Napa County's Newest Ridgetop Firebreak, Built Parcel by Parcel
By Tim Carl
Summary: Napa Firewise, working with Napa County, CAL FIRE, the U.S. Forest Service and private landowners, has completed the 11.5-mile Hogback Ridge fuel break along the Mayacamas crest above Mount Veeder. The $1.5 million project treats roughly 250 acres across dozens of parcels, creating a ridgetop line where firefighters can stage and hold when wind-driven fires push toward an estimated 8,000 structures within 3 miles. Napa Valley Vintners separately funded a dedicated Firewise dozer that helped open initial access to the ridge and supports fuel-break work countywide. Backers point to the 2025 Pickett Fire as evidence that pre-built containment lines, improved access and mapped water sources can limit a blaze’s footprint before it becomes catastrophic, even as long-term maintenance and funding remain unresolved.
MOUNT VEEDER, Calif. — The line is visible from the air long before you reach it: a tan ribbon stitched along the crest of the Mayacamas Mountains, separating Napa from Sonoma, threading past the peak of Mount Veeder at 2,600 feet and running 11.5 miles from the Carneros Highway to the intersection of Trinity Road and Dry Creek Road. From the summit on a clear day, you can see Mount St. Helena to the north and the lights of the city of Sonoma to the west. From this ridge, fire moves in either direction. So does the work to stop it.
On May 14, dozens of landowners, firefighters, vintners, federal staff and elected officials gathered near the peak to mark completion of the Hogback Ridge fuel break — the largest single ridgetop fuel-reduction project ever finished in Napa County and a working model for what the next quarter-century of wildfire defense in Wine Country might look like.
The project covers roughly 250 acres of fuel break. It links to other completed and planned projects across the county. The Hogback Ridge work was funded by a $1.5 million U.S. Forest Service grant. Earlier, in 2023, the Napa Valley Vintners provided $1.4 million to support operations and purchase a dedicated Firewise dozer, which cleared the initial access road to the site and supports fuel-break work countywide.
Crews thinned small pines, limbed lower branches, removed invasive French and Scotch broom and left enough overstory to hold the soil. From the air, the result reads as a fuel break threading through the forest.
The reason it matters can be stated in one number: 8,000.
That is the count of structures — homes, barns, wineries, outbuildings — within 3 miles of the line. If a wind-driven fire crests this ridge unopposed, as the 2017 Nuns Fire did, those structures sit in its path.
“Every structure is a million bucks,” said Steven Burgess, the landscape resiliency program manager for the Napa Communities Firewise Foundation, who ran the technical briefing. “So that’s basically $8 billion. It’s a good save.”
The Hogback project cost $1.5 million. The math, even at Burgess’ deliberately rough scale, is hard to argue with.
What the Project Is and Why It Is Different
Most fuel-reduction work in Napa County happens in two places: along roadsides, where crews clear shoulders to keep evacuation routes open, and around homes, where landowners create defensible space within 100 feet of structures. Both are essential. Neither stops a fire that is already running across a landscape.
Hogback Ridge does something different. It sits where firefighters actually want to fight.
“We can’t put crews deep down into canyons with 70-mile-an-hour winds and expect success,” said J.C. Greenberg, deputy chief of the Napa County Fire Department, who helped scope the project in 2022. “We’re back up here on the ridge lines. So when you take a look at the maps across Sonoma-Lake-Napa, those ridge lines are limited, and you have to follow them out. This is one of those strategic ridge lines.”
A ridge crest is where wind, slope and fuel align in a fire’s favor and against that of firefighters. Flames running uphill accelerate. Embers carry farther. Crews working below the line lose visibility and escape routes. But a ridge prepared in advance — thinned, with a dozer track wide enough for equipment, with mapped water sources and staging areas — flips the geometry. Firefighters get the high ground, an anchor point and time.
