This is a tale of two fires — similar in time and cause, but sharing few other characteristics. Both were ignited by lightning, just over a month apart, but they burned at different speeds, in different habitats and impacted different wildlife species. The fires described below were just two of 2,167 fires that burned more than 850,000 acres in Wyoming last year. Northeast Wyoming experienced the largest fires with the most widespread impacts.
The fires took a toll on local communities and landowners, which has been covered extensively by local media. These fires also resulted in short- and long-term post-fire implications for wildlife in northeast Wyoming and the habitats they depend on. The Wyoming Game and Fish Department continues to respond to those impacts.
HOUSE DRAW FIRE
The largest fire in Wyoming in 2024 was reported midmorning Aug. 21 east of Buffalo after a small storm cell passed through. Driven by strong winds, the fire moved fast. It was estimated at 65,000 acres by evening. The fire showed extreme fire behavior. It crossed north across Interstate 90 and when the winds changed, it burned south again. The fire eventually burned 174,547 acres, scorching a north-south strip in places 10 miles wide and almost 60 miles long.
Pronghorn
On Aug. 22, Game and Fish wildlife managers searched burned areas to determine the loss of wildlife and euthanized injured animals. No deer or elk carcasses were located, but 57 pronghorn were found deceased or required euthanasia. Over the coming weeks, approximately 20 others were found or reported dead by landowners.
Pronghorn have difficulty navigating some fence types due to their preference for going under rather than over or through fences. According to Buffalo Wildlife Biologist Zach Turnbull, multiple carcasses were found near fences, but others were further away with no explanation as to why they could not escape the fire, as it appears deer and elk were able to do.
The affected pronghorn herds, Crazy Woman and Leiter, were still recovering from effects of drought conditions over several years, followed by a significant winter in 2022-23. An outbreak of epizootic hemorrhagic and bluetongue virus in 2021-22 further impacted the herds.
“A good portion of pronghorn remained in the burn scar immediately following the fire, and many remain now, feeding mostly on burned prickly pear cactus and emerging grasses as they start to flush in wetter areas,” Turnbull said.
Mule deer
Although no deceased or injured deer were found immediately after the fire, it is likely some perished immediately and others later from pneumonia or other respiratory complications from smoke inhalation.
Both mule deer herds in the House Draw Fire area, Pumpkin Buttes and Powder River, are below objective. Like pronghorn, these herds were already affected by long-term drought conditions, and epizootic hemorrhagic disease was observed and verified in 2020, 2021 and 2022. The combination of these and other factors has exerted downward pressure on the populations, and this new alteration of habitat could inhibit recovery for years.
“Mule deer are considered specialists and need fairly specific habitat components to thrive,” Turnbull said. “Loss of habitat typically equates to reduced carrying capacity and reduced ability for an area to support a population. While mule deer can and have adapted to some habitat alterations, a fire of this magnitude will likely have population-level impacts.”
Turnbull added that few deer were observed in the burn scar immediately following the fire or during routine winter composition and sightability flights. Some anecdotal evidence suggests they shifted use patterns, with deer being detected at higher levels in unburned areas adjacent to the fire.
Sage-grouse
The largest, but yet unknown impacts from this fire, will be to the sage-grouse population. The fire burned 32 percent of the designated Buffalo Sage-Grouse Core Area and 19 percent of proposed additional core area. Nineteen occupied lek sites were impacted that had a peak of 231 observed males in the past three years. In 2024, male lek attendance was up 6 percent from the previous year.
Leks are monitored annually in the spring by Game and Fish biologists and many partner agencies and organizations, and data from the 2025 field season is being analyzed. Results will be published in early fall, but Turnbull and others expect the results will unveil a sobering view of the future of sage-grouse in northeast Wyoming.
“Wildfire has been shown in other areas to immediately impact nest and adult survival so we expect to see population-level impacts,” said Game and Fish Sage-Grouse Biologist Nyssa Whitford. “Sage-grouse have extremely high site fidelity to their lek locations. While some will move to other areas, particularly if their lek locations and preferred nesting sites were on the edge of the fire perimeter, some will not.
“Sage-grouse are a sagebrush obligate; they need the plant to survive. It provides cover throughout the year and comprises a significant portion of their diet. In the winter, sagebrush is the main food source for sage-grouse. The lack of sagebrush around lek sites means there is little to no cover, or habitat, for nesting sage-grouse hens. In short, the fire destroyed their home and their groceries.”
