In a cavernous garage in rural southeastern Oregon earlier this month, rancher Tom Sharp watched a mechanic work on a military surplus Humvee — painted red and retrofitted to fight wildfires.
It was damaged fighting the late-July, lightning-caused Second Flat Fire.
“What we didn't realize initially was that we had also … ripped out from its compression fitting one of the automatic transmission hydraulic lines,” Sharp explained. “And we lost all of our transmission fluid somewhere in the sage.”
The fire burned more than 100,000 acres of range and pine in late July. He and his son were able to limp the vehicle to the Shoshone Engine Xchange in nearby Hines.
With the transmission out of service, “we had to absolutely be sure that there wasn't going to be a situation [in which] we had to back up,” he said. “We eventually brought it into the repair shop in forward gear to where it sits today.”
Sharp heads up the North Harney Rangeland Fire Protection Association, one of a number of so-called RFPAs in Oregon and other neighboring states. They’re staffed by volunteer firefighters — mostly ranchers — who use surplus government gear and vehicles, like the Humvee.
“We extend the capacity — the resource capacity and the effectiveness — of first response to the state and federal government wildland fire agencies,” Sharp explained.
That’s especially important during busy fire seasons like 2026.
“It's important to recognize that in this part of the country, certainly here in eastern Oregon, we are an agricultural based economy: ranching and farming, livestock grazing,” Sharp said. “When we lose our rangelands to wildfire, we're losing natural resources that support the agricultural industry here.”
East of the Harney County seat of Burns, the Coleman Creek Fire burned some 313,000 acres, blackening 40 miles of Highway 20’s southern edge. Research has shown that the Oregon-Idaho-Nevada border is home to one of the largest concentrations of the country’s fastest-moving fires.
Driven by fires like the Second Flat, Oregonians have had a record season, with nearly 2.4 million acres burned. The previous state record was 1.9 million acres, set in 2024.
The state alone has accounted for just over one-quarter of the 9 million acres burned nationwide. That’s more than any other year — at this time — in at least a decade.
As large as the acreage figure is, National Interagency Fire Center meteorologist Jim Wallmann said well-timed precipitation tempered the season in some places, like the mountains of Idaho and Montana, and brought an earlier slowdown than initially expected.
“It was definitely a very busy season overall, especially in the four-week period from mid-July to mid-August,” he said, adding that that period was “as busy as I've seen it in my five years here.”
2026 was also one of the worst smoke years in decades, and saw hundreds of homes destroyed in several states.
In Colorado, the Aspen Acres Fire was one of the state’s largest ever, razing hundreds of homes. In Washington, 833 homes burned in Spokane in early August, totaling more than $1 billion in losses — the state’s costliest wildfire disaster, according to reporting in the Spokesman-Review. Even outside the West, Georgia saw record home losses.
‘We were just outnumbered’
In Nevada, Reno and surrounding Washoe County were under siege in August.
Whipping winds bent flames flat and blinded a fire engine crew with smoke in a shaky, nighttime video of the Bug Fire shared by a local firefighters union on social media.
Richard Edwards, chief of the Truckee Meadows Fire Protection District, described the fire behavior he saw this summer as “surreal.”
From North Virginia Street the afternoon of Aug. 22, he watched the Hawk Fire barrel downslope toward his crews.
“The 40 or 50 mph winds that we had were increased as that fire came off the ridge line. And it came across like a wall,” he recounted. “So we have an area of probably six, seven miles of wildland-urban interface that we're now trying to protect with somewhere around 25 or 30 fire engines and hundreds of homes. And we were just outnumbered.”
“There's not enough firefighters,” he added. “There's not enough fire apparatus to actually protect each and every one of these homes.”
The Hawk ultimately destroyed 47 homes — the most ever in a Nevada wildfire — and fatally injured an elderly woman.
Edwards said it illustrated “the challenge of not having enough resources quick enough to make the stand as needed.”
The country was at its highest preparedness level in August, meaning that there was stiff competition for limited national resources like aircraft and hand crews. The chief said that waits to fill orders were as long as 72 hours.
“The Bug, Stallion, Hawk and other fires in the Reno area demonstrated how quickly wildfire conditions can escalate and how critical timely access to firefighting resources is to local communities and responding organizations,” a U.S. Wildland Fire Service spokesperson said in response to a request for comment.
“During Preparedness Level 5, when extensive wildfire activity creates heavy demand on firefighting resources nationwide, available resources may need to travel from other regions, and competing demands can affect response times.”
