K
Katie Fite
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- Thread Author
- #1
Editor’s Note: This story is a perfect example of your tax dollars not just being wasted but actively degrading our public lands.
All Hell broke loose when a thunderstorm system passed across eastern Oregon and Washington on July 22. Oregon was hit by 8,537 lightning strikes, bringing an eruption of new blazes on top of 20+ fires already burning. One of these strikes ignited the Big Grass Fire. It quickly became a mega-fire. The burn perimeter area (red on map) is 578,637 acres, mostly in Idaho. I’ve seen no breakdown of how much land has burned outright vs. how much was consumed in firefighting backburns, or in burn out of areas within the perimeter after the wildfire had passed over an area.
Big Grass Fire Watch Duty map.
The fire started in grass west of the Owyhee Wild and Scenic River canyon in Oregon and north of Three Forks. It grew rapidly for two days, at a time when the region was overwhelmed with new starts. It jumped the river canyon and went on a fearsome tear northwest into Idaho up towards South Mountain. News reports the evening of July 25th said the Big Grass Fire covered 90,000 acres in two hours (that’s 140 square miles!), with explosive growth: “That fire has burned 130,000 acres as of 7 p.m. on Saturday night and first sparked on July 23. The fire burned an additional 90,000 acres within two hours and is estimated at 220,000 acres as of 9:30 p.m. Saturday. By Sunday afternoon, the fire has been estimated at 280,000 acres according to the sheriff’s office”.
Public and private land around the western part of BLM’s Mud Flat Scenic Byway in its path near the Oregon-Idaho border south of Jordan Valley had become choked with exotic weedy grasses – unscenic depressing bulbous bluegrass, cheatgrass, and increasingly overrun by medusahead. Western junipers had been incrementally purged across this landscape, and replaced by cheatgrassoline that provided ideal conditions for explosive wind-driven fire growth.
Cut browning junipers off Mud Flat road along the OR-ID border- now within the Big Grass perimeter. Fall 2025.
By the Mud Flat road and OR-ID border now within Big Gras perimeter. I don’t know if this was a wildfire or purposeful burn. Fall 2025.
Big Grass swept NE up South Mountain (through sage, juniper, Douglas fir, mountain shrubs, aspen) and also south and east onto Juniper Mountain – where BLM had spent millions of dollars butchering and burning old growth and mature juniper forest communities for over a decade.
Its final big breakaway effort was a run SE down off Juniper Mountain into and across the East Fork Owyhee River Canyon. It burned upstream in the river canyon area from the South Fork Owyhee confluence over east to Duck Valley, and on south through Priority Sage-grouse and occupied Pygmy Rabbit habitat. It almost reached the Nevada line.
East Fork Owyhee Canyon, Idaho.
Occupied Pygmy Rabbit habitat in the fire’s final path west of Duck Valley.
At an August public meeting, an incident team stated the blaze started in grass. Vegetation was so dry that aspen and willows were readily igniting. The Forest Service should pay attention – as an underlying driver for conifer killing in some Utah projects has been burning off conifers to get more aspen for a “firebreak”. In the conditions that produce mega-fires and consume the big acreages in the West, aspen flame out too.
A super-dry nearly no-snow winter was followed by a largely dry spring. When spring rains did come, the storms were timed ideally to spur flammable annual weed growth. In late May, I documented the sudden dense cheatgrass invasion in BOSH-treated areas of the Owyhee Uplands just east of the area soon to be consumed by the Big Grass fire. Many millions of federal dollars and copious state funds had been poured into juniper eradication in the BOSH (Bruneau-Owyhee Sage-grouse Habitat) juniper eradication project. BLM and the University of Idaho Range Department head oversaw this emerging BOSH-caused weed nightmare. Under the guise of “research”, junipers were cut, and piled then burned and jackpot and broadcast burned, destroying native understory grasses. BLM fire managers staff and Pheasants Forever contractors involved in the BOSH relished burning. In a period of a few years, while chronic cattle grazing continued, these “treatments” catapulted dense cheatgrass into critical Owyhee upland Sage-grouse habitat in the Bruneau Field Office.
Meanwhile, in Owyhee Field Office lands in areas now consumed in the Big Grass Fire, BLM had been aggressively trying to eradicate mature and old growth junipers across Juniper Mountain. This started a few years earlier than the BOSH, and continued up through 2025, glomming onto the BOSH project funding bonanza.
