Forest officials, worried about massive wildfires this summer, plan to set controlled burns on more than twice as much land in Colorado as they did last spring.

About 89,000 acres will be burned overall. That compares with 35,000 acres torched in controlled burns last year.

Last summer, fires that raced across the West charred nearly 7 million acres and destroyed hundreds of homes in nine states.

Colorado wildfires blackened 126,750 acres last summer. Included in that total were 58 homes and 11,000 acres of mostly national forest south of Pine Junction, as a result of the Hi Meadow fire (pictured, left) .

Colorado's share of $1.6 billion approved by Congress to step up firefighting efforts in the West was spent bolstering fire crews in Fort Collins and Craig, acquiring equipment and paying for more controlled burns to begin this spring, officials said.

The low-intensity fires are aimed at ridding forests of dead trees and thick underbrush that could fuel bigger wildfires.

"Last year we were fighting fires, not running prescribed burns," said Barb Perkins, spokeswoman for the Bureau of Land Management, one of two principal agencies conducting the controlled burns.

BLM officials hope to run 46 controlled burns on 25,100 acres at a cost of at least $1.7 million.

Last year, BLM crews were so busy fighting wildfires that only 479 acres were treated in three projects. The agency's annual burns in the last decade have averaged from 10,000 to 15,000 acres per year.

This year many of the burns -- about 20,000 acres -- will be in northwest Colorado.

Dennis Zachman, a BLM project management specialist, said the projects primarily will include logging, tree thinning and chemical spraying of non-native plants.

The U.S. Forest Service plans 97 burns and mechanical "treatments" on 64,000 of its acres at a cost of $5.2 million. Most will occur where forest land touches inhabited areas.

More than 22,000 acres are targeted in the Pike-San Isabel Forest along the Front Range southwest of Denver. They range from 90-acre burns in the Buffalo Creek area to 7,000 acres in the Trout Creek watershed.

About $448,700 will be spent planning future burns, chemical spraying and mechanical fuel removal such as logging, thinning and chaining.

The National Park Service, still dealing with the effects of the Bircher Fire, which closed Mesa Verde National Park for 23 days, plans only four burns totaling 90 acres. The burns will be done in conjunction with thinning operations that are about 85 percent complete.

"Ironically, our plan for last year was approved the day the Bircher Fire broke out," public information officer Will Morris said.