Reconstructing Black Forest

A house is fully engulfed with flames in the midst of the Black Forest Fire northeast of Colorado Springs on June 12, 2013. (Helen H. Richardson, Denver Post file)

There are 154 new homes in the Black Forest neighborhood, and nearly 18 months after the devastating fire, more than half of the hundreds of houses destroyed are on track to being rebuilt.

But home construction is a small part of how Black Forest residents measure recovery, a process that could involve decades of forest restoration and changing the community's culture.

The 2013 Black Forest fire was El Paso County's second devastating blaze in two years, and recovery managers quickly learned that Black Forest could not compare to the 2012 Waldo Canyon fire.

When Eddie Bracken formed the recovery nonprofit Black Forest Together, the plan was to follow the example of Colorado Springs Together, another nonprofit that organized debris removal and focused on rebuilding the 347 homes destroyed in the Mountain Shadows neighborhood in 2012.

But as residents grappled with homeless livestock, thousands of charred trees and the loss of home businesses, it became clear that Black Forest would have to forge its own path to recovery.

Unlike the more suburban Mountain Shadows, Black Forest is an isolated community where residents sought solitude among the dense ponderosa pines. Now, those living trees have become the area's greatest hazard because of decades of overgrowth.

Black Forest Together's focus is on the future of the forest, said Scott MacDonald, Black Forest Together's forest recovery program director.

MacDonald and Kathy Russell, a resident and nonprofit volunteer, have encouraged neighbors to band together and create community fire mitigation plans that require them to cut down live trees.

"There's a heavier price to pay" if residents don't mitigate, Russell said. "If you love the forest, you have to cut some of it down."

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Reconstructing Black Forest