Big Grass (pink)- overlaid with various recent BLM deforestation projects. Firefighting teams made a huge effort to keep the fire from burning towards Silver City (old mining town) in the NE, towards Triangle, and east of Deep Creek off the Mud Flat Road, and kept it largely out of the block of dark green colored BOSH treatment areas there. Source: Twig viewer map.
Close up of Juniper Mountain area with BLM’s expensive eradication treatments shown. They became toast in the Big Grass Fire. In the lower right, you can see a faint underlying outline of parts of the 2007 Crutcher Fire. Big Grass ripped through the Crutcher burn (where juniper cover was already mostly gone) in its wind-driven run down to the East Fork Owyhee.
Before BLM spent millions of dollars in a crusade of purposeful desolation, of the land, Juniper Mountain contained a beautiful montane western juniper forest community, with many truly ancient trees, and almost no cheatgrass. Younger trees were in areas of old BLM 1960s era eradication projects. Younger trees present were undergoing natural succession, and re-occupying sites – not encroaching, not invading.
The 1999 BLM Owyhee RMP land use plan had briefly considered ACEC (Area of Critical Environmental Concern) designation for Juniper Mountain areas because of the extraordinary montane western juniper community present. Cattlemen killed that proposal deader than dead. The RMP outcome predictably ended up vilifying the trees. Then in 2014-2016, forest destruction was blessed in EAs for Trout Springs and Pole Creek grazing allotments, through warped “health” assessments and ecosites tailored to justify forest eradication. As is now common in BLM grazing processes, junipers were blamed for land degradation, covering up for cattle impacts.
When salivating BLM fire managers were sicced on areas of Juniper Mountain, they aggressively targeted prime mature and old growth stands – cutting, pile burning, broadcast burning, and conducting vile jackpot burns to take out old trees. They sneakily tried to get away with claiming they weren’t targeting old growth – by not outright cutting down old growth but instead cutting down trees all around the oldest ones, letting the cut trees dry out, then torching the “jackpot” they had purposefully created. The old trees, often with some rot in the center, burned to a husk. They also located dense wood piles right by mature and old growth trees, then ignited the piles killing the old ones.
BLM 2019 prescribed burn area – old growth juniper husk in a new sea of continuous fine flashy cheatgrass fuel. Photo May 2026
BLM has been intent on wiping out any vestige of old growth making the land fit their vegetation modeling lies. They even targeted trees in supposed “fire safe” rocky outcrop sites. In Pole Creek, trees were girdled, or cut to lean precariously into older ones, in “widowmaker” positions.
In bygone days, Owyhee BLM used to concede that Yes, junipers could naturally occur on rocky outcrops. On Juniper Mountain, they aggressively pursued juniper destruction on these outcrops to wipe out old trees. 2016 Pole Creek photo.
Old trees were also girdled – likely in the hopes no one would notice. Always look closely at trees in a landscape mottled with scattered dead junipers – as this is atypical. Look for girdling, and in places like Nevada, inquire if Tebuthiuron herbicide pellets were rained down.
I documented all this with Owyhee BLM. The response? They blamed the contractor cutting crew. How dare I claim that the agency was purposefully targeting old growth junipers for obliteration.
Here’s a Juniper Mountain Pole Creek tree that somehow escaped assassination – you can see a dead cut leaner on the right, and a dead girdled tree on the left. Look at the native understory grass. BLM’s scorched earth burn techniques wipe the native grass out, to the delight of cheatgrass. 2018 photo.
By 2018, cheatgrass and other weeds were invading Juniper Mountain Pole Creek sites BLM had burned in 2015-2016.
In 2019, BLM blindly ignored the flammable weeds already invading its Pole Creek “treatments” and proceeded to torch a large area of old growth. I documented this in photos here. High on the flames and ashes of this big Juniper Mountain jackpot burning escapade in 2019, the fire manager overseeing the forest destruction boasted about playing God:
“We’re hitting the reset button” Okeson said, by which he meant setting huge swaths of juniper forest ablaze and transforming them into sagebrush and grasslands—the preferred milieu of the sage grouse and the cattle rancher. The burn carried a price tag of $1.5 million, which he insisted was a bargain in terms of its ecological benefits”.
Classic settler mentality, crowing about domination of the natural world. Millions of dollars more continued to be spent attacking forests, ultimately generating more cheatgrass. You get awards for doing this kind of thing in BLM. As long as there’s funds, these guys will whack and burn until there’s nothing left but weeds.
