By Annie MacKeigan, The Water Desk

Western wildfires start and spread because of a whole host of factors—wind, temperature, drought, forest health. But scientists are finding that the most important indicator of where the next big fire might ignite isn’t held in the trees themselves, but in the soil their roots are buried in.

Recent studies demonstrate how soil moisture data can help wildfire experts predict a potential fire’s location and severity. Those studies could eventually aid in developing more precise forecasts for fires across the country. 

This link, between how moist the ground is under a forest or grassland and fire risk, is gaining more traction among scientists due to an increasingly expansive network of monitoring equipment. 

In Colorado’s Roaring Fork Valley, 10 remote soil moisture sensors transmit data hourly, measuring the amount of water in the soil at that specific location and a certain depth, so scientists and researchers can better understand the ecosystem.

In the Rocky Mountain region of northern Idaho and western Montana, the U.S. Forest Service is working to install soil moisture networks at existing remote weather stations to increase the federal government’s observational capacity. 

In the Oklahoma grasslands, 120 monitoring sites make up a network for automated soil moisture data collection that spans the whole state, collecting data once every 30 minutes. The network, called the Oklahoma Mesonet, is one of the densest monitoring networks in the world, and is managed in collaboration between the University of Oklahoma, Oklahoma State University and Oklahoma Climatological Survey.

In Colorado’s Garfield County, the Middle Colorado Watershed Council uses soil moisture data to better understand wildfire risk for their mountain communities. The council uses available satellite data as an indicator for wildfire risk through drying trends and overall watershed health. 

“It doesn’t look like a lot on the surface,” said Stephanie Kampf, professor of ecosystem science and sustainability at Colorado State University. The sensors are buried underground, collecting soil moisture data from different depths across the West. 

But what may not look like much from the surface is a developing network of soil moisture data that could prove invaluable in predicting, and potentially preventing, some of the West’s most destructive fires.

A growing link

The West is in an era of megafires. Decades of fire suppression have put the region in a fire deficit. Fire is an important part of the landscape, but changing climate conditions foster more severe and destructive burns.   

Soil moisture data could help better predict the location and severity of these potentially catastrophic wildfires. 

“There is growing acknowledgment in fire science that soil moisture is really important,” said Zachary Holden, research ecologist for the U.S. Forest Service and contributor to a 2025 research study that explored soil moisture as a strong predictor for wildfire. 

Holden helped create a forecasting model that used archival soil moisture data to estimate wildfire growth from 140 wildfires in the U.S. northern Rocky Mountains from 2012 to 2021, later expanded to include Oregon and Washington. 

The forecasting model, now publicly available, aims to be a more detailed tool for prediction as climate change alters our foundational understanding of ecosystems, a model that will combine weather and hydrology.  

In addition to Holden’s research, which focuses on the U.S. northern Rocky Mountains, a number of other researchers in the West are linking soil moisture with wildfire prediction, finding that soil moisture and hydrologic conditions are an even stronger predictor for wildfire than drought and weather conditions. 

“You can predict whether something is going to be wet or dry, just looking at precipitation patterns, but soil moisture itself gives you the combination of how much water came in, and then how much water went back out through evaporation,” Kampf said.  

A 2023 study aimed to better understand the relationship between soil moisture and wildfire risk. According to Erik Krueger, contributor of the study and plant and soil sciences researcher at Oklahoma State University, wildfire researchers were collecting data related to vegetation fuel, fuel load and fuel moisture properties when the relationship between soil moisture and wildfire became clear. 

“We just said, ‘Hey, we’ve got this soil moisture database, how can we use it to look at the relationship between when and where wildfires will occur?’” Krueger said. 

According to Krueger, scientists have understood that there is a relationship between soil moisture and wildfire, but the data could not be found in one place. “There was no way to quantify [the risk] without the soil moisture data,” he said. 

After combining the data, Kruger said, they could better understand wildfire risk. 

Wildfire scientists have worked for decades without the soil moisture data that is now becoming available. “We can make their jobs a little bit easier, and make our wildfire prediction a little better,” Krueger said.

Applying the science

It’s not just scientists interested in this link between soil moisture and wildfire. Western land and water managers are seeing the benefits of the emerging fire indicator as well.

