With wildfires burning across many Western states, wildland firefighters gathered Sunday to pay tribute to three of their own who died after they were trapped by flames a week ago.

Emily Barker, Nick Hutcherson and Sydney Watson were remembered as courageous public servants who left a lasting impact on the communities where they worked.

“They showed up to make order out of chaos day after day with purpose, dedication and heart,” U.S. Wildland Fire Service Chief Brian Fennessy said during a memorial service in Grand Junction, Colorado, near where the firefighters died while battling flames on the Colorado-Utah border.

While that fire is now almost entirely contained, nearly 40 large fires are still going strong across the West. Most of the current fires are scattered around Colorado, Utah and New Mexico while there are wildfires in eight other states — from Alaska to Arizona.

Over the holiday weekend, more evacuations in Colorado were ordered across four counties where the Aspen Acres fire had burned about 136 square miles (352 square kilometers) south of Colorado Springs.

The fire had damaged or destroyed more than 200 structures as of Sunday, authorities said. National Guard soldiers were sent in Friday to help with staffing checkpoints on roads near the fire zone.

Months of dry weather and a record lack of snow this past winter in some places along with erratic winds have been fueling the fires.

The three firefighters killed on June 27 in western Colorado were members of a Helitack crew that sometimes drops into remote areas by helicopters.

Barker, Hutcherson and Watson and two others who sustained burn injuries were overcome by flames from fast-moving fires in Mesa County. They had deployed emergency protective shelters, which are considered a “last resort” for firefighters when there is no other way out.

Fennessy, the Wildland Fire Service chief, said Sunday that “the weight of this tragedy is felt way beyond our wildland fire community.”

Photos of the firefighters were set up on the stage at the memorial service alongside flowers and flags.

They worked jobs that require courage, selflessness, strength and heart, said Sarah Fisher, the U.S. Forest Service’s deputy chief for fire and aviation management.

“The work demands long days, heavy burdens and quiet acts of bravery,” she said. “We will remember them, we will honor their legacy and we will carry their light forward.”

Emily Barker

Barker, 38, had so much spirit, and the people around her always strived to be a better person by her presence, said Sarah Brubeck Schnurbusch, a friend and former roommate.

Barker was from Clinton Township, Michigan, and liked hiking, skiing, dirt biking and playing hockey. She loved firefighting.

“I’ve never seen someone so excited to go to work,” Brubeck Schnurbusch said. She added that her friend helped pave the way for many women in the industry.

Barker was a trailblazer, first working as a teacher “shaping young lives,” Fennessy said.

“She didn’t just live in wild places, she helped to shape them, care for them and make them better,” he said.

Nick Hutcherson

Hutcherson, 27, served in the U.S. Navy and had plans to become a physical therapy doctor, according to the Kaibab National Forest in northern Arizona where he was assigned. He was also an active member of the Northern Arizona Deaf and American Sign Language community.

Hutcherson, who was from Glendale, Arizona, “embodied the spirit of public service” Fennessy said.

He was a dedicated practitioner of Muay Thai martial arts who trained in Flagstaff.

His favorite saying was “easy day,” Fennessy said, “because Nick had an uncommon ability to face hard things with optimism, humility and a smile.”

Sydney Watson

Watson, 27, was from Warrior, Alabama, and a graduate of the University of Tennessee Southern, where she was a pitcher on the softball team, the university said.

In 2023, she participated in a program in North Carolina organized by the Women-in-Fire Prescribed Fire Training Exchanges, the group said. In her application, she said she wanted to see more women on the fire line and to learn from other women in the field, the university said.

“From the time she was very young, she knew she wanted to be a firefighter someday,” Fennessy said.

“I have no doubt she inspired many young women to become a firefighter,” he said.

Following several days of hot, dry weather, Colorado’s Western Slope is poised to see a period of rainy skies with possible thunderstorms ahead of what meteorologists expect to be an active monsoon season arriving later this summer.

Beginning Tuesday, a wave of energy is expected to track across the Northern and Central Rockies, leading to a significant uptick in thunderstorm activity statewide, according to a July 6 report from OpenSnow Meteorologist Alan Smith.

The forecast shows a moderate-to-high chance of showers and thunderstorms across the High Country beginning Tuesday afternoon, with patchy smoke lingering from the morning through the early afternoon due to active fires located across Southeast Utah and Southern Colorado.