Whitford noted the Northeast Wyoming Sage-Grouse Local Working Group, one of eight local groups comprised of government, nonprofit and landowner members that fund and support sage-grouse and sagebrush conservation in Wyoming, prioritized habitat projects in its 2024 funding and will likely do so again in 2025.
"The sage-grouse in northeast Wyoming are important genetically to sage-grouse in the rest of Wyoming and our neighboring states,” Whitford said. “It is difficult to establish sagebrush, but through planned habitat projects we are doing what we can to maintain this crucial genetic link.”
Restoring the landscape
Fire is a natural landscape process and plants require fire to reproduce or rejuvenate. However, the scale and intensity of the House Draw Fire was extraordinary and the effects will reveal themselves for decades to come.
“In general, fire is good for some species, bad for others,” said Sheridan Region Terrestrial Habitat Biologist Todd Caltrider. “There are wildlife species that thrive in open grasslands and post-fire, species that favor grassland communities will fill this niche. Other species that are more sagebrush dependent like the sage thrasher, Brewer’s sparrow, sage-grouse, pronghorn and mule deer will lose habitat.”
Northeast Wyoming lies at the intersection of two ecosystems — the Intermountain shrub-steppe and the Northern Great Plains. Weather is the fulcrum that will determine if the burned area will support sagebrush and shrubs again or tilt toward a grass and forb community. Envision a seesaw with the habitat types on opposing ends. In coming years, more precipitation will promote a grass and forb-dominated plant community. Less precipitation will encourage shrub growth.
“From my experience, most years we have conditions that favor grass communities instead of shrub communities,” Caltrider said. “In many areas in the Powder River Basin, we have seen very little sagebrush come back after fires. It doesn’t mean sagebrush will never come back into these communities, but it may take much longer than it does in other areas such as western Wyoming.”
Adding more uncertainty to this landscape’s future is the threat of invasive species. Invasive plants such as cheatgrass can take immediate advantage of disturbed soil conditions. Another damaging plant species, ventenata, has been spreading in northeast Wyoming rangelands since its recent rediscovery. It was found and reported in Sheridan County in 1997, but not again until 2016. Ventenata is native to the Mediterranean and was first documented in North America in 1952. It has no nutritive value and a high silica content, making it unpalatable to livestock and wildlife. It can overtake landscapes in a short period of time and reduce native plant diversity and availability by 70 percent or more.
Game and Fish staff, county weed and pest districts, the University of Wyoming Sheridan Research and Extension Center, land management agencies and private landowners work cooperatively to locate and eradicate ventenata and other invasive plant species throughout the state to protect native range for wildlife and livestock. Monitoring and treating invasive plant colonies as they arise in the newly exposed soils of the House Draw Fire will be an ongoing challenge for landowners and management agencies for the next several years.
To boost potential sagebrush rejuvenation, Caltrider and multiple government agencies, nonprofits and landowners organized a sagebrush seeding initiative in portions of the burned area. On Feb. 21, a small plane loaded with 500 pounds of seed took off from the Johnson County Airport in Buffalo to aerially distribute sagebrush and other native plant seed in areas identified as having the most chance for germination success. The flights continued hourly over several days, eventually seeding 35,000 pounds in 1,825 acres of private and public land.
The timing and location of the seeding was carefully calculated as sagebrush seed has short viability and degrades fast. Previous sagebrush seeding efforts in other states indicate the best chance of germination is when seed is spread over existing snow with another precipitation event predicted shortly after.
Caltrider explained the locations were chosen based on models developed by Department of Environmental Quality’s Abandoned Mine Lands staff and the University of Wyoming Sheridan Agricultural Research Station that took into account past sage-grouse habitat use, slope, aspect, historic cheatgrass density, past sagebrush distribution, burn severity and landowner participation.
“Sagebrush is a slow-growing plant, and it will take years before the seed matures into another seed-producing plant,” explained Caltrider. “It is anticipated that natural recovery of the sagebrush community in the House Draw Fire perimeter could take 100 years or more to recover to a point where the sagebrush community could again provide habitat benefits to sagebrush obligate species. But the seeding we’ve done in key locations may speed up recovery much faster than what we would expect naturally.”