“Wildfire isn’t just a forest issue, it’s fundamentally a watershed issue,” said Kate Collins, executive director of Middle Colorado Watershed Council and the Colorado River Wildfire Collaborative in Garfield County, Colorado. “Watershed health and wildfire are just not siloed issues at all, they are inextricably linked.” 

But wildfire prevention can be contentious, especially in places like Garfield County, which is considered a wildland urban interface, or WUI, where people live in areas affected by wildfire. 

“We do need to have fire in our landscapes regularly,” Kampf said. Routine fire lessens the impact of excess dry fuels in an area, limiting the severity of the burn. And emerging as a tool to plan less severe burns, or prescribed fire, is soil moisture.

Prompted by the increased risk of severe wildfire, the Colorado River Wildfire Collaborative has shifted their focus to mitigation efforts, which include riparian restoration, mechanical thinning of vegetation, creating defensible spaces, and prescribed fire. Each of these efforts not only helps reduce wildfire risk, but also supports soil moisture retention. 

The process of building a usable set of soil moisture data is just beginning. Using the data as a tool, particularly in relation to wildfire risk, is relatively new. Building a strong dataset not only takes time, but also additional resources that are still being pulled together.  

A new approach’s limitations

Sensors can only collect soil moisture data for the specific soil column they are inserted in, which brings other challenges. 

“One is topography, so not just the elevation, but what aspect you are on and sloping around, and then you have the vegetation at that site,” Holden said. 

In a high alpine area, soil moisture data collected at one point may not be representative of an entire region. How do you apply one finding across a shifting landscape?

In July 2025, a team with Aspen Global Change Institute set out to answer that question. “Single point moisture data has value in that it can give you an insight into what’s happening in the soil across a watershed,” said Asa DeHaan, research technician at AGCI. 

A single watershed has a wealth of different types of soils, especially in complex, mountainous regions like Independence Pass near Aspen, Colorado, where the data was collected. “This one spot is really dry. We need to go out and see, is this the case across a larger area?”

DeHaan and a group of 14 others embarked on a three-day mission of collecting soil moisture data with handheld probes every 5 meters in a 100 square meter area around the monitoring site. “There really was a high variability across this area, kind of what we hypothesized was going to be the case,” DeHaan said. 

This idea is called “slope granularity.” AGCI’s continued research on slope granularity aims to understand if the patterns that were recorded among different vegetation types and in different alpine environments may extend to larger landscapes. 

According to Colin Kinsman, a team member on the July 2025 trip, the group collected somewhere between 15,000 and 17,000 data points within the region. “All this was in an effort to see what the deviation is across the slope,” Kinsman said, information that is necessary to groups looking to better understand severe wildfire risk. 

Expanding the networks

But the predictive ability of soil moisture monitoring hinges on there being robust measurements and data collection available to wildfire researchers and managers. Integrating soil moisture data is made more difficult by sparse observations across the West. 

According to Helen Silver, co-director of the Integrated Rocky Mountain-region Innovation Center for Healthy Soils, IN-RICHES, and Quench soil moisture monitoring programs out of Colorado State University, advancing soil moisture as a tool for wildfire prediction means not only expanding the monitoring network, but also putting all the data in one accessible place. 

Silver is working with the U.S. Forest Service to introduce more monitoring sites across Colorado to create a larger network of data. More data could help wildfire managers use the network as a tool for predicting wildfires. “We have a really large opportunity to install more sites that will help with prediction,” Silver said.

But maintenance and installation of such sites is expensive. Together with the Forest Service, Silver is working to bring in more money. “I would love to see federal funds and state funds put towards this,” she said. 

But getting the data, having the data and using the data are all separate issues. “What we need is a few champions, a few wildfire scientists that are champions for using this practically, for implementing these new tools,” Krueger said. 

Ultimately, soil moisture monitoring can’t predict with total certainty where a wildfire will begin. But Krueger said it could give an additional boost to forecasts. Is that worth the investment? “If it’s your house that is downwind from where the fire is, it probably is,” he said. 

This story was produced and distributed by The Water Desk at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Environmental Journalism.