Now in 2026, BLM’s “reset to cow food” projects – which were also claimed to be fuels projects – have been consumed in the Big Grass Fire. The resulting cheatgrass that engulfed Juniper Mountain because of the treatments and cattle grazing disturbance makes Big Grass post-fire “recovery” more difficult – for anything other than cheatgrass and Ceanothus. The latter not known to be a favored haunt of Sage-grouse.
What would the Big Grass Fire burn pattern have been here if the forest hadn’t already been hacked and burned to pieces, and the understory increasingly choked with dense cheatgrass that flames in a millisecond? Perhaps little different given the extreme 2026 weather conditions and vagaries of wind – but I sure suspect the burn would have been patchier, with more juniper stands surviving. We’ll never know. And there’s unlikely to be any accurate accounting of effects of back burns and burn out areas with Big Grass.
Agency Big Grass Fire Facebook post on South Mountain work. Look- not all those dense junipers burned.
The effects of suppression efforts on burn patterns, intensity, etc. in these big fires are largely impossible to tease out post-fire. For example, what’s going on in this video – is it a backburn or the fire edge?
I had visited Juniper Mountain in May 2026, and was horrified at how much dense cheatgrass now choked BLM’s eradication project areas. It had engulfed large areas where burning had wiped out Idaho fescue and biocrusts, and/or exposed the grass and crusts to easy cattle use.
May 2026. Piles awaiting burning on Juniper Mountain in an area that had suffered 2019 prescribed burning. BLM had even gone back into unburned pockets of areas it had burned in 2019, and then a couple years ago cut down and/or piled surviving trees. Notice burn piles right by remnant older trees in background that had escaped past treatment. Endless manipulation endlessly applied.
Tall dense cheatgrass, scorched soil still not yet vegetated – but awaiting weeds. By July, this oiuld have been crispy dry. Not only had BLM destroyed the old growth, their soil scalding burn techniques killed off the native understory grass.
Wonder how fast the Big Grass fire moved through here?
The map above shows a close view of a big unburned pocket inside the Big Grass Fire’s northern perimeter. The Incident team called it the Donut. Their spokesman at a public meeting said it was 96,000 acres (150 square miles). The thin pink line in the east is a firebreak put in by firefighters. He also stated they had been considering burning up the Donut to stop potential hot spots busting out. But the ranchers had told the team “No, don’t do that”. So instead, they shifted gears and planned to bring in masticators and broaden the thin firebreak area. This is one of those rare times I agree with ranchers.
This highlights the controversial Federal firefighting penchant for a 100% black landscape inside a fire perimeter. It’s mindboggling that they would have even considered burning that much acreage. The pale green color in the lower center of the map is the remaining unburned area of the North Fork Owyhee Wilderness. The Incident team never mentioned if they considered Wilderness values when they contemplated burning out the Donut, which now contains pretty much the only old growth western juniper community left in Idaho post-Big Grass Fire.
A bit before the decision to not burn out the Donut, controversy had erupted over USWFS firefighting tactics on the Tartar Fire north of Weiser Idaho. The US Federal Wildland Fire Service is Burgum’s new fire empire creation with its clunky acronym confusingly similar to USFWS.
The Tartar Fire burned 158,000 acres, right down to the Snake River and Brownlee Reservoir. Just across the Snake, the Fox Fire was burning in Oregon. The Tartar landscape contained large blocks of private ranch land, and very degraded public land, with much of the area long infested with nearly every sharp-awned flammable annual grass and prickly weed known in the West. It had been burning at a modest rate in the north near the Payette Forest boundary but then the wind shifted, and overnight it flashed south almost to Weiser. This fire was the scene of a confrontation between firefighters and ranchers who didn’t want the Feds setting backburns on their private land:
“Chandler [rancher] says he rushed to the property and found U.S. Wildland Fire Service crews conducting a burn operation. “They were lighting a fire, and the closest fire was probably four miles to the north,” Chandler said. “So, thousands and thousands of acres between where they were lighting the fire and where the fire was burning“. Washington County Sheriff Matt Thomas was also at the scene.
Chandler says Thomas ordered the crews to stop lighting the fires and eventually threatened to arrest them if they continued. Thomas confirmed to KTVB that he was at the location and that fire crews were on private property. Thomas also said he told those crews in the moment that the actions could be considered third-degree arson under Idaho law”.
It was initially reported that fire crews were pulled from part of the Tartar Fire because they were being harassed and threatened. I suspect that whatever actually went down between ranchers and the Feds at the Tartar Fire may have helped save the Big Grass Donut from intentional burn out. The Big Grass incident teams were being very deferential to the Owyhee ranchers.