ELK FIRE
On Oct. 7, 1899, snow fell in the Bighorn Mountains, extinguishing a fire that had burned since August. The fire, on the north end of the mountains, consumed all but the schoolhouse and two cabins in the small town of Rockwood at the head of Box Canyon on the Tongue River. Rockwood, built five years earlier, was the operation center for the Tongue River Tie Flume logging operation and close to 100 people were in town the day the fire arrived. Dozens of people made narrow escapes, including a schoolteacher who walked her students to safety along the footboard of the wooden flume, in some places 300 feet above the canyon floor, as portions of it burned. All residents survived, but one person later died of pneumonia.
“…the burned over area reached from the Dry Fork of the Little Horn to the eastern end of Black Mountain, a distance of about 12 miles and from the Forks of Tongue River to the mouth of Horse Creek, in places seven or eight miles wide,” fire survivor Robert Straight told the Sheridan Press in a 1957 article. Straight and several other men survived by taking refuge in a marshy area, though they received burns on their exposed heads and faces.
On Oct. 7, 2024, 125 years following that historic fire, another blaze was burning in the Bighorns. The Elk Fire, reported on Sept. 27, had grown to 72,998 acres. Six hundred-eighty firefighters were combating the fire that was just 10 percent contained. The fire was not fully contained until five weeks later when, like the 1899 fire, a snow event brought it to an end. It burned 98,352 acres in an eerily similar footprint to the 1899 fire — starting at Riley Point near the Wyoming-Montana state line and burning southeast along the face of the mountain, thinning and finally ending at Red Grade Road southwest of the town of Big Horn.
Elk
Evaluation of the fire’s impact to the landscape and wildlife began well before it was extinguished. When safe to do so and where they would not impede ongoing fire suppression efforts, Game and Fish personnel surveyed Amsden Creek and Kerns wildlife habitat management areas.
These properties are two of the state’s oldest Wyoming Game and Fish Commission-owned wildlife habitat management areas. The 3,772-acre Amsden Creek WHMA near Dayton was purchased in 1944 and the 4,492-acre Kerns WHMA near the Montana-Wyoming state line in 1949. Both were acquired as critical winter range for big game, namely elk, which had been reintroduced into the Bighorn Mountains 30 years earlier. Each winter, Amsden supports approximately 350 elk through the winter and Kerns approximately 450.
A late-season fire is a worst-case scenario for Game and Fish-managed big game winter ranges, as vegetation lost to fire has no time for regrowth prior to winter. Although no elk were known to have died from the fire, Game and Fish personnel determined 85 percent of Amsden Creek and 65 percent of Kerns burned. Elk arriving at these traditional winter ranges in November and December would find little natural forage.
Game and Fish initiated a one-time emergency elk feeding program to provide forage and limit elk movement onto adjoining private agricultural lands. A long fall allowed managers to withhold feed until the first major snow events began in mid-January. Similar to feedgrounds in western Wyoming, managers fed elk in a low-density style of feeding to help reduce the risk of disease transmission and allow ample space for all elk to disperse and feed. Feeding continued into spring 2025 when the animals began seasonal movements to summer ranges. There are no plans to continue feeding.
Another first action after the fire was identifying priority areas to repair fences. In the 1950s, 11 miles of eight-foot fence was constructed at Kerns to prevent elk from moving onto and causing conflict with adjacent agricultural lands. In the 1960s, 7 miles of fence was constructed on Amsden Creek for the same purpose. The Elk Fire destroyed or damaged 5½ miles of fence on Kerns and almost 4½ miles on Amsden. Game and Fish personnel from around the state arrived within days to assist with emergency repairs, some of which included carrying in materials and reconstructing fences in ravines with a 60-degree slope. Two miles of fence was repaired on Kerns until weather conditions forced an end of work. Repairs will continue through this year.
“Even though this fire occurred late in the season, regrowth of native grasses started almost immediately post-fire, and in several places we saw as much as four inches of new growth before winter conditions set in,” said Sheridan Region Habitat and Access Coordinator Nathan Lindsey. “This offered wildlife a nutritious food source going into winter. Although there was not enough forage to sustain these animals over winter like the areas normally provide, it was a welcome addition to what seemed like a bleak outcome for the winter.
