Fighting Fire with Fire: Alpine Forestry

Fuels Reduction and Wildfire Risk Management in Park City

Park City and the Wasatch Back are famous for winter sports, but the region’s breathtaking natural scenery and abundant wildlife are the reason so many of us want to call these mountains home. To live here is to coexist with wilderness in its truest sense; and beneath the beauty lies a complicated truth: These mountains are a living system shaped by forces that we can influence but will never control.

For Telian, Alpine Forestry is a direct extension of the life he built in the mountains surrounding Park City. Years in wildland fire, as well as the Ski Patrol, provided the field experience. But for Telian, Alpine Forestry is more than a business—it’s a way to protect the health, function, and future of a place he knows and loves.

“Wildfire is a natural part of that system,” explains David Telian, founder of Alpine Forestry and a seasoned forestry expert. “I’m an environmentalist and conservationist at heart,” Telian says. “My role is to look through the lens of what we need to do now, in order to preserve this land for generations to come.”

Telian’s company, Alpine Forestry, is a land management company that maintains its focus on forest health, wildfire mitigation, and long-term stewardship in Park City and the greater Wasatch Back. Founded out of the recognition that forests need active, thoughtful management and not just reactive cleanup. Telian’s company works to reduce overgrown stands, fuel loads that drive wildfires, and ecological stress. It’s work that sits at the intersection of conservation, public safety, and landscape resilience.

The information gathered by Telian and his team becomes the basis for the year’s schedule of prescribed burns—a technique for preventing catastrophic fires by starting smaller, far more controllable ones.

Planning for these burns begins months in advance.

Telian begins by working with private and public landowners to determine the best approach for each specific parcel of land, with early surveys providing key data about the areas of overgrowth or over-crowdedness that may lead to a catastrophe.

As the Western United States adapts to a warmer and drier climate, scenes of wildfire destruction have permeated our news feeds with unnerving regularity. Despite this, Telian is quick to remind his neighbors that preventing wildfires altogether should never be the goal. “Wildfire is actually a natural part of the ecosystem,“ Telian says. “A lot of our projects are really designed to mimic what a low intensity wildfire would look like.”

In Telian’s view, walking away from a prescribed burn isn’t a contradiction of conservation. It is conservation. In addition to strength, endurance and expertise, the true name of the game is often “patience.” Forest management requires passionate dedication and flexibility. Activities are frequently delayed, but never truly cancelled.  “The only poor management is no management,” Telian plainly says.

The Healing Flame

Beauty has a way of distorting our perceptions. A dense, green forest may appear healthy to the untrained eye, but Telian and his team know otherwise. On terrain as difficult as the Wasatch Back, decades without management have left forests overcrowded, stressed, and loaded with combustible material. Not only do these conditions exacerbate the consequences of wildfire, they force trees into competition for water and sunlight, decreasing the vitality and biodiversity of the forest.

Alpine Forestry’s work is meant to interrupt that trajectory—not by destruction, but by restoring balance. “Good forest management doesn’t include cutting and burning everything in sight,” Telian says. “It’s a very selective process.”

That selectivity is especially important in local aspen stands, which Telian speaks about with something close to reverence. In the Park City area, healthy aspens serve as natural firebreaks and support ecological diversity, but they are often crowded out by other species and brush. Part of Alpine Forestry’s work is to help those groves return to a more resilient state. When projects succeed, the evidence isn’t hard to discover. Telian often finds increased vitality, healthier forest floors, more wildlife activity, and the return of young aspens rising when revisiting sites even a year or two after work was performed there.

The Nature of Community

Axes, chainsaws and drip torches are the tools of Alpine Forestry’s trade. All three require both technical discipline and public trust. That makes the work more than ecological. It’s also social. “People see smoke and worry,” Telian says. “They see trees cut and assume damage. They wonder why a pile is burning near a trail or behind a neighborhood.” Understanding these natural instincts, Alpine Forestry has built education into the job itself. The crew posts notices, works with local media, answers questions on site, and treats outreach as part of stewardship rather than an inconvenience. “The more outreach and education that we do,” he says, “the more commonplace this type of management can become in our community.”

That word—community—is often used in Park City. The whole Wasatch Back, Telian says, is connected to this work because everyone who lives here is bound to a wildland-urban interface. Homeowners, visitors, and trail users all benefit from the same forests, and each shares the risks that come with changing seasons, climate, and a growing population. Wildfire does not respect property lines. In Telian’s view, neither can stewardship.

For Telian, that longer view is what Mountainkind™ is all about. It’s more than just enjoying the mountains in the moment, it’s taking responsibility for what comes next. He puts it simply: “The actions that we take today will most certainly affect our future.

Through his work, David Telian protects the present, but to hear him tell it, the most important part is safeguarding the future. “This forestry work around Park City is creating a resilient landscape that will be there for our children,” he says. It’s a legacy that will allow future generations to enjoy the same natural wonders that we cherish today.