On Monday, March 23, residents who evacuated homes along the Highway 115 corridor south of Colorado Springs were allowed to return after the 24 Fire — which had quadrupled from 80 acres to over 7,300 in four days — reached 24% containment.¹ That same week, a separate wildfire in Costilla County's Chama Canyon forced mandatory evacuations,² and red flag warnings covered nearly every Front Range county where Colorado's wildland-urban interface population lives.³ Eight days from now, on April 1, every WUI municipality in the state must formally adopt the Colorado Wildfire Resiliency Code, establishing minimum structural hardening standards for new construction and significant remodels.⁴

Gil Archuleta is a retired Colorado Springs firefighter who bought a place outside Penrose in 2004. Twenty-two years of knowing exactly what's wrong with his own house and not quite getting around to all of it. He spent Monday hosing ash off his patio furniture. We reached him Tuesday morning. He'd just finished his second pot of coffee, which he said was "not a good sign for anybody."

Gil Archuleta is a composite character. The fires, the code, the deadline, the evacuations are all real.

You were evacuated last week. What was Monday like, coming back?

Gil: Anticlimactic, honestly. Which is the best possible outcome, right? You drive back expecting something and it's just your house sitting there looking stupid. Flag's still on the porch. Dog's water bowl right where I left it, except now it's got ash in it. Everything's fine. Everything's fine and you're shaking a little because you know what "fine" looks like from the other side. I responded to Waldo Canyon in 2012. Three hundred and forty-six homes. I know what not-fine looks like.

You spent 28 years with Colorado Springs Fire. Does that make evacuating your own home easier or harder?

Gil: Harder. God, so much harder. Because you're not just grabbing the photo albums and the dog. You're doing a mental assessment of every house on your street as you drive out. That guy's got juniper right up against his vinyl siding. The Hendersons still have that cedar fence connecting their deck to their detached garage, which is basically a fuse. You see it all. You can't turn it off.

My wife says I drive out of our neighborhood like I'm writing a fire inspection report. She's not wrong.

Let's talk about your own house. You've said you know what's wrong with it.

Gil: [laughs] Where do you want to start? I bought it in 2004. The siding is fiber cement, which is actually fine — I lucked out there. But the eaves have gaps I've been meaning to close with ember-resistant mesh for, let's call it a while. The deck is original wood. The windows are single-pane in the back bedrooms. I replaced the roof with Class A in 2019, so that's good. The landscaping — I've done the defensible space out to thirty feet, but the slope behind the property has gambel oak that I don't own and can't touch.

So I've got this beautiful hardened perimeter and then nature's kindling pile six feet past my property line. It's like flossing your front teeth and skipping the molars.

The Colorado Wildfire Resiliency Code takes effect April 1. What does that actually mean for someone in your position?

Gil: For me, sitting in my existing home? Technically nothing. And that's the thing people don't understand. April 1 is when your city council or your county commissioners have to say "yes, we adopt this code."⁴ It doesn't mean I have to retrofit my house by April 1. My house is grandfathered. I can sit here with my gapped eaves and my wooden deck until the day I die or the day it burns, whichever comes first.

But if it burns? If I have to rebuild? Now I'm building to CWRC Class 1 or Class 2 standards depending on what fire-intensity zone they've mapped me into.⁵ The version of my house that replaces this one will be significantly more expensive and significantly harder to burn. So you end up in this situation where the code essentially says: we'll protect the next house on this lot, but not the one standing here now.

There's also a trigger at 500 square feet of additions, right?

Gil: Right. If I want to add a room — say my daughter's family needs to move in, which is not a hypothetical for a lot of people right now — if it's over 500 square feet, I've tripped the code.⁶ Now the whole project has to meet CWRC requirements. So you've got people who might genuinely need more space doing the math on whether 499 square feet gets them what they need.

I understand why the threshold exists. You have to draw a line somewhere. But it creates this weird incentive where the code that's supposed to make you safer might make you build smaller instead.

Some municipalities aren't ready. Broomfield was projecting an adoption date two weeks past the deadline as of earlier this year.⁷

Gil: Doesn't surprise me at all. And I want to be fair — adoption is complicated. You've got to map your fire-intensity zones, train your inspectors, figure out your appeals process.⁸ That's real work. But the fire doesn't care about your hearing schedule. The 24 Fire started on a Wednesday at 80 acres. By Sunday it was 4,600.⁹ That's not a timeline that respects municipal process.

The mayor of Colorado Springs said conditions are "ripe for the next Waldo Canyon."¹⁰

Gil: He's not wrong. But here's what bothers me about that framing. Waldo Canyon was June. Black Forest was June.¹¹ We're in March. The 24 Fire started March 18. The Sterry Fire up in Larimer was March 12.¹² Three significant fires in two weeks and spring hasn't technically started doing whatever spring used to do.

So when somebody tells me the deadline for adopting fire-resilience standards is April 1, I want to ask: what calendar are you reading? Because the one outside my window moved up.

What do you tell your neighbors? You do volunteer mitigation consulting.

Gil: I walk properties with people. I show them what I see. The dead branches against the house. The mulch that should be gravel. The vent screens that would let embers through. And then I tell them the truth: I can't make you do any of this. The code can't make you do any of this, not if you're in an existing home. Your insurance company might eventually make you do it by pricing you out, but we don't even have good data on whether hardening gets you premium relief in Colorado yet.

So what I tell them is what I haven't finished on my own house. I tell them about the deck I'm going to replace this summer with composite. I tell them about the eave gaps. I tell them I was a firefighter for 28 years and I still haven't done everything I know I should do, because it's expensive and it's time-consuming and there's always something else.

What's the first thing you're fixing when we hang up?

Gil: The eaves. I've been saying that for three years, but I mean it now. I think.

Footnotes

1. Colorado Springs Gazette, "Evacuation orders lifted, wildfire along Colorado 115 grows to nearly 7,400 acres," March 23, 2026. ↩

2. Denver Post, "Colorado wildfire: Mandatory evacuations for new wildfire near Chama Canyon," March 20, 2026. ↩

3. National Interagency Fire Center, National Fire News. ↩

4. Adaptation Clearinghouse, "Colorado Wildfire Resiliency Code." ↩ ↩²

5. Colorado Division of Fire Prevention and Control, Wildfire Resiliency Code Board. ↩

6. City of Lone Tree, Staff Report on Colorado Wildfire Resiliency Code. ↩

7. City of Broomfield, "2025 Colorado Wildfire Resiliency Code." ↩

8. Headwaters Economics, Community Planning Assistance for Wildfire program, referenced via Adaptation Clearinghouse. ↩

9. Denver Post, "Colorado wildfires: Evacuations still in place for 24, Chama Canyon fires," March 21, 2026. ↩

10. City of Colorado Springs, "Ready, Set, Go! – CSFD Introduces Wildfire Preparedness Campaign." ↩

11. Waldo Canyon Fire (June 2012) and Black Forest Fire (June 2013) are widely documented Colorado wildfires referenced by the Colorado Springs mayor. ↩

12. Reporter Herald, "Colorado wildfires: Mandatory evacuations lifted in Larimer County grass fire," March 12, 2026. ↩