So basically the whole Southern Interior ranch country is a patchwork of wildfires. This is grass and pine rangeland along river vallies and benches separated by quite steep mountains. Some small towns and suburbs of smaller cities are on evacuation alert or order, and we’ve lost a couple of small towns.
For the past month, folks have been evacuating horses within the region, but now many of those evacuation sites are on alert or order. People are working hard to get horses and livestock down to the Coast/Vancouver area but as of today the two main highways out are closed, one by fire and one by a rock slide which I’m sure is fire triggered.
People are working hard to get riding horses out but there’s a big population of feral horses and also free range beef cattle that can’t be moved.
The fires move in unpredictable ways, sometimes skipping ahead or leaving patches unburned.
This has been an insanely catastrophic fire season, and of course not really news in the US which has had a number of years like that.
I have been learning to love the grassland rangeland for horse camping, and had been hoping to branch out and see more of it this summer. Now every place I had in mind is either on alert, order, or actually burned to the ground.
I live in NW MT quite close to the border so I completely relate to the basic horror of it. I live in the trees now but have lived in the more open areas and seen neighbors lose pasture, livestock, homes… all pushed by unseasonable winds and drought. As I sit here ashes are falling in our town today, pushed from fires both near and far. Places we used to go in the mountains are burned up and remain fairly dangerous for years with falling trees and erosion, fences burn up, water quality goes down, the price of hay goes up up up and worse of all, stock and buildings are lost. Last year at a MT fire people were basically chasing their horses and cows down the highways with trucks and horseback just trying to get them out of the way of the fires blowing up right behind them. Our horses stay at a pasture on the edge of our small town and I live on the local pages and updates in case something pops up by them. With wind and storms that bring more lightening than rain it can happen any minute, not to mention people. We had a series of spot fires show up on the side of the highway here and dragging trailer chains were the suspect. One of my favorite TWH breeders in WA has a fire in her back yard and is again evacuating for the second time this year.