Lead image: The team that collected soil moisture data at Independence Pass in Colorado in July 2025 recorded over 15,000 data points. Photo courtesy of Colin Kinsman

The post Want to Predict Wildfires? The Key May Be Underground appeared first on Circle of Blue.

The Dry Creek fire was estimated at 315 acres as of Wednesday morning after starting Tuesday in Garfield County

Colorado State University’s crop-testing station near Akron grows varieties of black-eyed peas, testing for drought tolerance, fertilizer needs and more. (Michael Booth, The Colorado Sun)

Editor’s note

Where Colorado will find the water it needs to thrive is a more urgent question than ever amid historic drought, undeniable climate change and unprecedented interstate conflicts over limited river supplies.

The Colorado Sun is embarking on a “solutions journalism” series asking who in the state is doing their share to save precious water. Our solutions-oriented reporting will assess whether specific water conservation projects can free up water at a large scale, or whether local conservation is always overwhelmed by uncontrollable natural conditions or immovable market realities.

The Colorado Sun series “Can Colorado do more with less water?” will create a body of work showcasing what may or may not be possible in creating water solutions across the state. From Akron to Aspen, we’re looking for signs of success or failure that will help lead us to water security. 

AKRON

Surveying miles of sprouting Eastern Plains farm fields, the logic around Colorado’s deepening water crisis might sound simple. 

Colorado each year sinks deeper and deeper into a crisis of water shortages. 

Up to 90% of the water available in the state each year is used for agriculture. 

It takes 44 inches of water a year in Burlington to grow alfalfa. Only about 10 inches of water drops on Burlington in a year. 

It only takes 15 inches of water to grow a healthy crop of black-eyed peas in Burlington. 

So.

The numbers point to seemingly obvious questions: Why couldn’t a lot of eastern Colorado farmers switch crops to black-eyed peas, and sell their saved irrigation water to thirsty Front Range cities, or get paid to leave it in the Colorado and South Platte rivers for others to use? 

Could that help calm the intensifying  interstate and urban-rural wars over shrinking water supplies? 

Expand the questions across Colorado: Could Mesa County farmers leave more water in the Gunnison River by growing obscure but nutritious sainfoin as cattle forage? Would San Luis Valley farmers try easily quenched rye grass to help the dwindling Rio Grande and hold the soil against unhealthy winter dust storms? Can they grow camelina for bio jet fuel in Fruita? Take advantage of oil-producing sunflower varieties that thrive like weeds in Lincoln County? 

Yes.

But. 

Colorado’s farmers can and do grow anything and everything across the state’s wide range of climate and precipitation. They will experiment with any crop and adapt on the fly. 

But they need a market come fall. A farmer adventuring with black-eyed peas in April needs to know that a bumper crop from one farm won’t blow the whole limited market for the nutritious legume most popular in the American South and Middle East. Dairy farmers in Texas want more alfalfa than sainfoin. Some Colorado farmers still have unwanted hemp bales sitting in barns from a years-ago fad. 

“These folks are ready, they’re hungry for a solution, because using less water and recovering our aquifers in the San Luis Valley, it’s required, but it’s also our future. We don’t have a future if we can’t recover these aquifers,” said Heather Dutton, manager of the San Luis Valley Water Conservancy District and a fifth-generation farm kid who grew up in the valley. “So there’s no fighting alternate crops down here. It’s just waiting for these markets to be developed. We need them faster, we need them right now rather than tomorrow.” 

It’s not magic — it’s weather and agronomy and cash flow, Dutton said. Colorado’s water solutions lie with alternative crops, and irrigation nozzles that save 2% of flows, and welcoming local food markets … all of the above. 

“There’s no silver bullet, it’s all silver BBs,” Dutton said. “We’re going to have to do all of this. That’s the long game.”

The Colorado Sun’s Solutions Journalism project is launching today with the state farm economy because that’s where the water is. That does not mean we are asking only farmers what their solution or sacrifice will be — far from it. In this series, we are heading to Aspen, Aurora, Akron, Alamosa and Adams County. Who is doing their part to save Colorado water? What are luxury homes doing? What are data centers doing? What are landscapers doing? 

We start with farms because one of the most common reader questions goes like this: If we need to use less water, and farms are using up to 90% of the water, can’t we just grow something else? 