“This fire was able to rejuvenate a lot of old growth and decadent native grasses by removing competition and allowing younger and more nutrient forage to establish. Long-term, this is going to be beneficial for many species in the area and also will give the woody vegetation and forbs a chance to become more abundant, providing additional browse for ungulates. We will monitor for annual invasive grasses like cheatgrass and ventenata in the coming years, but this fire gave forage a boost and a chance to rebound, something that hasn’t occurred in this area in a long time.”
Mule deer
“The fire will likely benefit mule deer by promoting growth of forbs and shrubs, but it will take at least a few years to realize it,” said Sheridan District Wildlife Biologist Eric Maichak. “Other areas of the Bighorn Mountains that have burned in the last 20 years — near Red Grade or Crater Ridge — have some of the better forb and shrub communities I've seen in the Bighorns.”
Coincidentally, 92 members of the North Bighorn Mule Deer Herd were fitted with GPS collars as part of the statewide Mule Deer Monitoring Project initiated in 2023. Data from the collars revealed most were outside the fire perimeter before it started. Some were inside the fire perimeter and remained there, presumably finding pockets of unburned areas to use until migrating to the west side of the mountain onto winter range. Only one mule deer was reported to Game and Fish with fire-related injuries and was euthanized.
Mule deer were not targeted for emergency winter feeding. They have a specialized digestive system that does not process hay as efficiently as elk, and it can have detrimental impacts on their health. Additionally, GPS collar data from the first two years of the monitoring project shows that while there are some year-round resident mule deer in the eastern Bighorns, many that summer there move to the west side of the mountains during winter. A large portion of the resident mule deer on the eastern Bighorns spend winter on the foothills and plains, away from the fire perimeter.
Maichak added deer were seen within the burn perimeter during annual surveys in December 2024 and winter mortalities of collared fawns were within normal range, coinciding with periods of significant snow and cold temperatures.
Additionally, the third year of mule deer captures and GPS collaring took place in January as part of the ongoing monitoring project. Captures were targeted near the edge of the burn to look at future use of the area by mule deer. An annual report of preliminary findings is published on the Game and Fish website each year. Final captures and collaring will take place in January 2027, with data analysis and a final summary happening in 2028 and 2029.
Yellowstone cutthroat trout
Two decades ago, Sheridan Region fisheries biologists began laying the groundwork for restoration of native Yellowstone cutthroat trout in West Pass Creek near the Wyoming-Montana border. Portions of the creek and its north and south forks flow through the Bighorn National Forest, Kerns WHMA and adjoining private land.
In 2020, a permanent barrier was constructed preventing upstream movement of fish into the majority of the creek. In the years since, regional fisheries biologists have completed chemical and mechanical removal of existing fish above the barrier, primarily nonnative brook and brown trout, in preparation for stocking of Yellowstone cutthroats.
Ash and sediment flow into streams and rivers are part of post-fire effects and it is expected that streams in the burned area, including West Pass, will see increased sediment loads for the next several years.
“If sediment flow is heavy, it can kill fish, suffocate spawning and rearing habitats, fill in pools and change water chemistry,” said Sheridan Fisheries Biologist Gordon Edwards. “We also could have potential loss of overhead cover for the stream, which regulates temperature, so the temperature regime could change and productivity could change because it is getting more sunlight.”
However, these are all the worst-case scenarios. Edwards noted streams can be resistant to fire impacts and the green, vegetative, riparian corridor acts as a barrier between the fire and the stream. He pointed out that nearby Pumpkin Creek and its Yellowstone cutthroat trout population weathered the 2021 Crater Ridge Fire better than expected.
“It was a really severe burn, but we visited the stream immediately after the fire and found the fish had survived, and there was an unburned buffer of vegetation along the stream,” Edwards said.
Game and Fish and U.S. Forest Service personnel will monitor stream quality in coming years and the cutthroat restoration project will continue, with stocking expected to take place in the next 3-4 years.
“The fire didn’t burn into Red Gulch or Elkhorn creeks where we have successfully expanded cutthroat populations, which are likely to be the source of fish for the eventual West Pass stocking,” Edwards said.
Taking the long view, Edwards added: “I think we tend to worry, but these populations have been through events like these before. We can have all these concerns, but these fish and other species have survived many millennia of cycles of fire and regrowth, so they are pretty resilient.”
— Christina Schmidt is the information and education specialist for the Wyoming Game and Fish Department in the Sheridan Region, and a regular contributor to Wyoming Wildlife.