Ranchers face loss of livestock, livelihoods in Washington fires

The burned carcasses blend into the scorched landscape, just more black and ash among the haunting outline of trees. “There she is,” rancher Doug Grumbach says, pointing up the steep slope near his ranch. “It looks like she was trying to run and froze in that mode.” The cow is now obvious: A perfectly shaped head, a body covered in skin that’s become cured leather – taut and solid like a drumhead. She’s upright, wedged between two burned trees, ribs exposed, a flurry of maggots working furiously. Her calf lies in a heap nearby. Grumbach is silent. He rubs his jaw and points to another carcass farther up the hill on the grazing land in the Colville National Forest, just south of the Canadian border. The land recently burned in the Stickpin fire. Grumbach, like cattle ranchers across fire-ravaged north-central Washington, isn’t sure of his total losses. The devastation includes not only body counts but hundreds of miles of fence, grazing land and water sources on his family’s fourth-generation ranch...more