Here's a good interview by Hilary Rosen of Tooth and Claw (at PLoS Blogs) on the fires in the Colorado Front Range:
The Perfect Firestorm: An Interview with Author Michael Kodas

Lots more detail here, with several interesting maps, data, and video: Red Zone: Red Zone: Colorado's Growing Wildfire Danger, by Michael Kodas (and a couple others)

From the interview:

I divide the problem into three basic causes. The first is forest management, which would include everything from excess fire suppression, to logging that leaves a lot of slash on the ground, to planting trees. Ways we utilize the forest that make it more flammable.

The second is development, the fact that we have such a huge boom of population into the forest. You have a lot more human-influenced fires. And you also have a lot of resource that has to be protected. With the Healthy Forests Initiative, the Bush plan that was supposed to make the forests more resilient to fire and also help communities protect themselves, they created all these grants for community wildfire protection plans. And communities across Colorado took advantage of these grants to put together these plans. But the implementation has not been nearly as good because the money ran out—it paid for the plans, but it didn't pay for the actual work.

One of the points made by Headwaters Economics, a think-tank in Montana, and others is that the primary funder of a lot of these initiatives is usually the homebuilders association, and what they want is to be able to justify developing farther into the "wooey."

Sorry, what's the wooey?

The wildland-urban interface.

Ah. The WUI. I've never heard it said like that.

Oh yes, it's the best part of writing a book like this, you get to say "wooey" all the time.

Anyway, part of a story I just did dealt with how we've had more than 100,000 people move into Colorado's red zone, which is the most flammable forests, since the Hayman fire in 2002. By the way, the day of the big blowup in the High Park fire outside of Fort Collins was 10 years to the day from the big blowup of the Hayman fire.

You have this development issue. With more people moving into the forest, having fireproof homes doesn't lower the cost. You still have to fight the fires. You've still got power lines and reservoirs and all kinds of other kinds of resources you have to protect.

You still don't want the fire in your neighborhood.

Right. You're still going to be putting it out. Which speaks to the first problem, management. You're still going to be suppressing fires that need to burn, so you're still going to end up with a fuel problem, with a lot of fuel around these communities.

Then the final cause is climate. That's the wild card, and that's the one that came down this year. By June we had 2 percent of normal snowpack in the high country. Streams dry up earlier, forests dry up earlier, the forest is flammable earlier. There are areas of the West and Colorado where it's been documented that the fire season actually starts about two months earlier. Hence the Lower North Fork fire, which was the first or second day of spring and was incredibly volatile.

And back in March, Hilary Rosner wrote this blog post, asking an expert "... what will the lack of snow mean for Boulder and the rest of the region this summer? Are we in for severe drought? Wildfires? Possible rationing of water supplies?": (Snowless) Mountains Beyond (Snowless) Mountains: A Two-Minute Interview with Mark Williams

~ Becky in Tucson