Colorado farmers, ranchers, researchers and economists are more than happy to discuss the answers, in detail, right after they point out an important fact: 100% of Coloradans eat food. It’s a shared responsibility. 

First, the problem: 

Long-term climate change, shorter-term drought and continued growth in the Western U.S. are combining for a growing mismatch between our water demands and our annual water supply. Lake Powell, a key to the clean water plumbing system for 40 million people in seven states, will catch only 13% of its usual runoff this year. U.S. officials plan to release only 6 million acre-feet from Lake Powell for downstream states in 2026, down from 7 million to 9.25 million in prior years. Annual flows in the San Luis Valley’s streams are down an average of 18% from 20 years ago. 

(An acre-foot covers nearly a football field-size piece of land in 12 inches of water. It’s nearly the equivalent of a year of natural precipitation on the Eastern Plains, or the consumption of two to four urban households for a year.)

Meanwhile, cities like Aurora, Thornton, Colorado Springs and other growing Front Range cities, buy up farm water and spend years arguing with rural communities over whether taking that water will dry up local economies and irreparably alter a way of life. 

Colorado officials have tried a number of grant and mitigation programs to shift water from farm use to virtual water banks that could satisfy federal compacts with Lower Basin states. They’ve also tried alternatives to traditional farm irrigation that would capture water savings to be used by willing city buyers while not permanently drying up the land. 

“Growing something different” remains at the heart of many of those efforts.

Catching an answer in the rye 

The San Luis Valley is the southernmost snow-driven irrigation system in the Western Hemisphere, Dutton notes. Anyone making long-term economic plans in the valley needs to know how perilous that fact is, given how climate change has already cut into Colorado’s snowpack. Meanwhile, the state engineer periodically shuts down wells in the valley in order to meet interstate compacts to raise depleted aquifer levels. 

Many farmers are well aware that a cereal grain like rye uses only a third to a half of the irrigation water required for other popular valley grains. Dutton joined forces with Sarah Jones of Jones Farms Organics in Hooper after a 2023 spring dust storm eroded topsoil and blanketed the valley. Jones Farms was trying rye as a winter cover crop that could hold down and enrich soil meant for potatoes in other seasons. 

Add in Alamosa-based Colorado Malting Company, supplying grains to distillers and brewers, and now there was a team of experts who could apply to the Colorado Water Conservation Board for a water-saving grant. The board provided about $400,000 for education, marketing and other support. 

“We set out to work with 10 farmers and have them plant 1,200 acres of rye for the water savings, and the improvement to soil health and wind erosion,” Dutton said. “Of that, we said, we’ll commit to selling 300 acres of harvest. And we will use some of the grant to grow the market.” 

Marketing rye means expanding possibilities beyond the tang of an intense marble rye soaking up mustard and pastrami at your local deli. Rye can be mixed with wheat flour to lighten the blend in bread, become the base flour for cookies and pastries, be distilled into whiskey, and more. Dutton and partners found 100 potential customers for a new local rye supply. 

“And farmers being farmers, the first year, right out of the gate, they grew over 4,000 acres, because they’re like, wait a minute, this makes a ton of sense,” Dutton said. 

Valley farmers were able to produce a healthy rye crop using about a third of the water usually applied to other popular crops. And when the Rye Resurgence Project went out to sell its committed share of the acreage, they averaged 62 cents a pound, when rye historically has sold at 30 to 40 cents a pound. 

Nonfarm citizens of the valley have also reaped some of the benefits of the slight change in mindset. They hear about water shortages and climate change in a sea of other world problems, Dutton said, and they wonder what to do. Buying a muffin made in Alamosa made from local rye flour is not everything, but it’s more than nothing. 

“On the larger stage in this country, there’s so much going on, and people feel overwhelmed in a lot of different ways,” Dutton said. “And so to recognize that as an individual we can make a difference. … It’s really complicated, but it doesn’t mean that it’s impossible.” 

Yes, they do know beans about it 

For all the recent political and social drama about the urban/rural divide, city and country Coloradans still have a few things in common when it comes to water and the land. 

When it rains over the city, a homeowner looks gratefully at the sky and thinks, “I can turn off my sprinklers for a week.” 

