings from Smokey Bear to prevent forests from burning, the state’s approach would now be better illustrated by a soot-smeared Uncle Sam urging citizens to pick up a drip torch.

I’m the outlier in this batch of recruits. My classmates are all veterans in the world of fire and forest management, familiar with the tools and terminology. They come from conservation districts, land trusts, environmental nonprofits, tribes and forestry companies. The class isn’t designed to train journalists, but to certify pros who are poised to put fire on the ground.

Over the next three days, we’ll attend the same classes and field outings and take the same certification test. They’ll go back to their communities empowered to lead prescribed burns. I will also deploy to the fire line, but wielding a notebook and camera as my tools.

Like many Westerners, I’ve spent summers monitoring smoke forecasts and been stuck inside for weeks at a time. I’ve arrived at trailheads to find flames crackling in the trees overhead. I’ve texted friends who live in mountain towns to see if they’ve gotten the order to evacuate.

Tattooed on my left forearm is a topographical map of a remote section of Olympic National Park, a lake-filled basin high in the mountains that’s my all-time favorite hike. Last summer, a large wildfire burned its way along the ridge above the basin, the border of the tattoo just below my elbow. Every few hours, I refreshed the page mapping the spread of the fire, hoping the wind would shift. I checked the local weather forecast, hoping for rain.

As I monitored the spread of that wildfire, I looked out the window to see smoke pouring off the hillside just a mile away from my home, in the Cascade foothills on the fringes of the Seattle suburbs. This fire, sparked in a city-owned forest, was quickly contained. But the lingering smoke hung in the air all day, a reminder of how quickly one spark can turn into a threat.

I cover lots of issues as an environmental reporter. Fire is the one topic that’s front of mind regardless of whether I’m writing a story about it on deadline. My friends are constantly thinking about fire too, and it’s not because they’re spending their day interviewing state forestry officials.

FOR MOST OF US, fire feels like an ominous foe, one we have to trust others to fight. But crews on the front lines have a different relationship with fire. They understand that it’s a natural part of healthy ecosystems, one that has been absent from many Western forests for far too long.

Fire creates vibrant landscapes and critical habitat. When deployed properly, prescribed fires can protect forests — and towns — from truly destructive blazes.

“We need to be burning ourselves out of the problem, not waiting for fire to show up when we don’t want it,” said my prescribed burn instructor, Kyle Lapham, who has managed the Washington certification program since it launched in 2022.

When I got the chance to join Lapham’s class, it seemed like an opportunity to feel less powerless against fire. Sure, it wouldn’t turn me into a frontline hero battling blazes. But it would help me understand the growing movement to turn fire into an ally.

Just going through this boot camp, puzzling over the difficult questions burn leaders must face, felt like a way to engage with the problem, even if I did more typing than burning.

Wildfire veterans want many more people to get this kind of training, to see fire as a backyard issue and not one that governments alone can solve.

Particularly in the West, a century of wildfire suppression has left many forests overly dense. Places that used to burn regularly now have more trees per acre than ever before, and a forest floor stacked with dead limbs, needles and brush — kindling for the catastrophic megafires that can devastate millions of acres.

Increasingly, federal and state managers are trying to restore fire’s role. Burning in the spring and fall, they’ve spread low-intensity fires in state forests and national parks to reduce fuels and “treat” unhealthy forests. That work can lower the risk of high-intensity wildfires by 60%, research has shown.

But lots of the forests that need fire are not managed by the U.S. Forest Service or a state agency. And burning on private lands is incredibly difficult. Many states now want to empower landowners and community groups to burn on their own. They’re training burn leaders and offering grants, equipment and technical support.

“If you don’t treat any private lands, you’re missing the boat,” Lapham said.

DURING A FIELD OUTING at a nearby state forest, our class stands in the rain among dripping ferns and plans a hypothetical burn, soggy conditions notwithstanding. We set out sampling grids and practice calculating different fuel types in the forest vegetation, based on the time it takes their moisture levels to change. We note nearby roads, dwellings and businesses, considering the atmospheric conditions that would minimize smoke impacts on the community. We discuss the logistics of a multiday collaborative effort from a host of organizations and local fire districts.