Controversy over wildfire suppression tactics is not new. At times, suppression burns have been suspected to be set to produce more wood for salvage logging. FUSEE describes consequences of backburns and burnouts:
Big fires sweeping the sagebrush biome in the northern Great Basin region started alarming biologists in the 1990s-2000s. Above is a Twig Viewer map with the pink Big Grass Fire outlined in the center. It’s encircled by many relatively recent mega-fires. The 2012 Holloway Fire (green color, 448,547 acres) in the SW of the map burned stronghold Sage-grouse habitat. Alarmingly, unburned sage by Holloway is now in the crosshairs of Jindalee lithium mining exploration in the McDermitt Caldera region. Holloway burned NW to within 2 miles of the adjacent large tan area that is the 2012 Long Draw Fire (558.054 acres) also in vital Sage-grouse habitat in the Oregon Canyon Mountains. It also burned NE across Highway 95. The Big Grass Fire started just west of Long Draw, and its perimeter may overlap it a tiny bit. The large tan area north of Big Grass by the OR-ID border is the Soda Fire (279,144 acres). It started on private ranch land on a blue sky day. Causal circumstances were never clearly revealed to the public. There, BLM spent 67 million dollars on rehab – lots of grass, sage seed, and herbicide use. The timing of this funding injection coincided with Sally Jewell’s Sage-grouse non-listing decision.
The east-west tan area in Nevada that extends from the eastern edge of the Santa Rosa Range is the 2018 Martin Fire (431,754 acres). It swept through many leks and across the Owyhee Desert towards Duck Valley. It was started by 4th of July fireworks. The human perpetrator was never caught. That same summer the South Sugarloaf Fire (233,842 acres) burned just to the east, on BLM lands and parts of the Humboldt-Toiyabe Forest Bull Run and Bruneau Mountains and portions of Duck Valley. Much of the mottled brown mass of overlapping fires in the east that extends way north across the Nevada-Idaho line is the 2007 Jarbidge Murphy Fire Complex (652,016 acres). It was actually 6 lightning fires that coalesced. BLM’s Murphy rehab planted even more crested wheat and giant-sized cultivar bunchgrasses for cattle food in lands already full of these grasses, and some sagebrush seed, and of course herbicide use. Then in 2015, Jarbidge BLM finalized a new RMP that said Hey – there’s too much dense grass here so sagebrush can’t grow. Our solution is to increase cows to beat out the grass to maybe get more sage.
The 2026 Oregon Coleman Fire (308,863 acres) is in the northwest. It ran east across the Stinkingwater Mountains from near Crane almost to Dry Creek by Owyhee Reservoir – across old burns and several BLM juniper killing projects. White on the above map doesn’t mean that there’s a huge untapped reservoir of sagebrush and Sage-grouse habitat booming with leks in some of these places. For example, to the west of the Soda Fire, by Succor Creek, much of the landscape is medusahead and cheatgrass. Some places burned in fires too old to be displayed on Twig viewer, where there’s been minimal shrub recovery, and cheatgrass reigns supreme. Or it’s bleak crested wheat seedings where BLM decades ago plowed up. sprayed, railed, burned sage and replaced it with cattle forage grass.
Regarding Big Grass and Sage-grouse: The Oregon area Soldier “PAC” population and adjacent Idaho lands didn’t have a rosy future to begin with, already facing an annual grass deluge in many places. The Big Grass Fire’s last big run down south of the East Fork Owyhee in Idaho burned stronghold Sage-grouse habitat and vital Pygmy Rabbit habitat. It could have turned out a lot worse in Idaho, but major suppression efforts were made all along the eastern fire edge. Sparse low sagebrush may have helped naturally limit spread in some areas near the East Fork.
The Forest Service seizes on wildfires as an excuse to salvage log. BLM has a long history of using wildfires to increase livestock forage grass, string barbed wire, and fatten herbicide corporation profits. I’ll be writing more about all this – weeds, wildlife impacts, huge sums wasted on “treatments” that destroy biodiversity and cause cheatgrass dominance – as we see what emerges from the Burgum//Budd-Falen/Pearce Interior Department brain trust in the aftermath of the 2026 wildfires.
