The largest wildfire in Nebraska history tore through 640,000 acres of grassland on March 12. Homes, barns, ranches, and fences were reduced to ash. By early April, 240 separate wildfires had already scorched Wyoming's plains. Around the same time, power companies across Colorado were cutting electricity for days at a stretch, afraid that high winds might knock down a line and touch off another disaster like the 2021 blaze that wiped out more than 1,000 homes.
This is not a preview. Fire season across the West has already arrived — and it got here months ahead of schedule.
Record-breaking heat, drought, and wind pushed it in early. The National Interagency Fire Center confirmed the obvious: this year's fire season is going to be significant. Parts of the Southwest and Great Basin have no snow at all. In those regions, snowmelt is running four to six weeks ahead of even the earliest melt-off dates on record.
A Winter That Never Really Showed Up
Wyoming had its hottest and driest winter in recorded history — worse than anything during the 1930s Dust Bowl years. Then, in mid-March, a heat dome fueled by climate change settled across the Southwest and spread north into Colorado and Wyoming, pushing temperatures into the 80s.
Zachary Labe, a climate scientist at Climate Central, put it plainly. "We call these compound events," he said. "You get two extreme events back-to-back which compound or exacerbate the impact but are consistent with what we expect in a warming world."
The snowpack situation across the region is grim by any measure. Colorado ski resorts closed early this season — some never opened at all. Nearly every basin in Wyoming is sitting at record lows. Even Montana and Idaho, which came through the winter in slightly better shape than their southern neighbors, are seeing below-normal snowpack melting at above-normal rates.
That matters more than most people realize.
Camille Stevens-Rumann, a fire ecology associate professor at Colorado State University and a former U.S. Forest Service wildland firefighter who worked on both engine and hot shot crews, explained why snowpack is so critical to keeping fires in check. "If you think about a forest sitting under snow, it's not going to burn, or is very unlikely to burn," she said. "But snowpack also keeps water in a lot of places until early July. That allows many systems to be moist and when we have July fires, there are places that won't burn because there is still moisture in them."
When that moisture disappears in April or May instead of July, those same forests become tinderboxes months earlier than anyone is prepared for.
Stevens-Rumann also pointed out that the fire season isn't just stretching at the front end. The big wet October snowfalls that used to put fires to bed for the year across the West are now arriving in November or December, sometimes not at all. The season is getting longer on both sides.
What Dry Ground Does to a Landscape
Snowpack does more than protect the high country. It feeds water downhill, saturating streams, rivers, and wetlands at lower elevations. When those sources dry up earlier in the year, so does the vegetation — grasses, brush, and trees that ranchers, hunters, and hikers pass through every day.
The lower elevation grasslands and prairie ecosystems across the West — the same ground that supports sage grouse, mule deer, pronghorn, and songbirds — are becoming what Stevens-Rumann calls increasingly "desertified."
"One thing we know that predicts bad fire years is moisture stress in the winter and spring before," she said. "We've been so moisture stressed, it's on par with or greater than 2020."
In 2020, wildfires burned more than 10 million acres across the West, including 4 percent of California's entire landmass.
The conditions heading into this summer, by most available measurements, are comparable or worse.
How These Fires Actually Start
Those Smoky Bear signs at trailheads and campgrounds aren't just decoration. When they point to extreme fire danger, forest managers are working from real data — specifically, the moisture content in wood about as thick as a finger. When fuel in that size range, meaning grass, pine needles, and small twigs, dries out, a forest becomes dramatically more vulnerable.
Stevens-Rumann compared it to building a campfire. Wet wood doesn't catch. Bone-dry twigs and needles go up fast. The difference between a manageable fire and a catastrophic one often comes down to how dry those small fuels are when a spark hits them.
But drought doesn't just dry out the small stuff. Stressed, drought-weakened trees burn faster and more aggressively than healthy ones. That compounds a problem that's been building for over a century.
Decades of fire suppression policy — the instinct to put out every blaze as quickly as possible — left Western forests packed with fuel. Before that approach took hold, fires burned mountainsides in irregular patches. The burned-out sections would regrow with wildflowers and young trees, creating natural breaks that slowed future fires. Those breaks are mostly gone now.
"Now we have these continual wall-to-wall forests that are thick and dense," Stevens-Rumann said. "And those trees have grown up as an even stand age, making the whole landscape more ready to burn."
Some forests in California have seen 90 percent of their acreage burn in the last 40 years. Across much of Wyoming and Colorado, the figure is 20 to 30 percent. Even Yellowstone, where nearly 800,000 acres burned in the famous 1988 fires, is primed to go again.
The Human Factor
Lightning gets most of the blame in the public imagination, but humans now start more wildfires than lightning across many parts of the country, according to the Western Fire Chiefs Association. Cigarettes flipped out of car windows. Chains dragging on the pavement and throwing sparks. Downed power lines energizing dry grass. Campfires left to smolder overnight.
Forest managers are already responding. Campfire bans have been put in place across a number of areas. If conditions continue to deteriorate through the summer, those restrictions will expand to include chainsaws and charcoal grills. In the worst-case scenario, public lands could be closed altogether.
Tim Brown, director of the Western Regional Climate Center, noted that an active monsoon season in the Southwest could push fire-dampening moisture farther north than normal — but the same monsoon system can also bring lightning. The two things are not mutually exclusive, and every major storm system brings both risk and relief at the same time.
What Could Still Change the Forecast
The picture is bad, but it is not locked in.
Stevens-Rumann was direct about the one factor that could shift the outlook. "The one thing that can save us from a bad fire season is if we get precipitation," she said. "But if we have a dry summer also, and see ignitions in July, then everything is ready to burn."
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is already forecasting above-normal temperatures for the summer. If extended heatwaves arrive on top of the drought and dry fuels already in place, the conditions will be about as bad as anyone in fire management has ever seen.
Brown and Stevens-Rumann both pointed to a historical example worth keeping in mind. The Fort McMurray fire in April 2016 was the most expensive natural disaster in Canadian history. It sparked fears of an unprecedented season. Instead, the summer ended with fewer acres burned than recent averages. Bad starts don't always become catastrophic finishes.
The Resource Problem Nobody Is Talking About
Even setting aside the question of how many fires ignite, there is another issue sitting in the background that deserves more attention than it's getting.
If the worst predictions hold — a high fire season stretching from New Mexico all the way to Washington state — the country's firefighting resources could be pushed past their limits. Hot shot crews, air tankers, and the logistics of moving equipment and personnel across multiple simultaneous fire fronts across half the country represent a finite system. Stevens-Rumann put it bluntly: those resources are already strained in a normal year. A season that hits hard across the entire West at the same time is a different kind of problem.
The West has been through brutal fire seasons before — 2020, 2018, 2017, 2012. Each one set records and each one prompted the same cycle of shock, response, and recovery. But the underlying conditions — the drought, the fuel load, the earlier springs, the later first snows — are not recovering between seasons the way they used to.
The grasslands of Nebraska were already burning in March. Wyoming was already on fire in April. Colorado's power companies were already making the call to shut off electricity in high wind events.
Fire season didn't wait for summer this year.