Wine Country burned during the October 2017 firestorm that swept across Napa and Sonoma counties, destroying thousands of homes and reshaping wildfire policy across Northern California. Filmed as the Nuns Fire advanced through the Mayacamas Mountains, this video documents one of the most destructive wildfire events in California history — Tim Carl Video
What makes Hogback different from earlier Napa fuel breaks is its scale and its ownership pattern. It is not a roadside project on county or state land. It is not a small Firewise cluster around a single neighborhood. It is an 11.5-mile continuous line that crosses dozens of private parcels — vineyards, ranches, residential properties, undeveloped forest — and it required every one of those owners to sign off, allow access and accept that crews and equipment would work on their land.
“This area up here, this is part of the challenge because it is owned by so many fragmented owners,” Greenberg said. “Making that conduit, the connection, getting the buy-in, the trust — this project right here demonstrates how we’re able to get this across the line.”
That public-private stitching is the model. The federal grant paid for the work. The vintners bought the dozer. The county supplied support, planning staff and maintenance contracts. CAL FIRE provided technical oversight and crews. Firewise mapped the parcels, ran the landowner outreach and held the contracts. The Mount Veeder Fire Safe Council, one of 22 volunteer-led councils across the county, identified the corridor as a priority in its Community Wildfire Protection Plan years before the funding existed.
“Somebody back in 2017 said, ‘We need to make this whole road one fuel break,’” Burgess said. “And so we drafted it, we vetted it and it was a bona fide project. And then when we saw the opportunity for funding five years later, we were able to get funding.”
Five years between identification and funding. That is the timeline this kind of work runs on.
What It Hopes to Prevent
The Hogback ridge has burned before. The 1964 Nuns Canyon Fire, the 1996 PG&E fire and most recently the 2017 Nuns Fire all ran across this terrain or near it. The 2017 fire, part of the catastrophic October complex that killed 22 people in Sonoma County and destroyed roughly 5,600 structures across the region, came over the ridge from the Sonoma side and into Napa County’s Mount Veeder neighborhoods on its third and fourth days.
Jim Granucci’s home at 3465 Mount Veeder Road was one of the houses it took.
“The fire went in through the vents underneath the house,” Granucci said. “Even though the house that we had built was only 10 years old, that was the only fire-prevention thing that we did not have. We had metal roof and Hardie board siding and everything else. But it basically destroyed the entire house. And the fire went around my barn — cement floor, didn’t even touch it.”
Granucci pulled the first rebuild permit in Napa County after the fire and moved back, he said. His property now sits adjacent to the new Hogback line. He spoke at the tour not as a technical participant but as a person the project is built to protect.
“It used to just be a small dirt road up here,” Granucci said. “At least now they’ve got a heliport here where they can land a helicopter. They can bring in their ground crews, they can bring in their trucks. It’s really just a real, real neat thing to be able to have that potential for protection, should we need it.”
Matt Ryan, the CAL FIRE Sonoma-Lake-Napa Unit chief who also serves as Napa County’s fire chief, was a division supervisor on the 2017 Nuns Fire. He ran the Cavedale and Moon Mountain section — narrow roads, steep terrain, fire behavior that outran the resources he had.
“This strategic dozer line would have made a difference,” Ryan said, standing on the new line and looking down toward burn scars still visible to the west. “As you traverse through the Cavedale area, very narrow roads, winding roads, it was much of a challenge for us, especially with the ground resources, to really find an anchor point to start line construction.”
Anchor point is the operative term. Without one, ground crews have nowhere to begin. With one — a dozer line, a ridge top, a defensible position — they can hold.
Last Year the Model Worked
The clearest evidence that ridgetop fuel breaks are worth the years of permitting, the millions of dollars and the landowner negotiations came less than a year ago, on the other side of Napa County.
In summer 2025, the Pickett Fire ignited northeast of Calistoga in terrain that had been prepared in advance through Firewise and CAL FIRE projects — dozer lines pre-positioned, fuel breaks cleared, access roads improved and water sources mapped. Months of work, done before any spark.
When the fire started, crews had what 2017 did not give them: an anchor point.