All Hell broke loose when a thunderstorm system passed across eastern Oregon and Washington on July 22. Oregon was hit by 8,537 lightning strikes, bringing an eruption of new blazes on top of 20+ fires already burning. One of these strikes ignited the Big Grass Fire. It quickly became a mega-fire. The burn perimeter area (red on map) is 578,637 acres, mostly in Idaho. I’ve seen no breakdown of how much land has burned outright vs. how much was consumed in firefighting backburns, or in burn out of areas within the perimeter after the wildfire had passed over an area.
Big Grass Fire Watch Duty map.
The fire started in grass west of the Owyhee Wild and Scenic River canyon in Oregon and north of Three Forks. It grew rapidly for two days, at a time when the region was overwhelmed with new starts. It jumped the river canyon and went on a fearsome tear northwest into Idaho up towards South Mountain. News reports the evening of July 25th said the Big Grass Fire covered 90,000 acres in two hours (that’s 140 square miles!), with explosive growth: “That fire has burned 130,000 acres as of 7 p.m. on Saturday night and first sparked on July 23. The fire burned an additional 90,000 acres within two hours and is estimated at 220,000 acres as of 9:30 p.m. Saturday. By Sunday afternoon, the fire has been estimated at 280,000 acres according to the sheriff’s office”.
Public and private land around the western part of BLM’s Mud Flat Scenic Byway in its path near the Oregon-Idaho border south of Jordan Valley had become choked with exotic weedy grasses – unscenic depressing bulbous bluegrass, cheatgrass, and increasingly overrun by medusahead. Western junipers had been incrementally purged across this landscape, and replaced by cheatgrassoline that provided ideal conditions for explosive wind-driven fire growth.
Cut browning junipers off Mud Flat road along the OR-ID border- now within the Big Grass perimeter. Fall 2025.
By the Mud Flat road and OR-ID border now within Big Gras perimeter. I don’t know if this was a wildfire or purposeful burn. Fall 2025.
Big Grass swept NE up South Mountain (through sage, juniper, Douglas fir, mountain shrubs, aspen) and also south and east onto Juniper Mountain – where BLM had spent millions of dollars butchering and burning old growth and mature juniper forest communities for over a decade.
Its final big breakaway effort was a run SE down off Juniper Mountain into and across the East Fork Owyhee River Canyon. It burned upstream in the river canyon area from the South Fork Owyhee confluence over east to Duck Valley, and on south through Priority Sage-grouse and occupied Pygmy Rabbit habitat. It almost reached the Nevada line.
East Fork Owyhee Canyon, Idaho.
Occupied Pygmy Rabbit habitat in the fire’s final path west of Duck Valley.
At an August public meeting, an incident team stated the blaze started in grass. Vegetation was so dry that aspen and willows were readily igniting. The Forest Service should pay attention – as an underlying driver for conifer killing in some Utah projects has been burning off conifers to get more aspen for a “firebreak”. In the conditions that produce mega-fires and consume the big acreages in the West, aspen flame out too.
Spring 2026 Conditions on the Ground
A super-dry nearly no-snow winter was followed by a largely dry spring. When spring rains did come, the storms were timed ideally to spur flammable annual weed growth. In late May, I documented the sudden dense cheatgrass invasion in BOSH-treated areas of the Owyhee Uplands just east of the area soon to be consumed by the Big Grass fire. Many millions of federal dollars and copious state funds had been poured into juniper eradication in the BOSH (Bruneau-Owyhee Sage-grouse Habitat) juniper eradication project. BLM and the University of Idaho Range Department head oversaw this emerging BOSH-caused weed nightmare. Under the guise of “research”, junipers were cut, and piled then burned and jackpot and broadcast burned, destroying native understory grasses. BLM fire managers staff and Pheasants Forever contractors involved in the BOSH relished burning. In a period of a few years, while chronic cattle grazing continued, these “treatments” catapulted dense cheatgrass into critical Owyhee upland Sage-grouse habitat in the Bruneau Field Office.
Meanwhile, in Owyhee Field Office lands in areas now consumed in the Big Grass Fire, BLM had been aggressively trying to eradicate mature and old growth junipers across Juniper Mountain. This started a few years earlier than the BOSH, and continued up through 2025, glomming onto the BOSH project funding bonanza.
Big Grass (pink)- overlaid with various recent BLM deforestation projects. Firefighting teams made a huge effort to keep the fire from burning towards Silver City (old mining town) in the NE, towards Triangle, and east of Deep Creek off the Mud Flat Road, and kept it largely out of the block of dark green colored BOSH treatment areas there. Source: Twig viewer map.
