Deer Valley Burn Pile Building with Marin County Fire Foundry Crews

We've partnered with the Marin County Fire Foundry Crew to build new burn piles in Deer Valley, adding to the piles we built last season. The Fire Foundry program is a community-based workforce program that provides job training and career skills to underserved and underrepresented residents of Marin County and the greater Bay Area, building both wildfire resilience and local opportunity at the same time.

The crew is focused on removing invasive species like French Broom, along with dead and downed branches and brush, and gathering it into piles. These piles will be burned in the Winter of 2026, when the appropriate weather conditions return.

Much of this terrain is steep, remote, or otherwise hard to reach with vehicles or heavy equipment. In these areas, burn piles are one of the most practical and cost-effective ways to reduce fuel loading.

This work not only reduces the risk of a dangerous, fast-spreading fire near homes and infrastructure, it also opens up the forest canopy so that sunlight can reach the ground again giving native species room to flourish.