On any given day, you are likely to see Stephanie Thaggard Tanner with her husband, Rob, walking through The Village at Castle Pines (the Village). Each day, they explore seven or eight miles of the lush, tree-filled community they love to call home. Stephanie is passionate about this community and as such has become heavily involved in fire mitigation and forest stewardship for the Village. She is the Village Lake Firewise USA Resident Leader and Committee Chair and serves on the Village Forest Stewardship Committee.

Firewise USA is part of the National Fire Protection Association, providing a collaborative framework to help neighbors in a geographic area get organized, find direction and take action to increase the ignition resistance of their homes and community and to reduce wildfire risks at the local level.

“Hardening homes with fire-resistant building materials and creating defensible space by removing too-close combustible materials like mulch, bushes and firewood from the immediate perimeter can protect a home from igniting,” Stephanie added.

Stephanie’s forest stewardship committee helps preserve the overall forest health by managing the roughly 250,000 trees located in the community. “Wildfire mitigation is a big part of that, of course, but also responding to critical environmental events that arise like this year’s mountain pine beetle crisis. A tree dying from pine beetle infestation becomes a fire-risk, so they’re related,” she shared.

Stephanie was honored to be a panelist at the 2026 Colorado Wildland Fire Conference in Ft. Collins in April to discuss community coordination with town and county government and local fire agencies. “It was very inspiring to spend several days with such a diverse representation of Coloradans coming together to work toward the common goal of making our communities safer,” she shared.

According to Stephanie, fire mitigation is simpler than it sounds. She said to start by cleaning debris from gutters, clearing mulch and plants away from the foundation by five feet and trimming tree branches to six feet off the ground.

When not keeping the community safe, Stephanie is with her wonderful family. She and Rob have been together since they met on the San Antonio Riverwalk during the St. Patrick’s Day celebration in 1989; she was a senior in college and he was in town for an oil and gas convention. “It was definitely love at first sight,” she shared. They were engaged that same week and returned to the Riverwalk to marry six months later.

Stephanie and Rob have lived in Calgary (Rob is Canadian), Houston and Dallas over the years but moved to Colorado in 2019 after visiting time and again while their two sons Zach (33) and Caleb (27) were here in college. The boys still live in Colorado.

The couple loves to travel and cheer on the Colorado Avalanche, Denver Broncos and CU Buffaloes. This summer, the pair will road trip across the northeastern United States, on to Novia Scotia and surrounding provinces to visit friends and family, something they have wanted to do for years.

“We can’t imagine living anywhere else. The people really are amazing,” concluded Stephanie. “Walking is how we have met and become friends with so many wonderful people. I think we may know every dog in the Village by name.”

If you would like more information about fire mitigation and the Firewise USA program, feel free to contact Stephanie anytime at stephanie.tanner.cofirewise@gmail.com. For more information on the National Fire Protection Association, visit nfpa.org.

 

 

By Elean Gersack; photos courtesy of Stephanie Thaggard Tanner