By admin 
The summer of 2026 has been one of extraordinary fires. In Europe, they have burned hundreds of thousands of acres in France and Spain and destroyed homes across England; they killed 13 people in Spain last month, and an elderly couple in Greece this weekend. In Canada, fires have consumed an expanse of forestland larger than Belgium—which is also battling its biggest recorded wildfire. In the United States, about 7.2 million acres have burned, the largest year-to-date area in the past decade and nearly double what it was at this time last year, according to data from the National Interagency Coordination Center. Allison Rayburn, a program coordinator for the Oregon Department of Forestry, told me that in the eastern part of the state, “you can barely see the sun” through the smoke: “It’s just devastation, and miles and miles and miles of blackened landscapes.”
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In Europe, many of the fires have threatened populated areas, but in the U.S., much of the area burning in the West has been rural. Near the Oregon town of Jordan Valley, the Big Grass Fire has been burning since July 23 and is among the largest fires in the state’s modern history; toward the end of last month, it hopped a canyon and crossed the border to Idaho, where the smoke from this and other fires made the air quality the worst in the country. The complex of fires in Spokane, Washington, flattened entire neighborhoods; three other wildfires 10 times its size are burning elsewhere in the state.
If 2025 was a year of urban fire that destroyed large swaths of Los Angeles, 2026 is a year of rural fire, Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources’ research unit, told me. “This is an extraordinary fire season in the American West,” Swain said. “It just hasn’t been in California”—which usually accounts for much of the nation’s fire activity and its media attention.
Many of the biggest fires this year started because of back-to-back lightning strikes and have grown because of extreme heat, drought, and dry fuel left behind after an unusually warm winter. They’ve destroyed grazing land and crops, killed livestock, and incinerated fruit that was just shy of harvest. Many of the ranchers and government employees I spoke with compared 2026 to Oregon’s devastating fire season two years ago, when 1.9 million acres burned across the state; already this year, residents have lost hundreds of thousands more acres than that. When I spoke with Dave Upthegrove, Washington’s commissioner of public lands, he was driving from the fires in Spokane to one near Walla Walla that was threatening the town’s water supply; the week before, he’d visited the burn area of the 150,000-acre Sinlahekin Fire. Firefighters there had used a road as a fire line, he said, and on one side of it, all was flat and black. On the other side, crops were wilting from the fire’s heat.
Because so many of the fires this year are burning on rugged terrain without many roads, the elite firefighters who rappel from helicopters and hike through miles of forest to reach a fire line have been in high demand, Upthegrove said. But these hotshot crews cannot hit every fire, and in many cases, ranchers are the first to get there. Silas Skinner, a sixth-generation cattle rancher, told me that when the Big Grass Fire broke out, three government trucks were there; the rest were rigs from the Jordan Valley Rangeland Fire Protection Association. RFPAs—about 40 of which are spread across Oregon, Idaho, and Nevada—are independent, volunteer firefighting nonprofits composed of local ranchers and farmers who are trained by state and federal agencies to help fill the firefighting gap in rural areas. Their equipment comes largely from military surplus—literally, in some cases, bulldozers that didn’t get sent to Vietnam, “and some that did,” Rayburn, who is one of the RFPAs’ main contacts in the Oregon government, said. In the weeks since lightning struck and started the fire, Skinner and about 100 other volunteers have been using military trucks, outfitted with water tanks and sprayers, to help government agencies fight the Big Grass Fire. It is currently burning an expanse of sagebrush and juniper trees nearly the size of Luxembourg.
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Federal agencies have also been sending in thousands of employees to fight the fires. But with so many fires burning simultaneously, government resources have been stretched thin and diverted to those in more populated places such as Spokane. The volunteer firefighters, then, have taken on more of a share of the work than they have in the past, they told me. (Both the Forest Service and Wildland Fire Service said that it’s standard for RFPAs to take on more work during a fire season this active.) When I spoke with Morgan Kromm, a rancher and the secretary of the RFPA in Crane, Oregon, and Tom Doman, the association’s chairman, they’d just come off a 10-day stretch of back-to-back firefighting. They told me they’d been working in 36-hour shifts, and when I asked where they’d catch naps during those stretches—in their trucks?—Doman clarified: “We were not sleeping.” The Crane RFPA has already handled 18 fires this year—normally the total they’d have seen by about October—and “we still have 90 more days of fire season,” Doman said.
Fire seasons vary by region, but in general, they have been getting longer and less predictable. Both RFPAs and state officials told me that this has made it difficult to get resources when and where they’re needed. Typically, Oregon enters into mutual-aid agreements with states in the Southwest and along the East Coast that have different fire seasons and can help one another out. But the whole country has been so dry that “they’re busy with their own fires,” Michael Curran, the chief of fire protection for the Oregon Department of Forestry, told me. RFPAs provide mutual aid to one another too, while members also try to manage their own ranches and farms alongside firefighting. “Yesterday, we were moving cows, and the fire was burning right above us,” Skinner said. “So everybody kind of had an eyeball on it.”
Some of his grazing land has already burned. Other ranchers have found that their cattle died in the fire. In Jordan Valley, community members have been donating hay to those whose land burned, so their cattle will have something to eat. Rayburn told me that since that terrible 2024 fire season, she has watched landowners “for two years rebuilding fences and reestablishing water holes and reestablishing their cattle herds.” Now the fires are burning those same places—land where families have lived for generations, and land upon which their livelihoods still depend.