“That was the return on investments that we saw during that fire,” Greenberg said. “We’re not trying to put in some of these containment lines at 2 in the morning while the fire’s still running, threatening homes. This work was thoughtful. It was done ahead of time. If we’re doing this work during the fire fight, we’re doing this in the dark hours. We’re using operators that haven’t been up on this ground before. That’s zero visibility and smoke. They’re following their GPS maps in their dozers.”
The Pickett Fire was held to a small footprint. No major losses. No catastrophic spread.
It is the case study every speaker at the Hogback event came back to because it answers the question taxpayers and landowners reasonably ask when they hear about $1.5 million spent on a line of dirt across a ridge: Does this work?
“That was clear evidence that this kind of investment, work, planning, preparation, pays off big time,” said Liz Alessio, the Napa County supervisor whose District 2 includes Mount Veeder.
The math she cited puts the return-on-investment figure for prevention work in fire-prone landscapes at roughly $3.70 for every $1 invested — a number drawn from a range of studies on pre-fire mitigation and consistent with what wildfire economists have found in peer-reviewed work for more than a decade. The figure does not include the cost of lives lost, evacuation trauma, health impacts, smoke-tainted vintages, lost wages for hospitality workers or the long tail of insurance disruption.
Joseph Nordlinger, who leads the Napa Communities Firewise Foundation, framed the shift the Pickett Fire confirmed. He used the same phrase in August 2025 at a Calistoga Fire Safe Council meeting covered in “Under the Hood: Firewise 2025 — Napa Valley Gets Tactical on Wildfire.”
“We’ve learned hard lessons,” Nordlinger said. “Now we’re trying to burn on our own terms — not when spark meets wind but when we’re ready. That’s the shift.”
A Model for Ridgetop Maintenance
Completion is not conclusion. Without regular re-treatment — pruning regrowth, removing invasive broom and tree of heaven, keeping dozer roads passable — a shaded fuel break degrades within a few seasons. Tree of heaven and Scotch broom can convert a treated zone back into a fuel-loaded thicket faster than crews can keep up. The line built this year has to be maintained next year and the year after.
This is where the Hogback project becomes a template, not just an accomplishment.
The Napa Valley Vintners’ contribution funded the purchase of a dedicated Firewise dozer. Over the past two years, that single piece of equipment helped reestablish roughly 197 miles of dozer containment line across the county — well past the foundation’s original three-year, 100-mile target. The dozer keeps working after the grant funding ends. It cuts new line, maintains old line and stays under the foundation’s control.
The county has committed annual funding to maintain critical fire roads. A three-year, $64.6 million Cooperative Fire Protection Agreement between Napa County and CAL FIRE, which took effect July 1, 2025, locks in firefighting staff and supports volunteer firefighter programs across the unincorporated county.
And the foundation’s mapping work — overlaying parcel-level data on water tanks, pumps, access routes and defensible-space improvements — feeds directly into Tablet Command, the digital system fire crews use during incidents. When a fire starts near a mapped parcel, the responding engine captain already knows where the 5,000-gallon tank is, which gate is locked, which road can take a Type 3 engine and which can’t.
“We map those details in geospatially, in GIS,” Nordlinger said. “We build a data layer, then we provide that data layer to CAL FIRE, to the Sonoma County firefighters, the fire districts in their system that’s called Tablet Command, so that they can actually use that data in an incident, and it becomes actionable intelligence.”
The longer vision extends the model. Firewise wants to link Hogback Ridge north to Diamond Mountain near Calistoga, eventually creating a roughly 25-mile continuous defense line along the Mayacamas crest — a single managed corridor running most of the length of Napa County’s western boundary with Sonoma. That work will require more local and federal grants, more landowner agreements, more years of permitting and more maintenance funding once it is built.
Whether the money keeps flowing is the open question.
The Fragile Part of the Model
The funding picture for projects such as Hogback is less secure than the project itself.
In April 2025, FEMA canceled a $35 million Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities grant that had been awarded to Napa County in 2024 for additional fire-mitigation work. The cancellation, which county officials called “shortsighted” and “dangerous,” removed a major piece of the multiyear funding stack the county had built around expanding the Firewise model countywide.