When it rains over the plains, a farmer thinks the same. 

Growing corn in Burlington takes 26.2 inches of water across a season. If it rains and snows the expected 8.1 inches by late summer, a farmer only has to add 18.1 inches of irrigation to raise a decent crop. Sugar beets, though, need a total of 33.7 inches. 

Eastern Colorado farmers know corn if they know anything, said Joel Schneekloth, who retired this spring from his longtime job as a crop and water specialist for the northeast at the Colorado State University Water Center. Between demand for corn as feed and silage, and as an ethanol fuel stock for plants in Nebraska and Colorado, farmers know in the spring that they are likely to at least have cash flow in the fall to get them through another year. 

So Schneekloth and his team face a bumper crop of questions when they suggest northeastern farmers try a less-thirsty, drought-resilient plant like black-eyed peas. Also known as cowpeas, the nutritious legume has been a staple in southern states, in Africa and in the dry Middle East. 

Black-eyed peas get peak production with only 15 inches of total water in a season, Schneekloth’s charts show.

“It just does not show water stress like other crops do,” Schneekloth said. “They don’t wilt in the heat of the day. Part of that is the genetics. They’re a sub-Saharan crop.” 

Not only did they take less of the precious local water supply, but in theory it should be easier to get vital crop insurance on black-eyed pea stands, he added. Premiums could be cheaper because it’s less likely a drought will force the farmer to cash in on the policy.  

Saves water, smoother taste than pinto beans (in Schneekloth’s expert opinion), and gives farmers valuable risk options. … What’s the limitation? 

For one, said Schneekloth’s colleague at the CSU Akron crop test station, Sally Jones-Diamond, the gears from hundreds of years of agriculture bureaucracy turn slowly. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s risk management office doesn’t yet see black-eyed peas as a “common” crop, even though CSU is planting test patches of black-eyed peas from around the world right next to USDA experimental crops at their Akron shared station. Specialty crops require specialized written insurance agreements, Jones-Diamond said. 

“One day if they get their act together, and they get black-eyed peas added, then yes,” she said, farmers could get a price break on their risk. “But not as of now.” 

For another hindrance, look at equally slow-turning markets.

Many cultures have a tradition of a black-eyed pea stew for good luck on New Year’s Eve, but the other 364 days of the year can be brutal. Peru grows a lot of cowpeas and because of cheap rural labor can ship it all over the Western Hemisphere at prices lower than what U.S. farmers need. 

There are 1.3 million acres of corn grown by Colorado farmers each year. If only a few thousand of those were switched to black-eyed peas, the small handful of buyers in Colorado and Kansas would be flooded. 

“We could grow the heck out of them,” Schneekloth said. “As the old saying goes, one pickup load meets the market. One pickup load plus a 5-gallon bucket tanks the market.” 

Another farming wild card: Political whim 

Troy Waters can talk about alfalfa and winter wheat seeds all day. But one of his favorite conversation pieces in the back pocket of his Carhartts is a humble Mediterranean plant called false flax, which grows well at his multigeneration family farm in Fruita. 

The hierarchy at the Waters farm, which has long made a better living by growing crops for seeds to sell to other farmers, starts with water watchdogs’ favorite villain: alfalfa. The extremely nutritious and extremely thirsty bales can always raise welcome cash from local cattle ranchers or well-off dairy operations in Texas or Saudi Arabia. But Alfalfa can take up to 3 acre-feet of irrigation water in a season of multiple cuttings. 

Winter wheat takes significantly less water, and has added benefits of putting out roots to hold soil in damaging winds. But, like corn, it’s an enormous commodity crop with international competition and razor-thin profit margins in a good year. 

False flax is scientifically known as camelina. Run a healthy camelina crop through a press, and you get cattle forage, plus oil that can be mixed at 50% with kerosene to make a biodegradable and sustainable jet fuel. 

“In this valley, we could apply a little over an acre-foot of water less to camelina than we did to winter wheat,” Waters said. 

Waters took a gamble in 2024 and planted 235 acres of camelina, to grow seed stock for a national renewable energy company called Vision Bioenergy Oilseeds, based in Idaho. 

