These Oregon ranchers say the losses from summer range fires will be huge

BAKER CITY, Ore. — Hawks squawk on a telephone wire in a remote high desert valley near the town of Baker City, where fourth-generation rancher Kimberlee Kerns is finishing up an afternoon cutting straw bales.

Like many Oregon ranchers, she’s also a volunteer wildland firefighter, and glad that the cooler weather of late means she’s back in a tractor.

This summer has been brutal .

"We had 20 some days of better than 90-degree heat and something like 10 days in a row of over 100," Kerns says.

Things got explosive. The charred black sagebrush-cloaked mountains behind her are an ominous reminder of what's turning out to be a record wildfire season in Oregon . More than a million and a half acres have burned so far but it’s not capturing many national headlines. That’s because the fires are burning in sparsely populated cattle country east of the Cascade Mountains.

But ranchers like Kerns say the economic fallout will be huge.

"There is a lot of toasted range land out there, there’s a lot of black grass, there’s a lot of dead cows," she says. "There’s a lot of high emotions, which I think is fair."

High emotions, because folks out here, hundreds of miles from the nearest major TV market, kind of feel overlooked. These huge range fires were quickly eclipsed when homes started burning in California . But when the largest, the Durkee Fire, first blew up July 17, all available firefighting resources were already tapped. Just days before, the National Interagency Fire Center in nearby Idaho had gone to the top preparedness level 5, one of the earliest dates to hit that dubious mark in decades.

Rancher and volunteer fire captain Bert Siddoway was the first to call in the Durkee Fire before jumping in his pickup to help with the initial attack. It ended up being for not. At one point, he remembers the fire’s flank being 15 miles wide moving at a 30-mile-per-hour clip.

"And we were sitting right here when it jumped the river behind us and went north," Siddoway recalls, looking out at an expanse of blackened land. "So it was going north, south, east and west all at the same time. Not sure what you do with that."

With a handlebar mustache and a tall imposing figure, Siddoway taps his fingers on the side of his pickup bed. Choosing his words carefully, he says the federal government sent help but the only elite management team available was from Virginia, where they don’t have range fires.

"It was an exasperating experience," he says. "It wasn’t the smoothest operating fire I’ve ever been around."

Siddoway grazes cattle on about 100,000 acres of land. Like many western ranches, much of it is on ground leased from the federal government. He figures most of the grass is burnt and thus out of production for two years or more. And he’ll have to replace hundreds of miles of fences and water tanks that ranchers maintain on public and private land.

"A lot of the ranchers I know out here would have preferred their house to burn down than their ranch to burn down. And you can include me in that," Siddoway says. "It’s cheaper to rebuild your house."

And herein lies the frustration. Ranchers feel like the nation’s firefighting apparatus is geared toward protecting homes and lives, all important they say, but what about their assets or their livelihoods that aren't always so obvious as a burnt-out home or car?

Where are the some 14,000 cows displaced by the Durkee Fire alone supposed to go now?

University of Montana fire ecologist Philip Higuera says the fallout from range fires can be harder to quantify.

"The media, policymakers, society, we tend to focus on fires that have clear negative human impacts," Higuera says.

But these modern range fires are getting more frequent and expensive just like forest fires. Higuera says eastern Oregon had a heat wave not seen in decades. And invasive, flammable grasses have also taken over the range.

"Across the West over the past four decades, the signal of global warming is clear and its influence on fire activity," he says. "So this is all consistent with that."

In rural Oregon meanwhile, aid has been slow to arrive, mainly because ranchers won’t even know how many cows they’ve lost until Fall when the roundup begins.

"People think, well, we should know how many cows we lost, [but] it’s big, big country," says Matt McElligott, president of the Oregon Cattlemen's Association.

He says there are reports of some ranchers already selling off their herds because hay is too expensive. Many have had to move cattle to their typical winter ranges now, leaving in doubt what they'll do when winter actually comes.

McElligott worries some of the old timers may just pack it up.

"If you’re 65 to 75 years old and you need to rebuild, that’s a tough thing to do," he says. "You work all your life and in a matter of minutes it’s gone."

Gone, like most of the range here, right in the peak of forage season.

Copyright 2024 NPR