The fiscal year 2026 federal budget initially zeroed out the State Fire Assistance line item that funds U.S. Forest Service grants like the one that paid for Hogback. Congress restored the funding before final passage, but the experience left grantees uncertain about how to plan for fiscal 2027.
“As you know, in fiscal year 26, we did not have any funds at all in the budget before it went to Congress,” said Barbara Geringer, the assistant director for cooperative fire in the U.S. Forest Service’s Pacific Southwest Region, speaking to the gathered crowd. “Fortunately, Congress was smart enough to continue the funding to the states so we can fund projects like this. That’s where you guys come in. You need to be there on the front lines, promoting projects like this to keep them going.”
Sonoma County voters passed a dedicated fire-mitigation tax that funds maintenance on its side of the Mayacamas. Napa County has no comparable dedicated source. Measure L, a 2022 sales-tax measure that would have funded fire mitigation countywide, failed at the ballot. The county now funds Firewise work primarily through its annual contract with the foundation and through whatever state and federal grants the foundation can win.
“Dollars are becoming more scarce,” Alessio said. “We do need a sustainable funding source to continue this work all over Napa County.”
The Hogback line was finished in time for the 2026 fire season. The National Interagency Fire Center’s most recent outlook calls for above-normal large-fire potential across Northern California by July and August. Live fuel moisture at higher elevations is dropping. Spring grasses, which grew tall after a wet winter, are cured early after an unusually warm March.
And the stakes for vineyards extend past the flame front. In “Wine Chronicles: Napa Braces for the 2025 Fire Season,” growers, scientists and ETS Laboratories described how smoke — not fire — became the dominant threat to Napa vintages after 2020. Statewide, smoke-related crop losses ran into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Holding a fire small on the ridge keeps smoke off the valley floor; it is the same logic, working two ways. The line will be tested. Probably soon.
What the Project Tells the Rest of the County
Anne Cottrell, the Napa County Board of Supervisors chair, broke the project down into three traits she said made it work and made it replicable.
“There’s the strategy, there’s the collaboration and then there’s the cost effectiveness,” Cottrell said. “On the collaboration piece, we’ve got Napa Firewise, Napa Valley Vintners, Napa County, our RCD, our Sonoma County partners, and really critically, CAL FIRE and also the U.S. Forest Service. That’s all levels of government coming together. And then finally, cost effectiveness. This project cost $1.5 million. As Steve said, that’s less than the cost of the rebuild of one of those 8,000 structures.”
The strategy is to put the work where firefighters can actually use it. The collaboration is to stitch together federal money, private money, county money and landowner participation across jurisdictional and parcel lines. The cost effectiveness is the $1.5 million spent against the $8 billion in structures within three miles — to say nothing of the human and economic costs the math doesn’t capture.
The model is not new. The Angwin prescribed burn at Pacific Union College — covered in “Under the Hood: Fighting Fire With Fire” — used the same partnership template at a smaller scale two years ago, bringing CAL FIRE, Firewise and a single institutional landowner together to return controlled fire to a 14-acre legacy forest. Hogback is what happens when that template scales to 11.5 miles, multiple jurisdictions and dozens of private owners.
Whether Hogback Ridge holds in the next major fire will be decided by weather, wind and luck. What it has already demonstrated is that 11.5 miles of public-private cooperation, sustained across five years, can produce something durable enough to give firefighters a fighting chance.
“This only works if neighbors work together,” Nordlinger said. “Wildfire doesn’t respect parcel lines. If we want to build resilience, we need participation — now.”
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Tim Carl is a Napa Valley-based photojournalist.
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Thank you for a terrific story -- informative, inspiring, and a welcome piece of significant good news.
Fascinating article! Thank you. This looks so hopeful. I hope that it will pay off, as it feels it should, but continued work and commitment to it are critical. Knowing many who lost a lot in the 2017 fires all comes home when I hear about this break. Many thanks to all who put it into place, and to Napa Valley Features for sharing the information. I hope this will make a big difference and continue to be supported.