“I actually stuck my neck out. I did find out, we can raise it in this county, it yields really good, and I found out it takes a lot less water than winter wheat to raise a good crop,” Waters said. “The problem with it is, our current political climate changed a bit.” Fast-moving economic waves also rock the planning.

Major energy producers are now forming partnerships to grow camelina on large-scale farms, partly in response to growing demand from European nations mandating cleaner jet fuel mixes. But to plant camelina at scale, farmers need thousands of available acres, and expensive new equipment to handle camelina’s tiny seeds. 

“The seed company needs at least 2,000 acres to send out a train, otherwise it’s not worth it,” said Greg Peterson, director of the Colorado Ag Water Alliance. “And OK, we need a weigh station in Fruita, we need storage in Fruita. You can’t even go to a bank to get a loan for a grain silo anywhere, they’re not interested in funding that.”

One of the primary biofuel seedoil companies is backed by ExxonMobil, and the other is backed by Shell, Waters noted. “You tell me, with the price of oil right now, where are these companies going to throw their money? Drilling for more oil, or for a seed crop they’re still trying to convince farmers to raise?”

“The company I contracted for was willing to come in here and contract for 5,000 acres, and that’s a lot of acres in this valley for seed production,” Waters said. “But the whole industry’s kind of pulled back its horns a bit, and they don’t need any more. They overproduced in 2024. It just doesn’t pay.”

Widespread solutions will require deeper partnerships

Short of a central, Soviet-style planned farm economy, Coloradans interested in saving agricultural water will have to continue seeking piecemeal demonstration projects and solutions.

A typical, marginal Colorado farm this spring is facing fuel prices up 25%, fertilizer prices up more than that if they can get it at all, volatile tariffs playing havoc with international demand, and drought water allotments as low as 10% of normal. They need risk partners to try for the kinds of water savings the public tends to demand, said Peterson.. 

“I don’t want to come off as doom and gloom,” Peterson said. “I’m finding money to do alternative crop projects all the time. It’s just that I need 10 more people like me helping.” 

State agencies often have money for water experimentation, in $50,000 to $100,000 increments, Peterson noted. He helped a farmer in Conejos County find grant support to grow sainfoin as cattle forage in the southern end of the San Luis Valley instead of alfalfa. 

That experiment happens to coincide with impacts of climate change mentioned in a recent Colorado School of Mines study, where higher spring temperatures mean snowpack runoff is happening earlier. That matches up well with when sainfoin needs its first water, Peterson said. 

“But the saying with sainfoin is that year one, it sleeps; year two, it creeps; year three, it leaps,” he added. “Unless we figure out the economics right, you’re going to have to subsidize it until then.”

Colorado’s city water agencies have billions of dollars in revenue each year. Many Colorado counties facing buyups of their local agriculture water by cities are demanding more ethical treatment: Guarantees that dried-up land will be planted with sustainable local grasses, or requiring the city governments to backfill lost local tax revenues from unproductive land. 

Those water agencies will likely become more involved in the kind of water-saving partnerships that could give farmers the assurances they need to experiment, Peterson said. 

“I wouldn’t be surprised if in the next few years we’re ready to start making those asks,” Peterson said. “We have the data.”

In Fruita, Troy Waters and the son-in-law he hopes will continue the family farm are open to more options. What they are asking Front Range residents to understand is the basic economics of their lives. 

“We farmers don’t farm just for the fun of it,” Waters said. “We’ve got to make a living. So we can farm the next year.”

In our corner of the desert Southwest, it’s been spring since the fall.

The spell of October’s chinchweed marked the unexpected start of a second spring that I didn’t think would last beyond Halloween. Pectis papposa naturally comes to light weeks after summer monsoons, but I had never seen the tiny yellow flowers spill so magically across the Mojave. Especially so late in the year. Their bright display was a struck match to my exposed cornea, hypnotizing me into oblivion. It was disorienting — experiencing so much life even as the Northern Hemisphere began to tilt away from the sun.

Fall was supposed to be a time of shedding sunny summer habits, harvesting and hunkering down for cold, snowy nights. But the second wind of spring meant those cozy habits could die hard: We baked in the sun like chuckwallas, planted penstemons and searched for fairies in the buds of our bladderpod.

