By Bridgette Williams
By mid-August, you didn’t need a fire map to know much of the West was burning.
Smoke has hung over communities from Oregon to Nevada, lightning has started new fires across dry rangeland, and millions of acres have already burned across the region.
Oregon has taken one of the hardest hits. By early August, roughly 2 million acres had burned there, already surpassing the state’s record-setting 2024 season, with weeks of fire weather still ahead.
But the damage on the ground is more than just reported acreage on a map. Wildfires have burned grazing ground, damaged ranch infrastructure, threatened water supplies and displaced livestock. At the massive Big Grass Fire along the Oregon-Idaho border, ranchers were dealing with burned rangeland and cattle killed or injured by fire, smoke and extreme heat.
Once the flames are out, the problem doesn’t end. Burned federal grazing allotments may be closed while landscapes recover, leaving ranchers scrambling to find somewhere else to put cattle.
Nevada has been getting its share, where a woman has been arrested for intentionally starting the Bug Fire, which exploded along the Nevada-California line, ultimately burning more than 93,000 acres and forcing evacuations north of Reno. The neighboring Stallion Fire added another major incident to an already stretched fire response system. By mid-August, firefighters had made substantial gains on both fires and residents were beginning to return home.
For ranchers, the calculation is immediate: cattle, fences, water, hay, grazing permits, and whether there will still be feed standing when the fire is over.
And August isn’t the finish line – fire danger typically remains high well into September across much of the Great Basin. For communities watching smoke settle into the valleys again this summer, there is still a lot of fire season left.