After a lifetime working Nevada ranches, Jon Griggs figures he’s seen everything high desert sagebrush country can throw at a cowboy. The manager of Maggie Creek Ranch since 1998 has seen the Humboldt River high enough to strand half the ranch for a month and low enough to cross without getting wet ankles.
But even amid extremes of triple-digit summer days, subzero winter nights, drought, rain, fire and floods, there’s one day that stops Griggs in his tracks.
It’s July 18, 2007, the day the Marge Fire torched nearly 9,000 acres as it raced directly toward ranch headquarters west of Elko.
“I don’t like to think about that day,” said Griggs, who still gets emotional when he describes it. “It was a tough one.”
Griggs isn’t the only person feeling overwhelmed by the supercharged wildfires that are remaking the Great Basin landscape. The so-called sagebrush sea that stretches from Wyoming to California is literally going up in smoke. The mix of shrubs and native bunch grasses that is home to 350 species of wildlife, from sage grouse to mule deer and migratory birds, has lost about half of the 247 million acres it once covered. Although forest fires in mountain communities in California and beyond capture more headlines, rangeland fires in the Great Basin are burning much greater swaths of the West.
The fallout from such widespread burning cuts across nearly every aspect of rural communities, from their economies to their environments to residents’ overall moods.
Burned areas are unavailable for cattle grazing, the vegetation loss disrupts mule deer migrations and hinders hunting, and during summer the prospect of huge fires breaking out at any moment hangs over communities like smoke in the air. “People are talking about moving away from Elko,” said Caleb McAdoo, a supervising habitat biologist for the Nevada Department of Wildlife whose family has been in the Elko area since 1972. “They talk about seasonal depression in Alaska with the sun. But in Nevada it is smoky days.”...
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