Wednesday is expected to bring more of the same, with up to a 40% chance of showers and thunderstorms and possible wind gusts up to 25 miles per hour across the northern and central mountains, according to the National Weather Service. Thunderstorms could become more scattered with limited moisture on Thursday, followed by a return to clear skies by Friday.

Temperatures across the northern and central mountains are forecast to sit in the 70s and 80s throughout the week, with some areas, including Glenwood Springs and Steamboat Springs, reaching into the 90s by the weekend as hot and dry conditions once again take hold of the region.

Little-to-no impact on wildfire risk

While stronger storms throughout the week could produce locally heavy rain in some of the mountains, drier air at lower elevations could lead to a “dry thunderstorm” setup when paired with gusty winds and limited rainfall, especially on Thursday, Smith wrote in the report.

The possibility of dry thunderstorms — bringing lightning strikes on dry vegetation with no rain to extinguish the resulting sparks — could heighten wildfire risk in drought-stricken regions of the state.

“There is still some concern about what thunderstorm outflow winds could do to ongoing wildfires if these fires themselves do not receive meaningful rain,” Smith wrote.

Gillian Felton, a Grand Junction meteorologist with the National Weather Service, said it’s hard to say whether the upcoming showers will impact the state’s extreme fire risk. Because the showers and thunderstorms forecast for this week likely won’t be dropping a significant amount of precipitation, it presumably won’t do much to impact existing wildfires across the state.

Much of Colorado’s Western Slope remains in the highest level of drought as of July 2, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.

“Even though we are getting this push of moisture, it’s really rather weak,” Felton said. “While some localized areas might see more precipitation than others, overall, this moisture moves through quickly and we get right back to very dry, very hot conditions.”

Is monsoon season officially here?

Though this week’s rainy forecast marks a temporary uptick in moisture, Felton said it doesn’t yet signal the start of Colorado’s monsoon season.

“We pretty quickly will return to drier weather,” Felton said. “By Friday, anomalously dry air moves back in, and we’re looking at very hot and very dry conditions this weekend. This little push of moisture we’re getting is nice, but it’s going to be quite short-lived.”

Although hot and dry conditions will take hold across Colorado’s mountains over the weekend, confidence is growing that significant monsoon moisture could surge into the Western U.S. sometime during the week of July 13, though it will likely hit the Northern and Central Rockies before it arrives in Colorado.

“The core of this monsoon moisture surge is coming out of the Gulf of California with strong southerly flow, which may favor Arizona, Utah, Wyoming, Nevada, Eastern Idaho, and the Sierra (Nevada) in California,” Smith wrote in the report. “But this moisture should eventually spread into Western Colorado as well, which is in great need of meaningful rains given the ongoing fire situation.”

Longer-range models are hinting at an overall active monsoon for the second half of July and into August, according to Smith.

Charlie Childs, the CEO of a biotechnology startup, moved the company to Colorado for the lifestyle and because she believes the state is an up-and-coming hub for the industry.

Ditto for Blake Herren, head of the startup Raven Space Systems, on Colorado’s quality of life. And outreach by the state and the business community made an impression as he was considering moving from Kansas City.

Their moves to Colorado come as a business coalition has raised concerns that the state’s status as a draw for tech and innovation companies is in danger. More than 230 business, technology and civic leaders sent a letter in April to elected leaders, saying that Colorado is losing companies and jobs to other states.

Palantir Technologies’ relocation of its headquarters early this year from Denver to Miami was a warning sign for those who believe Colorado’s reputation as a national leader in innovation and high tech is eroding. In a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the data-analytics and artificial-intelligence powerhouse said the effects of climate change in Colorado and the state’s regulation of AI were risks to the company.

But beyond the splashy headlines about Palantir’s exit, the coalition’s letter warned that other states are luring away companies and beating out Colorado for investment and entrepreneurs “by offering clearer policy signals, faster regulatory pathways, and stronger alignment between government and growth.”

The letter has been signed by more than 430 business and tech leaders and investors, the coalition said on its website.

Gov. Jared Polis was a tech and internet entrepreneur before entering politics. After Ensuring Colorado’s Innovation Future released its letter, Polis said he was committed to making the state “an even better place” for companies to grow and innovate.

