After the Fire: Ranchers tell their story after the Tartar Fire

The Tartar Fire burned more than 158 thousand acres in Washington County near the town of Weiser, Idaho. Ranchers Tristan Winegar and Colby Chandler describe their experience with the fire, from fighting the flames to the response of the local community.

Verbatim:

(Tristan Winegar) On Saturday, August 1st, the sale was going on, our county fair was having their sale, and I received a phone call at 2 p.m. that the Tartar fire had broken out of the fire line and was headed south. And there was going to be a wind event and they were estimating 30 to 50 mile an hour winds. The ranchers were up there with bulldozers and they were making a fire line and they were going to try and back burn and stop the fire.

(Colby Chandler) We were up at our county fair, the Washington County Fair, buying animals for our county Farm Bureau, supporting the kids, and Tristan Winegar, one of our neighbors to the west, called and said that the fire that we'd known was started out on some BLM ground, that they weren't getting around it. And he felt like if we got enough of our neighbors, so we had enough manpower, we could get it stopped. And so he asked us if we could come out.

(Tristan Winegar) About 30 minutes before the fire was going to get to us and we could start back burning, the wind turned on like a light switch. Just immediately we had 20 and 30 mile an hour winds and at that point all you can do is get out of the way. By then we knew we had lost it. The fire was going like crazy. The fire burned 20 miles in just under 2 hours and it essentially burned straight south-southeast right through the middle of where we keep our cattle. When we got to the structures with the dozer the fire was just cresting Kelly Mountain and the flames were 50 feet tall and they were bright red because the smoke was in between us and the flames. And I remember seeing those flames when they came over the hill and just… I never was afraid, but it felt overwhelming to see that coming at you. And they were moving fast.

(Colby Chandler) We quickly realized there was no stopping it there. And so we took off, headed south, headed back to our place on the Devil's Elbow. By the time I drove up the Devil's Elbow Road, the fire had already burned up right behind our houses. My dad and my kids were all there and some other relatives, and they'd pretty much secured and saved our home, our haystacks. And so knowing that there was nothing I could do there, I just left and went around the elbow and it was starting to burn towards a lot of our neighbors' homes. And so we started just protecting those homes. When you drive by and you see houses about to burn and you know you have the ability to stop them, that's just what you do. It was just a group effort that we got it done. It was just a miracle.

(Tristan Winegar) It got to the city limits within three hours and we were able to stop it there and saved many homes. I have heard that there are some homes that were lost but they're on the other side of the hill.

(Colby Chandler) It was coming up next to one of the garages on one of the houses and it was kind of burning uphill towards it and there was a lot of dry grass up next to the garage and so I was basically pinned up against the garage and the grass trying to stop it and so yeah I just was using my shovel and and doing everything I could to keep it back. But it was really hot against the garage. And like I said, we had friends and family that showed up, and we would actually kind of take turns running around the corner of the garage because you couldn't breathe very well. And so we'd run back over, pat it out, and we'd just kind of flip-flop until we were able to get it out.

You had singed hair…

Oh yeah, it took my eyelashes off. The back around below my hat was all singed off, my hair, and yeah, my arms. Yeah, the hair was singed off my arms.

(Tristan Winegar) And it burnt here behind me. Everything you can see behind me here that's burnt. It came and it burnt right through the middle of our home range. And we built a fire line around it. The next day on Monday, the fire jumped our other fire lines and continued to burn and it burnt all of Indian Head Mountain and it burnt clear to the river.

(Colby Chandler) The second day, we had our president, Matt Dorsey, is who came, the president of the Idaho Farm Bureau Federation and brought his family and side by side we just, with hand tools, went out across the hills and put it out for miles. Just going along, patting it out. We used weed blowers and blew it back with weed blowers and with, like I said, with our family, with our friends. from neighbors. It was just amazing how people rallied together.

(Tristan Winegar) We had people come from Gem County Farm Bureau, Owyhee County Farm Bureau, Payette County Farm Bureau. They showed up with shovels and water and food and were ready to work. And because they understood what we were going through and that part to me is really cool. To the local firefighters that helped us and they know who they are; we are grateful and we are thankful to the air support, the airplanes and helicopters and the countless hours that they spent supporting us during the day… We are thankful. I hope that they know that. I'm sure that I'm forgetting people that we need to thank, but I hope they know how much we appreciate all that's been done. The outpouring of what can only be described as love on this fire is, it brings out emotions that you don't ever have. My phone rang off the hook for five days straight of people calling and saying, what can we do to help?

(Colby Chandler) The Weiser River Rodeo, the Weiser River Roundup, the rodeo committee, they'd organized with tons of other community members and people from other towns and they were feeding people that had been evacuated. They were getting supplies, they were gathering hay, posts, anything that we needed. People would show up out on the fire and give us hamburgers or snacks and I had no idea where it was coming from until after the fire I realized, wow, there's this whole thing going on behind the scenes that was just amazing. It just gave me a lot of hope for humanity, it really did. Sometimes we get discouraged. We get thinking we're isolated, that people don't care enough in the world we live in. But I'll tell you, it really opened my eyes to how many good people there are when there's something like this that happens.

(Tristan Winegar) Our personal count, last time that I talked to my dad, our personal count is we've lost about 90 head. And that's the part that's the part that's so hard is for us is seeing those burnt cattle. Not so much the money that we just lost. I mean that is difficult. I'm not going to say that that's not going to be a trial. But losing 90 head of cattle, that's not something I'd wish on anybody. But the hardest part is when you see the cattle, you can actually see on their face the fear of being burned alive. And that to me is the hardest part because there was no way that we could save them. And we care about them. They don't know what's going on. They don't understand. But to see that in their faces, froze on their faces because they were burned alive, and to see that pain and that suffering and the fear is life-changing. That's something that'll never… I'll never forget. And I know we're not the only ones to lose cattle. All of our neighbors lost cattle. We're also not the only ones that burned. So I don't want to take away anything from any of the other fires. The Big Grass Fire south of us here in Owyhee County, I mean, it's six or seven times bigger than this fire. And I I mean, I can't even imagine the damage that it's caused and how long that's going to take to come back.

(Colby Chandler) We're just grateful that everybody was safe, right? I mean, we got through it without any harm, and that's another miracle.

(Tristan Winegar) Mother Nature is a wonderful, beautiful thing, and this will come back. It'll come back better. And it's hard to imagine that right now with all the black, but it will.