Howling storms hit the desert one after another, flooding nearby communities with wildfire debris and turning our dirt road into a date shake. Hints that second spring was transforming into forever spring came queerly as the days grew shorter but stayed warm. Some Joshua trees bloomed around Thanksgiving, and botanists worried they might not be serviced by the yucca moth, their only pollinator. But it wasn’t until the winter solstice that all hell broke loose: The flowerfields of Anza Borrego Desert State Park gushed with color three months early. My husband and I skirted the Salton Sea to see them and were lulled by tens of thousands of devil’s lanterns as we walked toward the looming phantom of a mountain. Giant white evening primrose flowers (Oenothera deltoides) lit the way and led us deeper into a beautiful nightmare.

What else could we do but attempt to enjoy the world out of sync? What’s the difference between strolling through an unusual bloom with chronic climate dread and attending Lady Gaga’s Mayhem Ball while LGBTQ+ rights are torched? Bright lights, whether flowers or strobes, can ignite us in dark times. But they can also be distractions: Did the deep state seed the clouds to cause the blooms and sidetrack us while they built concentration camps and mined our mountains to arm war criminals? Slow down, Sherlock; it’s OK to occasionally photosynthesize and expose our showy sex organs in the breeze as we monkey-wrench dystopia. We might lose ourselves if we don’t.

In true spring, after winter’s big rains, Anza Borrego’s flowerfields are often filled with Northbound songbirds, bees and the flap of over a billion painted lady butterflies. But that afternoon, during one of the darkest days of the year, there was an eerie silence that stopped my husband and I in our tracks. I knew then our reality had become a modern Southwestern Gothic. All the components of terror were there in our tale: supernatural plants, a chronically ill narrator (“Greetings …”), a generational curse called climate change, a vampire (more on that later) and, of course, a lone raven quorking by the road.

What else could we do but attempt to enjoy the world out of sync?

I’d been thinking of The Picture of Dorian Gray, perhaps one of the queerest Gothics, which some view today as an allegory for climate colonialism. Oscar Wilde’s main character, handsome Dorian Gray, descends into reckless hedonism throughout the book. One day, he wishes for a portrait of himself to “bear the burden of his passions and his sins” while he remains forever young. As the portrait’s face becomes hideous over time, he locks it away in a secret room. At one point, after a loved one dies, Dorian even declares, “If one doesn’t talk about a thing, it has never happened.” This denialism is prevalent in our 21st century and at the heart of why some authors are increasingly drawn to the Gothic as they write about climate change. “The Anthropocene remains a prophesy, a promise of future violence, and thus a ghostly, haunting presence,” the editors of Dark Scenes of Damaged Earth: The Gothic Anthropocene wrote.

Things only got creepier as forever spring was interrupted by summer-like heat spikes that broke California records in March. We followed more blooms during one heat wave, dropping to the floor of Death Valley, where we found sprawling gravel ghosts (Atrichoseris platyphylla) and caltha-leaf phacelias (Phacelia calthifolia). BEWARE THE PURPLE FLOWERS, a small visitor center sign declaimed like a soothsayer, warning of dermatitis. We slept naked without sheets under the “Worm Moon” before it eclipsed in bloody streaks, sweating the whole night through. In that silvery light, I could see the haunting bodies of flowers outside our tent. We humans often report ghosts of people, sometimes animals, but rarely other lifeforms. Especially extinct ones. Imagine crushed endangered buckwheat haunting Cybertrucks. Or a ghost eubacteria, like prochlorococcus, appearing at the foot of an oil company CEO’s bed on Christmas Eve.

Waking up to sunwashed flowerfields was the Dr. Jekyll to the night’s Mr. Hyde. We moseyed through desolate washes and canyons to find yet more uncanny blooms. Following a wash within a maze of an alluvial fan, we came to a lovely vista. The hills below us rolled, and 3-foot-tall sunflowers danced on every crease. We got low on the sand beside the flowers for a bug’s-eye view, looking up like the sphinx moth caterpillars that were munching their leaves. Joy and whimsy were so back.

