In this long exposure, the Bench Fire burns on the Warm Springs Reservation, seen from Culver, Ore., on July 27, 2026.
Eli Imadali / OPB
This year’s wildfire season has already seen more acres burned across Oregon than in all of 2025. Right now, around 35 active fires are burning in the state, including the Bench Fire a few miles south of the Warm Springs Reservation.
It’s also a few miles from Jason Smith’s ranch. Smith is a Native rancher, born and raised on the Warm Springs Reservation, and helps manage the wild horse population along with his partner Kremena Doust. The pair spoke with “All Things Considered” host Crystal Ligori about how the wildfire has affected them.
Crystal Ligori: I’ve seen some of the videos you’ve posted on social media, and the fire looks like it is really close. Can you guys describe a little bit of what it looks like on the ranch today?
Jason Smith: Well, everything’s black right now. If it would have crossed the highway, that would have been at my place. Further up the road is my mother’s place, and it burned all the way around it.
Kremena Doust: So there is black ground everywhere, and it’s pretty smoky – It’s not that easy to breathe.
Smith: Like 15-18 miles from my house here is where the fire started, and it’s here... I mean, it made it this far, you know?
Ligori: How are you keeping yourselves and all the horses safe?
Smith: Well, to be honest, our livestock is part of the plan and part of the defense mechanism for fire. As long as there’s some form of grazing close or nearby, then it keeps the flashy fuels kind of at bay, and the wildfire can’t just get crazy crazy, you know.
Ligori: Interesting. So do you feel pretty safe where you’re at right now because of the grazing that’s happened?
Smith: For sure. We’re pretty blessed with having the Deschutes River right out our back door. So we have irrigation rights to pump out of the river there, and that’s what we were utilizing: an irrigation pump and fire hose to wet down the wood and the corrals and, you know, old dry horse manure is pretty easily burned too, so we’re trying to wet that down too.
Ligori: How many horses do you have on the property right now?
Doust: About 70 horses.
Smith: Yeah, 65 to 70.
Ligori: Most of, if not all of, the Warm Springs Reservation is under some level of evacuation order. I understand you chose to stay on the ranch and not evacuate. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Smith: It was already that ‘Level 3’ [evacuation order] a few days ago when that fire was knocking on our door. I mean, they were pretty much requiring everybody to evacuate. [But] we stayed, and we were running water lines and stuff for 10 or 12 hours until the helicopter finally showed up and helped knock down that fire a little bit.
Ligori: Why did you choose to stay?
Smith: We’d be abandoning my home, our livestock. Our livestock depended on us to be there, you know?
Ligori: And because these horses are wild, is evacuating them even an option?
Smith: That would have been pretty much impossible. It would require a couple of semi-loads or something. You could theoretically, if I had 5 or 6 saddle horses, you could move them out of here. From where we’re at, there’s a little highway that runs down along the Deschutes River, and you could herd them down there to get them out of the way. But if we had to move them, we would darn sure do it.
Ligori: I understand you were going to have a wild horse auction earlier in the week. Did that happen, or how was that going to work?
Smith: We had an opportunity for [buyers] to be here on Saturday, but that was the most active day of the fire, and they closed the highway coming to our place. So, the only thing we’re counting on now is the online sale.
Doust: We started a soft launch of it, uploading information on the horses and some people have already shown some interest. But it’s pretty hectic right now, trying to find hay and look after the horses and keep everything running.
We are hoping to ask for hay donations working with a nonprofit for any help we can get to to feed the horses. It’s now our responsibility here and it’s just more transitions to better times.
