The 105,000-acre Canyon Creek Complex fire south of John Day has burned a massive swath through grazing allotments in the Malheur National Forest, leaving ranchers worried about how they will find enough grazing land and hay to make it through the fast-approaching fall and winter. It’s the main concern of ranchers around the West who are reeling from wildfires. “It’s burned right through the heart of quite a few allotments,” said Seneca rancher Alec Oliver, president of the Grant County Stockgrowers. The fire — the largest in Oregon this year — tore through the Canyon Creek area, where it burned at least 43 homes and blackened grazing land. “A lot of hay was lost up through that area,” Oliver said. “There are a lot of (grazing) permittees up there and … a lot of summer ground was lost this year. (They) are going to have to find somewhere else to go next year.” As large wildfires become more the norm in Western states, ranchers who are forced to watch their livelihoods go up in smoke argue that mismanagement of federal and state lands is an underlying cause and that it’s time for government policies to change. A little over 2.8 million acres have burned in 122 fires in Oregon, Washington state, Idaho and California this season, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. Fuel loads add up At the Haeberle Ranch, between the towns of Okanogan and Conconully in north central Washington state, Rod Haeberle, 66, and his daughter, Nicole Kuchenbuch, 36, and son-in-law Casey Kuchenbuch, 36, voiced concerns about “mismanagement” of government lands. Their comments mirrored those of ranchers in southeastern Oregon after the massive 582,313-acre Long Draw and 430,000-acre Holloway fires of 2012. “These fires are not a surprise for those of us who live and work in eastern Washington. We’ve been warning about the potential disastrous effects of federal and state management policies for many years,” said Nicole Kuchenbuch. Agencies have allowed forests to become overgrown and unhealthy, consumed by underbrush that’s fuel for fires, she said. “Agencies tell us to keep our cattle out of creek bottoms, but there’s no grass elsewhere because they don’t thin forests,” she said. Sod was so thick in Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife grasslands from 20 years of no cattle grazing that it took bulldozers two and three passes to cut fire lines to soil, she said, adding that sod can be a fuel that’s almost impossible for firefighters to extinguish. While ranchers have lobbied for change, nothing happens because of the political strength of environmentalists and the Endangered Species Act, the Kuchenbuchs said. Haeberle calls them “asphalites — born on asphalt, raised on concrete and living in a world of plastic flowers.” Stark difference About 370 miles to the south, near John Day, retired U.S. Bureau of Land Management forester Bob Vidourek, pointed out the difference in the way federal forests were formerly managed and how they are managed today. He oversaw projects from 2003 to 2007 that thinned some of the 2,500 acres of BLM land that abuts U.S. Forest Service and private land on Little Creek Mountain. The projects included a timber sale, thinning stands and clearing out a large amount of slash. On Aug. 28, the Canyon Creek fire roared through Forest Service land and crested Little Creek Mountain. Vidourek’s home was put on a Level 3 “leave immediately” evacuation order but he wasn’t worried. The BLM land that had been thinned and cleaned up several years earlier was separating the blaze from his home. “I was never really worried,” he said. “I knew if it got into that stand, it wouldn’t burn too hot.” The fire did burn some of the BLM land but slowed considerably and stopped 1,000 feet from Vidourek’s house. Vidourek said he faced many hurdles when he tried to get the forest management projects going, but was eventually able to overcome them. “I’m confident that the work we did probably saved some of these houses,” he said, pointing to other nearby homes. The fire “killed everything on the other side of the mountain. I’m confident the work we did slowed the fire down.”
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