Exhausted after days on the fire line, sixth-generation Jordan Valley, Ore., rancher Silas Skinner says the Big Grass Fire is unlike anything he’s ever faced. With approximately 301,000 acres burned, only about 7%, containment, the wildfire has jumped the Owyhee River, crossed into Idaho and is now burning in all directions. The wildfire that started July 23 has torn across the high desert of eastern Oregon and into Idaho.
Skinner, who is also president of the Jordan Valley Rangeland Fire Protection Association (RFPA), summarizes the fire as “Extremely devastating. You got all the acres of ground that’s burned, plus the livestock.”
For ranchers in this region, the Big Grass Fire is not a news clip on a national broadcast — it’s a daily, grinding reality that is reshaping their herds, their grass base and their future.
Fire With No Respect for Boundaries
The wildfire started on the Oregon desert but hasn’t stayed there. It jumped the Owyhee River — Skinner calls it “a small Grand Canyon” — and pushed into Idaho, where it’s now burning in forested, roadless terrain that’s far harder to attack than open rangeland.
“It kind of left the desert, but it broke loose yesterday again out on the desert,” Skinner explains. “So it’s just kind of burning in all directions.”
Extreme drought has turned normal firebreaks into fuel. Skinner described embers throwing spot fires a half-mile ahead of the main front, and fire behavior he’s never witnessed in his life on the ranch.
“It spots out in front of us a quarter, half mile out in front, just from blowing ash or something, and then away it goes again,” he says. “It’s something like I’ve never seen — jackrabbits catching on fire, running across the fire line, and starting the other fire on the other side.”
A Volunteer Force Built for This Exact Moment
With no houses lost so far but ranch infrastructure and rangeland burning, the firefighting has fallen largely to locals. Skinner’s RFPA, formed in 2007, trains around 100 ranchers and hired hands annually and operates roughly 15 converted military fire rigs — six-wheel-drive Army surplus trucks capable of reaching fire in rough, roadless country.
“It’s been our local RFPA — it’s just a neighbor helping neighbors,” Skinner says. Rangeland Fire Protection Associations trace back to Oregon’s foundational legislation passed in the 1960s, giving ranchers legal standing to organize and fight fire on their own ground.
Outside help has been slow to arrive. Oregon is fighting roughly three dozen fires statewide, Skinner says, and Idaho isn’t far behind, which has stretched aircraft and personnel thin. That competition for resources has left ranchers on the front lines feeling largely on their own — especially when it comes to air support, a critical tool in steep canyons and remote desert.
“We can’t get any air support,” Skinner says. “And as rural as we are, and as rough as the ground is, a lot of canyons, a lot of deep draws, mountains, it’s, you know, without air it’s pretty hard to stop something like this.”
That began to change on Tuesday, when a California-based incident management team took command, and the fire was elevated to a higher priority — a shift Skinner says should bring more resources to the ground.
A Regional Crisis, Not an Isolated One
What makes this fire especially concerning for producers is where — and how — it’s burning. Drought is the underlying driver. Skinner describes “a terrible drought” year, with little irrigation water and dried-out meadows that became perfect fuel.
The Big Grass Fire is one piece of a much larger picture across eastern Oregon. Tim Deboodt, a rancher in central Oregon, described three separate fires that combined overnight into a single complex now totaling more than 100,000 acres, burning primarily through forestland with impacts that will stretch “for years and years to come.”
Deboodt’s operation has sat under a Level 1 evacuation notice for a week, even though the fire has so far tracked east rather than south toward his place. He says evacuation orders are shifting “on almost an hourly basis” as fire behavior changes.
“All over eastern Oregon” is how Deboodt describes the reach of the impact, citing communities including Sisters, Black Butte Ranch, Terrebonne and Chinook, alongside rural home sites and large ranching operations.
We’ve had ranchers lose everything. I mean, everything. It’s so hard to drive by their place, and the whole place is burned, plumb up — cows, livestock, equipment, everything.
The Toll on Cattle
For producers, the fire’s cost is measured in more than acres. Skinner describes one rancher who rushed to move 90 head out of a burning field — 65 of them died in the fire, and the rest suffered burns.
Beyond the immediate deaths, the fire is stripping away the forage base that sustains cow herds in this country.
“There’s thousands and thousands of cows that are going to be displaced, if nothing else, for years because of the grass,” Skinner summarizes.
The Owyhee Canyonlands, long a center of debates over “protection” and grazing, have been hit hard.
“One thing I have said several times is the Owyhee Canyonlands, they want to protect them and this is not protecting them,” Skinner says. “I mean, the best thing we can do is graze this ground because now everything’s just [burned up] —it just looks like the moon.”
“This Is Our Lives”
Both ranchers point to a disconnect between the scale of the disaster and the national attention it’s receiving. Skinner says he understands resources naturally flow toward populated areas also affected by fire, like central Oregon, but the toll on rural operations is no less real.
“I get it, you know, taxpayers, politicians want to be there — but this is our lives,” he stresses.
Community support has been strong on the ground, Skinner adds, with donations of food and supplies pouring in faster than local crews can use them. He says monetary donations to the RFPA remain welcome, even as physical donations have outpaced need.
While containment remains low, fire crews are working to establish lines, and producers across the region are bracing for continued spread — and a recovery that, for both grass and cattle, will likely take years.
