AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
The American West is having a brutal wildfire season this summer. More than 8 million acres have burned, the most in more than a decade. Seven wildland firefighters have died, and hundreds of homes have burned. Veteran NPR wildfire correspondent Kirk Siegler sent us this reporter's notebook.
KIRK SIEGLER, BYLINE: Drive through the scorching hot river basins of Eastern Oregon and Washington, and it's staggering just how much land is burned. It's like around every corner there's a new wildfire. Blackened range land unfolds for miles, pockmarked by little patches of grass that are randomly spared, their gold stalks lit up by the orange, smoky sun.
Right over here, to my left, is the Columbia River, down a little embankment. And then on the right, I'm passing by - it's, like, literally scorched earth. Just charred landscape - rocks are the only thing that remain. There's a burnt historical marker sign.
I'm trying to get to Spokane, Washington, from my home base in Boise, Idaho, but I have to drive the long way through Oregon because a new wildfire near where I live closed the main north-south highway. Just getting anywhere around here right now involves patience and a constant check of Watch Duty. That's the app that shows a wildfire's movement and evacuation zones in real time.
TERRY BARNES: We're trying to get home. We left a couple of days early. We thought we'd go ahead and go home (laughter).
SIEGLER: I recently met Terry and Kara Barnes in a country store by a roadblock in rural Oregon. The fires cut their camping trip short, and now they're trying to get home across the Cascade Mountains. It's a six-hour-plus drive. The fires keep closing the highways. Terry drinks a cold beer as smoke hangs thick in the air outside.
BARNES: No. 1, I'd like roads to open (laughter). I can still breathe. But I would sure like to go home.
SIEGLER: A record 2.5 million acres has burned in Oregon so far this summer, accounting for more than a quarter of the entire land burned in the U.S. this year. Mary Thompson here is frustrated that the media sometimes portray these fires as being way out here, not threatening anything. But she says this is cattle ranching country, and it's how families like hers make their living.
MARY THOMPSON: I don't know what they're going to do once the fires are over with 'cause there won't be any grounds to feed them. Yeah. It's hard. It's really hard. You almost cry.
SIEGLER: News of late is in Nevada and Washington state, where hundreds of homes have burned in dreaded urban wildfires. I talked with Hugh Safford about this. He's retired U.S. Forest Service. And one thing he said really stuck out - in these new mega fires, the homes become the fuel for the explosive growth, not the trees.
HUGH SAFFORD: Burned-down homes, they're gone. There's, you know, melted cars and all that stuff. And then, usually, there's a ring of live trees around a lot of the homes because the homes are what's burning. They're actually burning the forest. It's not the forest burning the homes.
SIEGLER: Homes are burning the forests. In Spokane, neighborhoods are leveled, but you still see pine trees that survive due to their thick, fire-resistant bark.
MELISSA MATTHEWS: Can you unlock the car, baby?
CHRIS MATTHEWS: Yep.
SIEGLER: Chris and Melissa Matthews lost pretty much everything.
M MATTHEWS: This is the first time - yeah, this is the first time I've seen it and been back since we, you know, loaded the car up and left. And it is jarring.
SIEGLER: When the wind kicks up just a little, there's an acrid, toxic smell from all the burnt lead paint in the home siding, exploded propane tanks, melted lithium batteries.
C MATTHEWS: Yeah. The air's not good.
M MATTHEWS: No.
C MATTHEWS: And I've had a sore throat for the last few days because of coming down here and everything.
SIEGLER: This is a common thing I've reported after these megafires - people return and soon find it's too soon and too dangerous to go back in. But one thing here really stood out to me - even with all this destruction, it's miraculous that the death toll was so small. At least 31 people died in the LA fires last year, and only one person died as a result of all three of August's Spokane fires. It is grueling still for wildland firefighters, all the more so due to President Trump's big DOGE cuts to public lands agencies. On the Old Trails fire in Spokane, I met firefighter Jose Ibarra as he doused a burning stump near a subdivision.
JOSE IBARRA: It's just exactly how it is in California, more structure protection.
SIEGLER: He's working a hot spot that could easily flare back up.
It's tough work. Yeah?
IBARRA: Yeah. It's tough work. Yeah. Yeah.
SIEGLER: And it's not even fall yet. That's when California traditionally sees its biggest wildfires - likely more to come.
Kirk Siegler, NPR News, on the road in Washington state.
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