Close up of Juniper Mountain area with BLM’s expensive eradication treatments shown. They became toast in the Big Grass Fire. In the lower right, you can see a faint underlying outline of parts of the 2007 Crutcher Fire. Big Grass ripped through the Crutcher burn (where juniper cover was already mostly gone) in its wind-driven run down to the East Fork Owyhee.
Before BLM spent millions of dollars in a crusade of purposeful desolation, of the land, Juniper Mountain contained a beautiful montane western juniper forest community, with many truly ancient trees, and almost no cheatgrass. Younger trees were in areas of old BLM 1960s era eradication projects. Younger trees present were undergoing natural succession, and re-occupying sites – not encroaching, not invading.
The 1999 BLM Owyhee RMP land use plan had briefly considered ACEC (Area of Critical Environmental Concern) designation for Juniper Mountain areas because of the extraordinary montane western juniper community present. Cattlemen killed that proposal deader than dead. The RMP outcome predictably ended up vilifying the trees. Then in 2014-2016, forest destruction was blessed in EAs for Trout Springs and Pole Creek grazing allotments, through warped “health” assessments and ecosites tailored to justify forest eradication. As is now common in BLM grazing processes, junipers were blamed for land degradation, covering up for cattle impacts.
When salivating BLM fire managers were sicced on areas of Juniper Mountain, they aggressively targeted prime mature and old growth stands – cutting, pile burning, broadcast burning, and conducting vile jackpot burns to take out old trees. They sneakily tried to get away with claiming they weren’t targeting old growth – by not outright cutting down old growth but instead cutting down trees all around the oldest ones, letting the cut trees dry out, then torching the “jackpot” they had purposefully created. The old trees, often with some rot in the center, burned to a husk. They also located dense wood piles right by mature and old growth trees, then ignited the piles killing the old ones.
BLM 2019 prescribed burn area – old growth juniper husk in a new sea of continuous fine flashy cheatgrass fuel. Photo May 2026
BLM has been intent on wiping out any vestige of old growth making the land fit their vegetation modeling lies. They even targeted trees in supposed “fire safe” rocky outcrop sites. In Pole Creek, trees were girdled, or cut to lean precariously into older ones, in “widowmaker” positions.
In bygone days, Owyhee BLM used to concede that Yes, junipers could naturally occur on rocky outcrops. On Juniper Mountain, they aggressively pursued juniper destruction on these outcrops to wipe out old trees. 2016 Pole Creek photo.
Old trees were also girdled – likely in the hopes no one would notice. Always look closely at trees in a landscape mottled with scattered dead junipers – as this is atypical. Look for girdling, and in places like Nevada, inquire if Tebuthiuron herbicide pellets were rained down.
I documented all this with Owyhee BLM. The response? They blamed the contractor cutting crew. How dare I claim that the agency was purposefully targeting old growth junipers for obliteration.
Here’s a Juniper Mountain Pole Creek tree that somehow escaped assassination – you can see a dead cut leaner on the right, and a dead girdled tree on the left. Look at the native understory grass. BLM’s scorched earth burn techniques wipe the native grass out, to the delight of cheatgrass. 2018 photo.
By 2018, cheatgrass and other weeds were invading Juniper Mountain Pole Creek sites BLM had burned in 2015-2016.
In 2019, BLM blindly ignored the flammable weeds already invading its Pole Creek “treatments” and proceeded to torch a large area of old growth. I documented this in photos here. High on the flames and ashes of this big Juniper Mountain jackpot burning escapade in 2019, the fire manager overseeing the forest destruction boasted about playing God:
“We’re hitting the reset button” Okeson said, by which he meant setting huge swaths of juniper forest ablaze and transforming them into sagebrush and grasslands—the preferred milieu of the sage grouse and the cattle rancher. The burn carried a price tag of $1.5 million, which he insisted was a bargain in terms of its ecological benefits”.
Classic settler mentality, crowing about domination of the natural world. Millions of dollars more continued to be spent attacking forests, ultimately generating more cheatgrass. You get awards for doing this kind of thing in BLM. As long as there’s funds, these guys will whack and burn until there’s nothing left but weeds.
Now in 2026, BLM’s “reset to cow food” projects – which were also claimed to be fuels projects – have been consumed in the Big Grass Fire. The resulting cheatgrass that engulfed Juniper Mountain because of the treatments and cattle grazing disturbance makes Big Grass post-fire “recovery” more difficult – for anything other than cheatgrass and Ceanothus. The latter not known to be a favored haunt of Sage-grouse.
