The Big Grass Fire has burned nearly 590,000 acres in prime upland and mule deer habitat across Oregon and Idaho’s Owyhee Watershed and is now the largest wildfire in modern Oregon history. Thankfully, it appears to have lost steam with just a few remaining hot spots. The fire has lasted weeks and forced thousands of evacuations in Pleasant Valley, South Mountain, and Jordan Valley, burning at least four homes. The Jordan Valley Rangeland Fire Protection Association, a crew of local ranchers who volunteer to fight fire on their own ground, has been running trucks around the clock for weeks and is now running low on fuel. Statewide, more than 2.5 million acres have burned this season, and the cold fall nights are still two months away. 

I have hunted sage grouse and chukar in this country. I have watched the sun break over the Owyhee rim with my dog running ahead.  I know what is riding on the weeks and months ahead. As the Oregon field representative for the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, I have listened to ranchers, hunters, and land managers all ask for the same thing again and again: certainty about how this place will be managed in the years to come. 

The landscape evolved with fire, but not like this 

Fire has always had a place in the West, and the sagebrush country in the northern Great Basin is no different. Historically, it burned on cycles measured in centuries, the spread of flames limited by the patchy fuel of its bunchgrass landscape. What has changed is not the fire, but what fuels it.  Cheatgrass and medusahead, invasive annual grasses native to Europe and Asia, arrived in the late 1800s in shipments of contaminated grain and quickly gained a foothold in the American West. 

The challenge with these non-native annual grasses is that they germinate quickly and abundantly to fill in the bare soil and forb covered spaces between native sagebrush and bunchgrass. These annual grasses have much finer and shallower root depths than native perennial bunchgrasses. They dry out weeks earlier than the cold weather bunchgrasses of the northern Great Basin. And now these invasives cover millions of acres of the Great Basin.Adding to these woes is the fact that land invaded by cheatgrass is roughly twice as likely to burn as native rangeland.  

Every fire that burns on this landscape leaves behind widened interstitial spaces and more bare ground, which is primed for the expansion of invasive annual grasses, setting the stage for the next blaze to move even faster. This cycle has been building for decades, but this summer it is compounding at a scale that portends a bleak future for habitat and the species and hunters that rely on it. 

The new fire cycle is having outsized impacts 

What burns is only part of the story. The larger changing patterns of weather and climate are changing what this country can grow. Perennial bunchgrasses are working capital for grazers and hunters. Their roots go deep into the soil, which keeps them green and less likely to burn well into summer. Cheatgrass cures to tinder dryness within a few weeks, and once its awns harden, it goes from acceptable forage to a liability for grazing animals. The hardened seeds can stick in an animal’s eyes and mouth, causing lasting injury. Medusa head is even worse, so silica-rich it is nearly inedible.

The animals tell the same story. Mule deer and cattle alike require a minimum quality of forage. This is something native perennials readily provide, while invasive annual grasses offer considerably less—outside a brief window in early spring they are neither nutritious nor easy to digest— and they cure out by early summer, leaving deer short of feed in late summer and fall, exactly when they are needing to put on weight to survive the winter months. Researchers at the University of Wyoming tracked 115 GPS-collared mule deer and found that deer begin steering clear of an area once invasive annual grasses reached 13 percent coverage, and strongly avoid it past 20 percent. Left unchecked in that study area, those grasses could erase nearly two-thirds of high-quality mule deer habitat within 20 years. The pattern holds for birds too; Sage grouse across the Great Basin have been projected to decline 57 percent by 2044 if the fire and invasive grass cycle runs on unchanged. 

This nutritional productivity is measurable.  The USDA’s Rangeland Analysis Platform shows Malheur and Harney counties together produced roughly 540 million pounds less herbaceous growth than their ten-year average through midsummer. This year, production over the last two weeks of July is down 28 percent in Malheur County and nearly 25 percent in Harney County. A dry summer explains some of that, but the longer trend is even clearer. Across Bureau of Land Management rangelands from 1991 to 2020, annual grasses and forbs increased while perennial cover declined, with annuals now out-producing perennials on some 52 million acres. Feed that cures in July is feed that nobody grazes in September, and becomes fine fire fuel weeks ahead of schedule, increasing the probability of fire’s return. 

Holding the line 

Restoring burned rangeland is a race against the calendar. Holding back invasive annual grasses requires the deployment of seed and pre-emergent herbicides in a tight window before winter precipitation gives cheatgrass and medusahead their headstart. This leaves agencies only a few months to assess the burn, line up funding, contract crews and aircraft, and get seeds and herbicides on the ground. On top of all this, the success of the native species reseeding lies in the hands of nature bringing fall rains for the seeds to successfully germinate. 

Bleak as this may seem, there is reason for hope in the form of new and old chemical applications. Imazapic, sold as Plateau, has been the standard pre-emergent treatment for years, though its hold on annual grasses tends to fade within the first year or two as the seed bank reestablishes. A newer option, indaziflam, sold as Rejuvra, targets that seed bank directly and has shown control lasting three to four years in field trials across the region, without harming existing native shrubs or established perennial grasses. Camera-trap research in Colorado found mule deer spending more time on ground treated with Rejuvra, where native shrubs like antelope bitterbrush rebounded once the annual grasses were knocked back. Applied at scale and combined with reseeding efforts, these tools could change the trajectory of this post-fire landscape. Therein lies the rub: getting funding, staffing, and gathering native seeds at a scale to match the size of the fires burning across the West from agencies whose workforces are stretched thin. 

There is another reason for optimism. We are looking at this country differently. Researchers at Oregon State University, the Agricultural Research Service, The Nature Conservancy, and state and federal wildlife agencies have built a framework that sorts this landscape by the three drivers that actually move the needle for local residents:  invasive annual grasses, conifer encroachment, and wildfire. This tool works across public and private lines, giving people a common picture. A rancher, a BLM range specialist, a Tribal biologist, and a bird hunter can stand on the same rim, agree on what they are looking at and which direction it is trending, and get straight to the question of what to do about it. In places where trust is earned slowly, that is as good as gold. 

None of this is happening in a vacuum. Ranchers, Tribes, hunters and anglers, and local leaders in Malheur County have spent more than six years building the Malheur Community Empowerment for the Owyhee Act, legislation that would deliver adaptive rangeland management, restoration funding opportunities, and long-term management certainty for this landscape. The Senate passed it by unanimous consent in December 2024, only to see it expire without a House vote before the session of Congress adjourned. It is back in this current Congress as S. 1942, waiting to be considered by the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Everyone who helped build that bill has been asking for the same thing since 2019: a durable framework for managing this country so the community is not left guessing at what comes next every time the sky turns orange. 

The coalition of ranchers, Tribes, hunters, and anglers that built this legislation is still at the table – or at least they will be when this fire season ends. And the bill that would make certainty the law of the land, rather than a hope renewed every Congress, is further along than it has ever been. Opportunity and urgency rarely show up in the Owyhee in the same season. This year, they have. 

If you hunt, fish, or simply believe this country is worth getting right, now is the time to say so. Learn more about TRCP’s work in the Owyhee, and let your members of Congress know that the Owyhee’s ranchers, Tribes, and hunters and anglers have waited long enough.