Kittitas County Resilient Landscapes

Kittitas County Resilient Landscapes is a fuels mitigation project intended to reduce wildfire risk in Kittitas County while creating more resilient communities and forests in the project area. After the Jolly Mountain Fire swept through the region in 2017, burning more than 35,000 acres, threatening multiple communities, and costing $30,446,600 for suppression, the community reinforced its commitment to work together to face a future with more frequent and larger fires. 
This project builds on and expands the sustainable landscape scale fuels reduction work underway in the Cle Elum Watershed and starts work in additional planning areas. 
Our projects are driven by the planning efforts of the WA Department of Natural Resources (WA DNR), the Kittitas CWPP, and the planning efforts of the County Fire Chiefs. Specifically the WA DNR, through a series of Landscape Evaluations (LEs) identified, mapped, and prioritized potential control lines in four priority watersheds in Kittitas County. Those LEs and prioritized lines have been incorporated into our CWPP through a 2022 amendment. Also adopted into the CWPP by the 2022 amendment are prioritized evacuation routes. The proposed evacuation route hardening is prioritized based on community and fire suppression consensus from conversations held with the Kittitas County Fire Chiefs Association which includes the input of local Fire Management staff at the USDA Forest Service (USFS) Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest Cle Elum Ranger District, the SE Region of WA Department of Natural Resources and the Kittitas Fire Adapted Communities Coalition.

This proposal accelerates implementation of these approved plans and will improve community wildfire resiliency by reducing fuels and tying into planned or past treatments on federal and state lands. The proposal will result in cross-boundary prescribed burning, hardened evacuation routes, and hardened potential control lines (PCLs) on private and municipal roads in four priority watersheds (Manastash-Taneum, Cle Elum, Teanaway and Upper Swauk.)