What would the Big Grass Fire burn pattern have been here if the forest hadn’t already been hacked and burned to pieces, and the understory increasingly choked with dense cheatgrass that flames in a millisecond? Perhaps little different given the extreme 2026 weather conditions and vagaries of wind – but I sure suspect the burn would have been patchier, with more juniper stands surviving. We’ll never know. And there’s unlikely to be any accurate accounting of effects of back burns and burn out areas with Big Grass.
Agency Big Grass Fire Facebook post on South Mountain work. Look- not all those dense junipers burned.
The effects of suppression efforts on burn patterns, intensity, etc. in these big fires are largely impossible to tease out post-fire. For example, what’s going on in this video – is it a backburn or the fire edge?
May 2026: Cheatgrass-Choked Juniper Mountain BLM Treatment Areas
I had visited Juniper Mountain in May 2026, and was horrified at how much dense cheatgrass now choked BLM’s eradication project areas. It had engulfed large areas where burning had wiped out Idaho fescue and biocrusts, and/or exposed the grass and crusts to easy cattle use.
May 2026. Piles awaiting burning on Juniper Mountain in an area that had suffered 2019 prescribed burning. BLM had even gone back into unburned pockets of areas it had burned in 2019, and then a couple years ago cut down and/or piled surviving trees. Notice burn piles right by remnant older trees in background that had escaped past treatment. Endless manipulation endlessly applied.
Tall dense cheatgrass, scorched soil still not yet vegetated – but awaiting weeds. By July, this oiuld have been crispy dry. Not only had BLM destroyed the old growth, their soil scalding burn techniques killed off the native understory grass.
Wonder how fast the Big Grass fire moved through here?
USWFS Burnout and Backburning: The Big Grass Donut and the Tartar Fire Controversy
The map above shows a close view of a big unburned pocket inside the Big Grass Fire’s northern perimeter. The Incident team called it the Donut. Their spokesman at a public meeting said it was 96,000 acres (150 square miles). The thin pink line in the east is a firebreak put in by firefighters. He also stated they had been considering burning up the Donut to stop potential hot spots busting out. But the ranchers had told the team “No, don’t do that”. So instead, they shifted gears and planned to bring in masticators and broaden the thin firebreak area. This is one of those rare times I agree with ranchers.
This highlights the controversial Federal firefighting penchant for a 100% black landscape inside a fire perimeter. It’s mindboggling that they would have even considered burning that much acreage. The pale green color in the lower center of the map is the remaining unburned area of the North Fork Owyhee Wilderness. The Incident team never mentioned if they considered Wilderness values when they contemplated burning out the Donut, which now contains pretty much the only old growth western juniper community left in Idaho post-Big Grass Fire.
A bit before the decision to not burn out the Donut, controversy had erupted over USWFS firefighting tactics on the Tartar Fire north of Weiser Idaho. The US Federal Wildland Fire Service is Burgum’s new fire empire creation with its clunky acronym confusingly similar to USFWS.
The Tartar Fire burned 158,000 acres, right down to the Snake River and Brownlee Reservoir. Just across the Snake, the Fox Fire was burning in Oregon. The Tartar landscape contained large blocks of private ranch land, and very degraded public land, with much of the area long infested with nearly every sharp-awned flammable annual grass and prickly weed known in the West. It had been burning at a modest rate in the north near the Payette Forest boundary but then the wind shifted, and overnight it flashed south almost to Weiser. This fire was the scene of a confrontation between firefighters and ranchers who didn’t want the Feds setting backburns on their private land:
“Chandler [rancher] says he rushed to the property and found U.S. Wildland Fire Service crews conducting a burn operation. “They were lighting a fire, and the closest fire was probably four miles to the north,” Chandler said. “So, thousands and thousands of acres between where they were lighting the fire and where the fire was burning“. Washington County Sheriff Matt Thomas was also at the scene.
Chandler says Thomas ordered the crews to stop lighting the fires and eventually threatened to arrest them if they continued. Thomas confirmed to KTVB that he was at the location and that fire crews were on private property. Thomas also said he told those crews in the moment that the actions could be considered third-degree arson under Idaho law”.
It was initially reported that fire crews were pulled from part of the Tartar Fire because they were being harassed and threatened. I suspect that whatever actually went down between ranchers and the Feds at the Tartar Fire may have helped save the Big Grass Donut from intentional burn out. The Big Grass incident teams were being very deferential to the Owyhee ranchers.