“We always want to double down on our successes and we want to change whatever isn’t working,” Polis told The Denver Post.

He said his administration has been working on one of the coalition’s recommendations: improving the supply and affordability of housing.

“We’ve removed a lot of barriers to housing. We did condo liability reform,” Polis said. “You make it easier to build, reduce regulation and red tape, speed up the approval process.”

But a bill limiting local governments’ ability to set minimum lot sizes for single-family homes to make more room for housing failed in this year’s legislative session.

Making it through the legislature was a bill requiring state departments to establish a schedule to review rules and determine whether they’re still needed. The bill was signed into law.

Polis and Eve Lieberman, executive director of the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade, or OEDIT, met with about 70 business leaders last month. The session was the first in a series planned across the state to focus on the business community, innovation, supporting good paying jobs and Colorado’s economy, according to OEDIT.

“That acknowledgement that we want to do better is an important part of showing the business community that Colorado is the place to be and the place to invest, because we’re always excited to learn how we can be more competitive,” Polis said.

One of the tools the state uses is the Opportunity Now Colorado program, which aims to grow existing companies, attract new ones and “train up” workers for new positions.

The program focuses on the state’s strategic priorities, such as promoting advanced industries, and helps fill training gaps where there are workforce shortages, Lieberman said.

The Opportunity Now program is in its second year and the tax credits that companies can apply for will build on the $90 million in grants that have been awarded, Lieberman said. The grants are projected to serve 20,000 Coloradans across almost every county in the state.

“We have already placed almost over 8,000  workers into those advanced industries, healthcare and education, where there are workforce shortages,” Lieberman said.

The biotech company that Childs co-founded with Madeline Eiken received a $250,000 advanced industries grant from OEDIT. They moved the company, Intero Biosystems, to Colorado from Michigan over Christmas.

Childs and Eiken trained with Jason Spence at the University of Michigan. Childs said Spence was the original inventor of  the process that develops miniature human intestines, or “organoids,” from stem cells that she and Eiken then commercialized.

“If you have a drug that you want to take into clinical trials, you can test it on our organ instead of a mouse or a dog or a monkey and hopefully get a better data point on how it’s going to react in humans and ethically not use animals,” Childs said.

Intero hopes to work on other organ systems as well. The company chose to move to Colorado because people didn’t want to be in the industry hubs on the two coasts.

“We feel like we can live a much better life here. Our employees can live a much better life here,” Childs said. “From the business side, there are so many resources here, like the OEDIT grant.”

Up-and-coming biotech hub?

Childs said the Colorado Bioscience Association was welcoming, helping Intero employees plug into networks. The company has set up shop in a building for startups on the University of Colorado Anschutz medical campus.

“One thing about Colorado is it’s not one of the big biotech hubs, but it is like the up-and-coming biotech hub. We’re just really excited to be here at the early stages of it really coming into fruition,” Childs said.

Herren, CEO of Raven Space Systems, had a personal connection to Colorado. He grew up in Oklahoma and has visited Colorado since he was a child to go mountain climbing.

There’s also the fact that Colorado has a robust aerospace and defense ecosystem and didn’t seem to be as expensive as other areas where a lot of other aerospace startups are located, Herren said. “It seemed like a good balance of access to talent and access to investors that would be interested in what we’re building.”

The company developed a 3D printing technology that specializes in aerospace-grade composites. The applications include hypersonics, propulsion systems, reentry vehicles, satellites, aircraft, missiles and rockets.

Raven moved from Kansas City to Colorado last year and decided on Broomfield as the site for its pilot facility. Herren said the company just started shipping its first parts for rocket motors.

When the company was looking at relocating to Colorado, Herren said state officials and the people in the industry reached out. He said OEDIT briefed him on available grants.

The company landed a $250,000 advanced industries grant from OEDIT. Last year, the Colorado Economic Development Commission approved up to $5.8 million in job growth tax incentives over eight years for the company. The tax credits are contingent on meeting job creation and salary requirements.

“There have been a lot of examples of successful startups before us to kind of give us that level of confidence,” Herren said.

But it’s also good to have the kind of major aerospace companies found in Colorado because they draw investors, other companies and government interests, he said.