Onaqui is threatened by the Stookey fire.

For those of us who follow wild horses and burros on public lands, fire is not an abstraction — it moves through the same Herd Management Areas (HMA) and Wild Horse Territories (WHT) where our herds live, and it reshapes the range they depend on.

We will try to update the chart as time allows. There is no single source for full information. We pulled from multiple sources to try to give you as accurate a picture as possible. There may be fires we did not find. PLEASE check in with the local offices of the agency that manages the land you are going to travel.

Climate change is very real. Water table drawdowns and drought. Many towns are threatened by fire as well as wild places. Please be careful.

We will update this list as time allows to show acres burned. These are approximate active fire boundaries and do not include complete acres burned inside wild horse and burros areas.

These lists may not be complete. We are only using active reported data. Please check with your local agency offices. 

Updated list, 7/26

The towns of Hines and Burns are under level 1, be ready, evacuation orders. This now includes the Burns wild horse and burro corrals.

Updated list, actively burning: July 25

Another fire in an HMA reported by one of our team members today. Scorp fire in the Black Mountain HMA in Idaho. We will update our main list as time allows.

July 21

No fire is within 15 miles of any of the burro-only HMAs (Black Mountain, Havasu, Chemehuevi, Silver Peak, Muddy Mountains, the Colorado River burro country, etc.). Those southwestern desert HMAs are quiet in the current national feed today. The data available is limited to only what we can find on the national database. Fires being reported now through local channels are not in that database.

The fire near Saylor Creek in Idaho was extinguished before the roundup.

Below: Over the last 10 years the BLM removed roughly 2,900 wild horses and more than 500 burros from the nearly 800,000-acre Twin Peaks Herd Management Area (789,852 acres along the California–Nevada border) across three roundups and after the final 2024 roundup—based on BLM’s own census—an estimated 894 wild horses and about 140 burros were left on the range. Twin Peaks is threatened by the rapidly growing Biscar fire. 

What to know before you travel off-road

If you head onto public lands to observe — for a herd, for documentation, or just to be outdoors — fire changes the rules fast. Much of the West is under active fire restrictions this summer. BLM has urged public awareness across the Pacific Northwest, and states like Utah moved to Stage 2 restrictions on BLM lands in June.

A pre-trip checklist for range travel:

1. Check the managing agency’s fire page first. Search the specific BLM district or National Forest name plus “fire restrictions,” and read the official alerts page for closures.
2. Know your restriction stage. Stage 1 and Stage 2 restrictions can ban open fire, campfires, smoking outside vehicles, generators, and even driving or parking on dry grass — a hot exhaust or catalytic converter over cheatgrass is a documented ignition source.
3. DO NOT DRIVE off a clearly marked dirt or gravel road or two-track. DO NOT drive overland. It is forbidden any time of year and during fire season is S-T-U-P-I-D.
4. Watch for area and road closures. Active fires close entire districts and roads with little notice (for example, the Babylon Fire closure that expanded to cover an entire ranger district) (Moab Sun News). Never drive around a closure barricade.
5. Carry the basics and a backup plan. Full fuel, a shovel and fire extinguisher, paper maps, and at least one alternate route saved before you lose cell service. Pack water and more water than you think you will need.
6. Recheck after lightning, wind, or extreme heat — conditions and closures can flip in hours.
7. Mind the smoke. Check air quality if fires are anywhere nearby; smoke can be hazardous well beyond the flames.

Murderers Creek is impacted by 2 fires.

Are wildfires actually increasing? Yes — the long trend is unmistakable

Year-to-year totals swing wildly, so any single season can mislead. But over decades, the direction is clear. A USA TODAY analysis of federal data found that between 1984 and 2024 more than 16,000 large wildfires burned roughly 179 million acres — an area larger than Texas — and that by the early 2020s the average annual acreage burned had nearly tripled compared with the 1990s.

2026 is running well ahead of normal. As of mid-July, the National Interagency Fire Center’s situation reports put the season at roughly 3.9 million acres burned year-to-date and earlier tallies had activity running around 130% of the 10-year average for fire counts and close to 150% for acres. Scientists say a hotter, “thirstier” atmosphere that dries out vegetation, longer droughts  (climate change) and expanding development pushing people into fire-prone country are main drivers.

Fires are getting bigger and more frequent, the people who fight them are working through a major and controversial reorganization at reduced strength, and the true national cost runs into the hundreds of billions each year.

Adobe Town, the Butterfly fire sits right at the border. Nearly the exact location where wild horses were removed from last July.

We know you are worried, and rightly so.

What NOT to do:

• Do not enter a closed or restricted fire area. It is illegal, it can trigger your own rescue, and it pulls scarce firefighters and law enforcement away from the fire.
• Do not drive into or near a fire zone to look for horses. Beyond the danger to you, vehicles on dry vegetation start new fires, and your presence can panic animals into running toward danger.
• Do not try to herd, chase, corral, or “push” horses to safety. Well-meaning intervention frequently drives horses into fences, roads, or the fire itself. Wild horses evade fire better without human pressure.
• Do not fly a drone anywhere near a wildfire. Drones ground firefighting aircraft — every time an unauthorized drone appears, tankers and helicopters are grounded for safety. It is illegal and it can cost lives and let a fire grow.

How to monitor — and how to know when it’s safe to check on your herd

You can stay closely informed without ever putting yourself, firefighters, or the horses at risk.

Monitor the fire itself:

• InciWeb (inciweb.wildfire.gov) is the interagency clearinghouse for incident details, maps, and updates on larger fires.
• NIFC (nifc.gov) publishes daily situation reports and the National Preparedness Level, a 1–5 gauge of how strained resources are; it was pushed to Level 4 in early July (Mercury News).
• The managing BLM district or National Forest posts closures, restriction stages, and reopenings on their alerts pages.
• Local county sheriff and emergency management channels carry evacuation and closure orders, often first.

Know it’s safe to go back only when the agency says so. The reliable signal is an official reopening notice — closures are formally lifted as containment increases and hazards are cleared, exactly as happened when the Snyder Fire’s public-lands closures were reopened (Vail Daily). Before you go:

1. Confirm the specific area or road closure has been officially rescinded by the managing agency — not just that the fire is “contained.” Containment is not the same as safe or open.
2. Check the current fire restriction stage for the district; the fire can be out while restrictions remain.
3. Watch for residual hazards: hot spots, falling burned trees (snags), unstable ground, ash pits, and flash-flood risk on burn scars after rain.
4. Coordinate with the local BLM Office for that HMA. They can tell you what roads are open and give you additional information. They can also tell you who, specifically, to contact if you see something (like a hotspot or injured animal) when you do go out.
5. When you do go, document rather than intervene — photos, locations, and welfare observations are exactly the kind of field record that supports advocacy, appeals, and accountability. Send them to the appropriate local agency office if intervention is needed immediately.

PLEASE… be safe out there. 

Litchfield

We are getting a lot of questions about the Litchfield holding corrals near Susanville.

The Biscar Fire is burning north of Litchfield, has crossed Highway 395, and forced evacuations “on both sides of the highway north of Karlo and south of Horse Lake”. The fire has grown to roughly 40,000–59,000 acres at 5% containment and expanded across the state line into Washoe County, with GO NOW orders including the Twin Peaks area.

We are keeping a close eye.

WHE is a small organization with no corporate sponsors or big endorsements. We need your support to keep our teams engaging lawmakers, our team fighting in the court, our team ready to run the roundup schedule.

Every mile we travel to cover roundups or assess a herd, every court case we bring, every win, every action we take is only possible because of your support.