JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
It's been 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 they've mostly been on sparsely populated cattle country east of the Cascade Mountains. As NPR's Kirk Siegler reports, ranchers there say the economic fallout will be huge.
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KIRK SIEGLER, BYLINE: Hawks squawk on a telephone wire in a remote, high desert valley near Baker City, where fourth-generation rancher Kimberly Kerns is finishing up an afternoon cutting straw bales.
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SIEGLER: Like many Oregon ranchers, she's also a volunteer firefighter and glad that the cooler weather of late means she's back in this tractor. This summer has been brutal.
KIMBERLY KERNS: We had 20-some days of better-than-90-degree heat and something like 10 days in a row of over 100.
SIEGLER: Things got explosive. The charred black sagebrush-cloaked mountains behind her are an ominous reminder. The Durkee Fire, one of the largest in the country, is still smoldering, having burned an area as big as Los Angeles County.
KERNS: There's a lot of toasted rangeland out there, and there's a lot of black grass. There's a lot of dead cows. There's a lot of high emotions, which I think is fair.
SIEGLER: 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 Durkee Fire first blew up in July, all available firefighting resources were already tapped.
BURT SIDDOWAY: This fire burned over into the Dixie Creek breaks. And it ran down this hill in the dark and hit the town of Rye Valley, which - there's just a couple of buildings left that's Rye Valley.
SIEGLER: Valley rancher and also volunteer fire Captain Burt Siddoway was the first to call in the Durkee Fire before jumping in his pickup to help with the initial attack. And it ended up being for naught. At one point, the fire's flank was 15 miles wide, moving at a 30 mile-an-hour clip, and there were also at least a half dozen other massive range fires in eastern Oregon.
SIDDOWAY: That black you can see over there - that's the other fire. The Thompson Manning Creek Fire's over there. And then there's another fire on the backside of the ridge over there.
SIEGLER: 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.
SIDDOWAY: It was an exasperating experience. It wasn't the smoothest operating fire I've ever been around.
SIEGLER: Siddoway grazes about 100,000 acres of land, a lot of it leased from the federal government. Most of the grass is burnt, and it will be out of production for two years, and he'll have to replace hundreds of miles of fences.
SIDDOWAY: A lot of the ranchers I know out here would have preferred their house to burn down than their ranch to burn down. It's cheaper to rebuild your house.
SIEGLER: And herein lies the frustration. Ranchers feel like the nation's firefighting apparatus is geared toward protecting homes and lives - all good - but what about their assets and their livelihoods? And where are the some 14,000 cows displaced by the Durkee Fire alone supposed to go now?
PHILIP HIGUERA: We - the media, policymakers, society - we tend to focus on fires that have clear negative human impacts.
SIEGLER: University of Montana fire ecologist Philip Higuera says the fallout from range fires can be harder to quantify, but they are getting more frequent and expensive, just like forest fires. Higuera says, eastern Oregon had a heat wave not seen for decades, and invasive flammable grasses have also taken over the range.
HIGUERA: Across the West, over the past four decades, the signal of global warming is clear in its influence on fire activity, so this is all consistent with that.
SIEGLER: In Oregon, 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. Matt McElligott is president of the Oregon Cattlemen's Association.
MATT MCELLIGOTT: People think, well, we should know how many cows we lost. It's a big, big country.
SIEGLER: But some are already selling off their herds because hay is too expensive. And he worries some old-timers may just pack it up.
MCELLIGOTT: So, you know, if you're 65 to 75 years old, and you need to rebuild, that's a tough thing to do. You work all your life, and in a matter of minutes, it's gone.
SIEGLER: Gone - like most of the range here, right in the peak of forage season.
Kirk Siegler, NPR News, Baker City, Ore. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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