Oregon ranchers race to protect cattle from Grasshopper Fire

By APRIL EHRLICH/Oregon Public Broadcasting

Standing in a dusty forest east of Mount Hood, Whitney Nogle thought she heard a cow. Without another word, she and her family ran to their horses.

The Nogles are a longtime ranching family out of Sherman County, east of The Dalles along the Columbia River, but they have leases to let their cattle graze on state and federal lands in neighboring Wasco County. Every day of the previous week, they woke at dawn to wrangle their cattle from vast stretches of land before the Grasshopper Fire reached them.

“I swear I heard a cow,” Whitney Nogle said.

But after 20 minutes of scouring part of their grazing area, Nogle and her crew couldn’t find signs of a cow.

Firefighting planes and helicopters cut through the sky, carrying water between the Columbia River to towns threatened by wildfire. Hotshot crews — teams of wildland firefighters — chainsawed trees nearby.

From a distance, they sounded strangely similar to cows mooing.

“Maybe we’re all just a little bit rummy,” said her dad, Pat Nogle.

Oregon is in the middle of an extremely active wildfire season. By the end of July, around 1.8 million acres had burned, nearing the state’s record of 1.9 million acres in 2024. While most of the fires are burning in remote forests and grasslands that are naturally accustomed to fire, some of these areas are critical to ranchers whose livelihoods depend on their cattle.

Ranchers like the Nogles know when wildland firefighting resources run thin, they’re on their own. They rely on their friends and family — along with heavy equipment and ranch dogs — to save their cattle.

By midday Tuesday, the Nogles had gathered about 100 cows and their calves in a holding pen. They needed to save another 30 cows from the nearby forests.

It’s not easy finding cows grazing among dozens of acres of rugged terrain. The Nogles first check hot spots, like watering holes at rivers and creeks. They also lure cows with strategically placed salt licks. Then their pack of herding dogs can sniff out cattle tracks.

If the dogs find a cow, they run around it until a horseback rider can rope it in.

“They’re excited about the fire because they get to work,” Pat Nogle said of their dogs. “I don’t know if I am.”

Over the course of the day, more friends and family showed up. So did some strangers who heard that nearby ranchers needed help. They brought rigs equipped with water tanks and hoses

“Everyone helps everyone. That’s the beauty of it,” said Jessie Fields, who also had cattle running alongside the Nogles’ herd.

As the group grew, so did the chatter. They stood in circles, sharing anecdotes and ribbing each other. They talked about a fire two years ago that also came close to this same area. At that time, a tanker plane dropped fire retardant line near their cattle pen.

“These are the only two years that I know it’s ever burned this much,” Whitney Nogle said. “It could happen anywhere.”

By late afternoon, the winds picked up and the sky turned dark orange. The Nogles huddled around a radio scanner that crackled with voices of increasingly frantic firefighters.

“It’s really starting to come down,” Whitney Nogle said, as ash fell from the sky. “It’s coming.”

There were still cows out in the woods, but the family found as many as they could that day. They needed to shift their focus to protecting the ones they had already found.

More ranchers showed up that afternoon with more rigs equipped with water tanks. They filled them at a nearby pond. Then they waited, checking their phones every few minutes, watching the fire’s perimeter get closer to them.

But a few hours later, the mercurial winds shifted again, this time pushing the fire away, into more remote hillsides. The orange sky faded to dull gray. People started packing up for the night. They would need to rest their horses and dogs.

“I’ll just stay here,” Pat Nogle said.

He found a pillow and a woven blanket so he could sleep in his truck, close to his cows.

They’re his livelihood, he said, but they’re more than that. He has watched them grow up from newborn calves, then helped them birth to their own calves. He brought some of the tinier calves into his home, keeping them warm in a bathtub during harsh winters.

He has insurance on them, he said, but he doesn’t want to let an animal burn to death. He has lost a cow and a calf to fire before.

“That isn’t what we raised them for,” he said.

He wasn’t going to give up on them yet. If flames appeared over the hill’s edge, he figured he could jump into the nearby pond.

He stayed in his truck all night. The next morning, the Nogles and some friends drove most of their cattle back home. With months left in the fire season, about 10 of their cows were still out on the range, with land burning all around them.

But the Nogles found some cattle tracks, they said. They hope they’re still alive.

This story was originally published on Aug. 3, 2026 by Oregon Public Broadcasting.