The agency said it recognizes “the challenges this creates” for local first responders fighting rapidly spreading blazes, and works with its “interagency partners to address competing needs and coordinate the deployment of available resources based on incident conditions and national priorities.”
Edwards said his community is “fatigued.”
“For the better part of August, a lot of the community in Washoe County experienced wildfire: the Bug Fire led right to Fred Fire, which led to the Stallion — a lot of evacuations with that. More evacuations even two weeks later with the Hawk fire — we had over 46,000 people evacuated at one time.”
Some even had to evacuate twice, according to the chief.
A community challenge
For Edwards, the brutal summer further underscored the importance of preparing before fires start with measures like clearing flammable material near structures and home hardening. He’s also worried that homeowners insurance providers may drop customers in the wake of the summer’s destruction, a growing worry across the West.
“It is a community challenge, and as the environment and the weather continues to change, those risks are going to continue to be present and increase,” he said. “It's trying to educate the community as a whole to the risk.”
“And there's no better time than right now,” he added. “We've lived it.”
Solutions were also on the mind of Sharp, of the North Harney RFPA, as he surveyed the Second Flat’s burn scar from a high point.
“For the time being, we need to be as good as we can … so that we can do as good as we can in the suppression of the fire that might be occurring today,” he said. “But longer term, we hope that management for a healthy ecosystem and habitats across these lands that are resistant to fires — longer term, we think that that is also the goal that we need to be working towards.”
Ready for next summer
Over at the Shoshone Engine XChange with the worse-for-wear Humvee, Sharp asked co-owner Wyatt Lasich, “is there something we can do to protect that line?”
“Yeah, I can take a look at it to see if I could probably reroute it,” Lasich responded.
Wedged under the massive vehicle, he got the repaired transmission back in place: “the easiest part, I would say, unfortunately.”
Asked for a prognosis, Lasich said he was “feeling good.”
“I’m ready to have it out of my hair,” he said. “I'm sure [Sharp’s] eager to have it back.”
A season of loss
Firefighters will also carry the hurt of this summer for years.
As the fire season peaked in early August, fellow firefighters took turns ringing a bell at a memorial for Nathan Matthews. The three tolls symbolized the end of his duties.
He was one of two seriously injured on a June 27 fire near the Colorado-Utah border. Three of his colleagues died that day, and Matthews succumbed to his injuries a month later.
“As we remember Nate, I want to also take a moment to recognize Emily Barker, Sydney Watson, and Nick Hutcherson,” U.S. Wildland Fire Service Chief Brian Fennessy told the gathered friends, family and colleagues.
“Together with Nate, their four lives were woven together through service, friendship, and courage. Their lives made a difference.”
Their fireline deaths were four of the 20 officially logged so far this season, above the 10-year average of 15.5.
In August, Reuters reported that incidents in which firefighters are trapped by flames — like Matthews and his colleagues — were at record highs. A Mountain West News Bureau analysis of federal Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center data showed that the seven so-called entrapment deaths so far this season account for more than half of all such fireline deaths since 2020.
Former U.S. Forest Service Chief Vicki Christiansen, who retired in 2021, pointed to aggressive agency mandates to quickly extinguish fires as a possible factor at play during this dangerous season.
“It comes down to risk,” she said during a recent virtual panel organized by the Wilderness Society, an advocacy group. “Assessing risk with the outcomes we're trying to achieve, right? And so this ‘aggressive suppression at all costs’ is, to me, a part of the leadership intent that truly needs to be revisited.”
“We're going backwards, not forwards, on how we manage risk,” she added.
In response to the criticisms, Christiansen’s former agency said that “aggressive initial attack remains the most effective way to prevent fires from escalating into long-duration, high-complexity incidents that heighten risk to responders.”
While acknowledging the “inherent risks” of wildland fire, the Forest Service said “our suppression posture never compromises field safety standards.”
At Matthew’s Aug. 1 memorial, Fennessy said that “wildland firefighters are a different breed. They're strong, resilient, courageous, and they're determined. Their work demands long days, heavy burdens, and quiet acts of bravery.”
“And they work in increasingly challenging conditions over the long days, weeks and months of any fire season,” he added.
“Or what we know now as a fire year.”
This story was produced by the Mountain West News Bureau, a collaboration between Boise State Public Radio, Wyoming Public Media, Nevada Public Radio, KUNR in Nevada, KUNC in Northern Colorado, KANW in New Mexico, Colorado Public Radio and KJZZ in Arizona as well as NPR, with support from affiliate newsrooms across the region. Funding for the Mountain West News Bureau is provided in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Eric and Wendy Schmidt.
