Background: In 2012, Colorado experienced one of its worst wildfire seasons of the past decade. The goal of this study was to investigate the relationship of local PM2.5 levels, modeled using the Weather Research and Forecasting Model with Chemistry, with emergency department visits and acute hospitalizations for respiratory and cardiovascular outcomes during the 2012 Colorado wildfires. Methods: Conditional logistic regression was used to assess the relationship between both continuous and categorical PM2.5 and emergency department visits during the wildfire period, from June 5th to July 6th 2012. Results: For respiratory outcomes, we observed positive relationships between lag 0 PM2.5 and asthma/wheeze (1 h max OR 1.01, 95 % CI (1.00, 1.01) per 10 mg/m3; 24 h mean OR 1.04 95 % CI (1.02, 1.06) per 5 mg/m3), and COPD (1 h max OR 1.01 95 % CI (1.00, 1.02) per 10 mg/m3; 24 h mean OR 1.05 95 % CI (1.02, 1.08) per 5 mg/m3). These associations were also positive for 2-day and 3-day moving average lag periods. When PM2.5 was modeled as a categorical variable, bronchitis also showed elevated effect estimates over the referent groups for lag 0 24 h average concentration. Cardiovascular results were consistent with no association. Conclusions: We observed positive associations between PM2.5 from wildfire and respiratory diseases, supporting evidence from previous research that wildfire PM2.5 is an important source for adverse respiratory health outcomes. © 2016 The Author(s). Open access. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which pemits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provifded you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licnse, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.