But then we discovered a horrific murder scene: a sunflower strangled by bright orange vines. A small-tooth dodder plant had leapt out of the ground, pierced the desert gold with its “teeth” and was extracting its resources like a pumpjack. This slow violence on a 94-degree winter day was the key that unlocked Dorian’s secret room for me. Inside hung the ghastly portrait of the parasitic human greed that had caused this bizarre and worrisome Western winter. What happens when the haunted castle we were taught to fear is actually a superbloom?

We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.

This article appeared in the May 2026 print edition of the magazine with the headline “A beautiful nightmare.”

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Over the course of his long life, media mogul and philanthropist Ted Turner bought vast stretches of land in Colorado, New Mexico, Montana and Nebraska and managed them for conservation. That work is expected to continue, even after Turner’s death on May 6 at age 87.

One of the Turner family’s largest properties, the 363,000-acre Armendaris Ranch in south-central New Mexico, is shielded from development by the nation’s second-largest permanent conservation easement. According to a statement on Turner Enterprises’ website, the rest of the roughly 2 million-acre ranchland empire will “continue to be protected, limiting future development and parcellation.”

“Turner Ranches, the Turner Foundation and his other nonprofits intend to do stewardship and restoration on those lands,” said Jonathan Hayden, executive director of New Mexico Land Conservancy, which holds the conservation easement on the Armendaris Ranch. Turner “will be known for being an innovator in the conservation space and being willing to try new things, from reintroducing desert bighorn to bison restoration — things that take a lot of capital and vision.”

Who owns the West?

Turner, who bought his first ranch in 1987, spent the following decades acquiring 12 more in six Western states. He focused on buying properties that were suitable for raising bison, intending to use the animals to restore the land to its original state as well as supply meat for his restaurant chain, Ted’s Montana Grill. By all accounts, his land purchases were about more than easements, a tool some wealthy landowners use to avoid taxes. Turner said publicly and on his website that his properties would continue to pay taxes to contribute to local communities. He also viewed his land as a way to bring back some species that are at-risk in the West and across the nation.

He made headlines with vast properties like the Vermejo Ranch in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado, which he bought from the oil company Pennzoil. For years, his ranch managers worked to restore the overgrazed and overused 558,000-acre expanse, ultimately bringing back more than 1,200 bison and reviving riparian areas along 30 miles of streams and more than a dozen lakeshores.

In 1997, Turner created the Turner Endangered Species Fund, which reintroduced Mexican wolves at his Ladder Ranch in New Mexico and black-footed ferrets on the Bad River Ranch in South Dakota as well as on Vermejo. He also brought westslope cutthroat trout to his Flying D Ranch in southwest Montana.

The Armendaris is focused on “sustaining wildlife species in a time of unprecedented drought,” Hayden said. Operators there have restored populations of imperiled desert bighorn sheep, reintroduced the endangered Bolson tortoise and the aplomado falcon, and protected habitat for more than a million seasonal and migratory bats in the famous Jornada Bat Caves.

Turner “will be known for being an innovator in the conservation space and being willing to try new things, from reintroducing desert bighorn to bison restoration — things that take a lot of capital and vision.”

The ranch “was both a keystone project and a catalyst that demonstrates how integral private land conservation can be to preserving broader ecoregions,” Hayden said, noting that other landowners have followed Turner’s lead. Since the completion of the Armendaris easement, the New Mexico Land Conservancy has facilitated two conservation leases totaling 120,000 acres on state public lands and another five on private land.

Ted Turner makes a deal

But Turner’s ranches also concentrated on economic output, raising upward of 45,000 bison, as well as hosting sustainable timber harvest and high-end guided hunting, fishing and ecotourism, according to Turner’s websites. In 2021, he created the Turner Institute of Ecoagriculture with the goal of “conserving ecosystems, agriculture, and rural communities,” especially on his 80,000-acre McGinley Ranch, which straddles the Nebraska-South Dakota border.

“He understood from a practical standpoint that commerce and conservation have to go hand in hand,” said Lesli Alison, CEO of Western Landowners Alliance. “If commerce is pitted against conservation, nature will lose every time.”

This story is part of High Country News’ Conservation Beyond Boundaries project, which is supported by the BAND Foundation and the Mighty Arrow Family Foundation.

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