Controversy over wildfire suppression tactics is not new. At times, suppression burns have been suspected to be set to produce more wood for salvage logging. FUSEE describes consequences of backburns and burnouts:
- “Fighting fire with fire” can significantly increase wildfire size and severity.
- High-intensity, uncontrolled backfires cause high mortality of old-growth trees that often results in post-fire salvage logging.
- Low-intensity burnouts eliminate vital fire refugia, can homogenize landscapes, and reduce the benefits of a natural fire mosaic of mixed-severity fires with intermixed patches of burned and unburned areas.
A Note on Regional Mega-Fires
Big fires sweeping the sagebrush biome in the northern Great Basin region started alarming biologists in the 1990s-2000s. Above is a Twig Viewer map with the pink Big Grass Fire outlined in the center. It’s encircled by many relatively recent mega-fires. The 2012 Holloway Fire (green color, 448,547 acres) in the SW of the map burned stronghold Sage-grouse habitat. Alarmingly, unburned sage by Holloway is now in the crosshairs of Jindalee lithium mining exploration in the McDermitt Caldera region. Holloway burned NW to within 2 miles of the adjacent large tan area that is the 2012 Long Draw Fire (558.054 acres) also in vital Sage-grouse habitat in the Oregon Canyon Mountains. It also burned NE across Highway 95. The Big Grass Fire started just west of Long Draw, and its perimeter may overlap it a tiny bit. The large tan area north of Big Grass by the OR-ID border is the Soda Fire (279,144 acres). It started on private ranch land on a blue sky day. Causal circumstances were never clearly revealed to the public. There, BLM spent 67 million dollars on rehab – lots of grass, sage seed, and herbicide use. The timing of this funding injection coincided with Sally Jewell’s Sage-grouse non-listing decision.
The east-west tan area in Nevada that extends from the eastern edge of the Santa Rosa Range is the 2018 Martin Fire (431,754 acres). It swept through many leks and across the Owyhee Desert towards Duck Valley. It was started by 4th of July fireworks. The human perpetrator was never caught. That same summer the South Sugarloaf Fire (233,842 acres) burned just to the east, on BLM lands and parts of the Humboldt-Toiyabe Forest Bull Run and Bruneau Mountains and portions of Duck Valley. Much of the mottled brown mass of overlapping fires in the east that extends way north across the Nevada-Idaho line is the 2007 Jarbidge Murphy Fire Complex (652,016 acres). It was actually 6 lightning fires that coalesced. BLM’s Murphy rehab planted even more crested wheat and giant-sized cultivar bunchgrasses for cattle food in lands already full of these grasses, and some sagebrush seed, and of course herbicide use. Then in 2015, Jarbidge BLM finalized a new RMP that said Hey – there’s too much dense grass here so sagebrush can’t grow. Our solution is to increase cows to beat out the grass to maybe get more sage.
The 2026 Oregon Coleman Fire (308,863 acres) is in the northwest. It ran east across the Stinkingwater Mountains from near Crane almost to Dry Creek by Owyhee Reservoir – across old burns and several BLM juniper killing projects. White on the above map doesn’t mean that there’s a huge untapped reservoir of sagebrush and Sage-grouse habitat booming with leks in some of these places. For example, to the west of the Soda Fire, by Succor Creek, much of the landscape is medusahead and cheatgrass. Some places burned in fires too old to be displayed on Twig viewer, where there’s been minimal shrub recovery, and cheatgrass reigns supreme. Or it’s bleak crested wheat seedings where BLM decades ago plowed up. sprayed, railed, burned sage and replaced it with cattle forage grass.
Regarding Big Grass and Sage-grouse: The Oregon area Soldier “PAC” population and adjacent Idaho lands didn’t have a rosy future to begin with, already facing an annual grass deluge in many places. The Big Grass Fire’s last big run down south of the East Fork Owyhee in Idaho burned stronghold Sage-grouse habitat and vital Pygmy Rabbit habitat. It could have turned out a lot worse in Idaho, but major suppression efforts were made all along the eastern fire edge. Sparse low sagebrush may have helped naturally limit spread in some areas near the East Fork.
The Forest Service seizes on wildfires as an excuse to salvage log. BLM has a long history of using wildfires to increase livestock forage grass, string barbed wire, and fatten herbicide corporation profits. I’ll be writing more about all this – weeds, wildlife impacts, huge sums wasted on “treatments” that destroy biodiversity and cause cheatgrass dominance – as we see what emerges from the Burgum//Budd-Falen/Pearce Interior Department brain trust in the aftermath of the 2026 wildfires.