Over three rigorous days, Lapham’s class covers everything from weather variables to smoke permits to community relations. We learned how to navigate a maze of regulations, coordinate with a host of agencies and plan for scenarios such as smoke over a busy roadway or complaints from a neighbor with asthma.

While the course is not required to conduct a burn, those who earn certification gain legal protections that can limit their liability if something goes wrong. Burning is inherently risky, but state officials say carefully planned fires set by qualified practitioners carry far less risk than leaving forests in their current state.

My classmate Tony Craven, wildfire preparedness project manager with the Kittitas County Conservation District, grew up playing in the forests above the small Washington town of Roslyn.

“Me and my friends used to play tag and hide and seek up there all the time,” he said. “You wouldn’t be able to do that today because you wouldn’t be able to find the other guys. We have more trees than we’ve ever had, and the shrub layer is thicker than it’s ever been. We have 100 years of fire debt built up.”

Craven is overseeing a $10 million federal grant to protect communities near Roslyn, which nearly went up in flames a few years ago when a wildfire came dangerously close to the town. Prescribed burns will be a big part of that solution.

The state wants, perhaps needs, more people like Craven to pick up drip torches. On the dry, fire-prone landscapes east of the Cascade Range, more than 40% of Washington’s forestlands are owned by private citizens, timber companies, tribes and local governments.

It’s a similar story throughout much of the West. In California, for instance, more than half of the state’s high-risk forestland is owned by families or private entities.

About 20 states now run courses like the one I took to certify burn managers and provide them with some level of legal protection. Advocates say Western states are following the lead of Southeastern states such as Florida, where burning has long been a cultural norm.

The courses also serve as a critical networking forum. Very few organizations have the resources to burn without outside help, so making connections is as important as the training itself.

Even in states where wildfire is not a top concern, officials say there’s growing interest in restoring fire’s ecological role, in part because of climate change. Pennsylvania, for instance, held its first certified burn manager course in 2023, with 27 participants. After years of burning only on public lands, the state hopes to jump-start a culture shift that promotes burning on privately owned land, which makes up 83% of the state.

AS MORE states certify residents to lead prescribed burns, they’re still finding many obstacles — including states’ own regulations.

During the course, we spent extensive time talking about clean air rules and the maze of regulations and permits burners need to navigate. Fire practitioners say these rules limit their “burn windows” to highly specific conditions. While the restrictions are designed to protect communities from smoke, those same towns often spend the summer under far worse smoke from out-of-control wildfires.

The member of Congress who represents my district, Democratic U.S. Rep. Kim Schrier, has sponsored federal legislation that would provide additional funding and loosen clean air rules to give burners more flexibility. The measure has earned bipartisan support, but has yet to advance this session.

Another challenge is simply the extensive resources needed to pull off a burn. Even small burns can require dozens of personnel, tankers, engines, containment lines, hose networks and portable water tanks.

Many burns have to pull in help from several counties over, or even neighboring states. Fire veterans say nearly every prescribed fire requires multiple agencies and groups working together for days at a time.

And sections of forest might include dozens of landowners, many of whom are skeptical of lighting fires. It takes locally led efforts to build trust.

One approach that’s quickly taking hold is known as a prescribed burn association, which basically serves as a local coordinating entity for neighbors and community groups. Prescribed fire advocates say such community-led programs represent the best path forward to restoring fire on private lands.

In Southwest Washington, the Mt. Adams Prescribed Burn Association, composed of several local groups and launched in 2022, has focused on the landscapes surrounding the iconic volcano. On a fall morning a few months after my class, the association hosted a burn as part of a multiweek training exchange, or TREX, that brought in fire practitioners from across the world.

Camera in hand, I walked the edge of the pine-oak woodland, a few steps ahead of the igniters and their drip torches. I snapped away as they tipped blazing fuel onto the forest floor and walls of fire ribboned through the brush.

