Now that the Bircher Fire has been contained, there will be a formal review of the firefighting methods used in battling the blaze, the Montezuma County sheriff’s department and Mesa Verde Superintendent Larry Wiese announced Wednesday.

Plans are to release the findings at the end of August in public forums, said Sheriff Joey Chavez.

During the wildfire, park and fire officials were hesitant to answer specific questions about firefighting efforts.

But Chavez said Wednesday that an investigative team will gather information and report its findings to a separate review team composed of officials from the National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Forest Service, Montezuma County sheriff’s department, Ute Mountain Ute tribe, and the city of Cortez.

Chavez said that forums will be held in Mancos, Cortez, Dolores and Pleasant View to discuss the findings, which will include a timeline and a blow-by-blow account of the fire.

Wiese said that major incidents such as this are usually reviewed, but officials are making a clear effort to involve the surrounding communities now.

The sheriff’s department is sponsoring the review because the fire started on private land in the Mancos Valley on July 20. Bircher burned 23,600 acres of National Park Service, Colorado State Forest Service, Ute Mountain Ute, BLM and private land, before it was contained Saturday evening.

During the fire, residents questioned officials closely at four public forums about how the fire was fought in its beginning stages. A number of local citizens alleged that park-service officials, concerned about the potential of disturbing buried Anasazi ruins prevented the Mancos Fire Department from bulldozing a line within the park boundary after the fire was first spotted on July 20.

Some questioned how quickly the local team and helicopter responded to the fire, and whether a lightning strike that hit the area earlier in the week had been fully extinguished.

Others were concerned that the Type II Incident Command Team called in on July 21 lost critical time and resources during the transition from a local to a larger firefighting effort.

Wiese said that specific answers to such queries would be readily available after the review.

"We want to be able to answer all the questions that are going to be asked," said Wiese.

On a tour of the area Wednesday, Wiese said the fire would have been difficult to contain, pointing out that the terrain includes numerous ravines. The fire quickly jumped from tree to tree, leaving grassy patches and a few live trees on its path up the mesa and peaking at 16 feet above the trees.

Wiese and Chavez pointed out a handline built by a team of 10 park archaeologists trained as firefighters shortly after the fire broke out. The handline stopped the fire from spreading further north up the mesa, but the head of the fire continued.

"You have an opportunity with hand crews if the fire spots," said Wiese. "It’s pretty tough for any equipment operator to get off and fight."

Wiese said that bulldozers would not have helped ward off the head of the fire because it was moving too fast, and the operator would have been in jeopardy. He also said that bulldozers could not have been used on the north flank because of steep ravines.

"It doesn’t make any difference whether there were bulldozers," said Wiese. "The fire was caught here (where the handline was) and it didn’t progress."

Wiese said that he can understand community criticism, but the important thing is to learn from the experience rather than to point fingers.

"What’s really important is what happens the next time we have a fire," said Wiese.

"We’ve all made mistakes in this — there’s no doubt," said Chavez. "You learn from it and bring it back to the table."

An interdisciplinary team projected in 1997 that fire in Mesa Verde was inevitable, given the hot weather patterns and the high levels of fuel, built up over a century of fire suppression. Wiese said that thinning projects have been occurring in the park for some time, but mechanically thinning the aged piñon-juniper forest is extremely expensive, while prescribed fire is dangerous.

"You can’t use prescribed fire in this kind of terrain, with this kind of fuel load," agreed Ronald Everhardt, deputy regional director of the National Park Service intermountain region.

Wiese projected that one of the changes that could come out of the review would be to post a permanent repeater at the top of the Mancos Overlook to facilitate radio communications from that area to the dispatch center.

On Wednesday, an area near where the Bircher Fire started was still smoldering from an underground fire. Wiese said fire commonly smolders in root systems and then re-erupt when the humidity is lowest and the heat is intense.

It was these kind of conditions that first spurred the Bircher Fire above the wooded canopy in the Mancos Valley. The flame lengths were estimated at 16 feet during the beginning and reached 200-300 feet during the conflagration.

The park’s fire-suppression manual states that fighting the head of the fire when flame lengths are above 11 feet is usually ineffective and extremely dangerous.

Despite the public’s allegations, Chavez and Wiese said the fire could be termed a success because no structures were damaged and over 1,000 firefighters were on the line with only eight minor injuries reported.

The Bircher Fire was reportedly in the top 10 fires that incident commanders had ever seen in terms of volatility and potential for damage, Wiese said.