For all my training, the images I was seeing still felt apocalyptic — raging flames, billowing black smoke, green understory turned to ash. But the crews moved calmly, just another day on the job. The mature trees, charred black on their lower trunks, withstood the fire just fine.

As the last flames hit the perimeter and flickered out, Adam Lieberg helped me appraise the situation. Lieberg, who helps manage this parcel for the nonprofit Columbia Land Trust, said this landscape is considered a “trailing edge” forest that would struggle to regenerate if a high-intensity wildfire wiped out its trees. This burn has reduced that risk considerably.

After the burn, I camped out nearby, still reeking of smoke and coughing occasionally. Finally, I understood a little something of what it looks like to deploy fire as an ally, to torch a forest in the name of saving it.

THIS STORY was supposed to end on a hopeful note, a reflection on the progress that burn leaders are slowly making to restore fire’s role on the landscape. But in the months following my prescribed fire boot camp, President Donald Trump imposed drastic cuts on staffing and grants for the U.S. Forest Service and other agencies.

Community Wildfire Defense Grants, a key source of funding for many locally based prescribed burns, were frozen, although some have since been restored. Burn leaders say they’re uncertain whether the federal funding that has supported them will be available, or if the federal agencies they’ve long partnered with will have enough staff to provide support.

Meanwhile, lawmakers in Washington state, facing a looming budget crisis, slashed the state fund that supports wildfire preparedness work. The state’s grant program to support community prescribed fire efforts, which handed out $1.4 million in the previous two-year budget cycle, received only $170,000 in 2025.

Lapham, who leads the burn manager training class, said conservation districts and other local partners were facing staffing cuts due to the loss of state and federal funding.

“It’s very frustrating,” he said. “We already know we’re behind the curve on treating what needs to be treated. Any time you put a big dip in that momentum, you’re just that much further behind.”

But as the funding dried up, leaders with the Washington Department of Natural Resources noticed a surprising development. More and more communities were setting up prescribed burn associations, leaning on local solidarity even as state and federal grants disappeared. From Spokane County on the eastern edge of the state to Bainbridge Island in the shadow of Seattle, local leaders are working to form new cooperatives to bring fire to their communities.

“Connection begets connection begets connection, and that’s how we’re seeing this growth here,” said Will Rubin, forest resilience communications manager with the state DNR. “This was a fledgling idea here not that long ago, and now it’s spreading more quickly than it ever has.”

Meanwhile, state Public Lands Commissioner Dave Upthegrove successfully lobbied lawmakers this year to restore funding for wildfire prevention, securing $60 million for an account that includes the DNR’s prescribed burn program. While there’s still uncertainty at the federal level, land managers say they’re now on a much stronger footing.

The work of states could become ever more important as progress stalls at the federal level. During Trump’s first year in office, a recent analysis from the Center for Western Priorities found, wildfire prevention work — such as prescribed burns and thinning of vegetation — fell by 35% on federally managed forests and grasslands.

Trump administration advances plan to rescind protections for nearly 45 million wild acres

Meanwhile, this summer devastating wildfires are torching millions of acres, fueled by a winter drought that left forests parched and mountains bare of snow.

And many advocates are concerned by the Forest Service’s rollback of the Roadless Rule earlier this month, which protected 45 million acres from road construction and development. Studies have shown that wildfires are far more likely to ignite near roads.

I’ve spent the past two years learning about atmospheric conditions and smoke regulations, interviewing fire veterans and walking the fire line beside ignition teams. For all I’ve learned, for all the work to reorient my feelings around fire, it feels like the winds are still swirling with uncertainty.

I did pass the test at the end of the burn manager course. But now it seems a larger test is facing all of us: Will we welcome fire back onto the landscape and invest in burning, not just suppression? Or will we give up on our fragile progress and wait for the next wildfire to challenge our defenses?

Stateline reporter Alex Brown can be reached at abrown@stateline.org.

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