Wildfires rip through unusual parts of U.S., raising fears of a brutal season

By late March, Nebraska was already in the throes of a historic wildfire event that had burned more than a half-million acres. In South Dakota and Wyoming, strong, dry winds are flaring up big blazes. Dozens of residents in two Colorado counties had to evacuate over the weekend as record hot temperatures and extremely low humidity fueled the rapid spread of fires in the parched brush. And until last week, it was still technically winter.

Wildfires are ripping across the Great Plains, and other flare-ups are popping up in Arizona and Colorado remarkably early in the season. Firefighters and experts are watching these giant red splotches of burning forest and grasslands with alarm, warning that the timing, ingredients fueling their startling growth, and what they signal about the fire season ahead is a recipe for concern – perhaps signaling an expanding frontier for fire risk in broader patches of the western half of the United States.

“To sum it up,” Pete Curran, a staff meteorologist for Watch Duty, a nonprofit that tracks wildfires live and sends updates to users in real time, and former captain at the Orange County Fire Authority, put it bluntly: “We are scared.”

“To have any fire that goes hundreds of thousands of acres in a day anywhere is very unusual at any time of the year, let alone in mid-March,” he added about the blazes in Nebraska. “It got everyone’s attention.”

Many fire-prone parts of the country did not get a real, substantial winter, one that typically leaves mountains and soil with a solid snowpack to help cushion the transition into unrelenting summer heat. Combine that with the kind of dry cold fronts that brought powerful fire-igniting winds in late February in the Oklahoma Panhandle and southern Kansas; an unprecedented heat dome parked over a slew of states from California to the Great Plains that brought the country’s highest-ever March temperature; and wildfire crews already stretched thin. Meteorologists, climate scientists and firefighters who monitor such activity closely are already calculating how they can spread their resources across regions if these kinds of fires begin to pop off simultaneously.

The lack of seasonal rain and snow has drastically dried out grasslands in places like Nebraska, which has vast, interrupted stretches of grass prairie lands, said Curran, who has been working in the wildfire space for 45 years. That has enabled blazes such as the record-breaking Morrill Fire to run fast and hard, burning 643,000 acres in a week and becoming not only the largest blaze in state history, but even topping some of California’s largest incidents.

The scale of the Nebraska fire was notable because although wildfires often move into higher elevations and hit different types of fuels such as timber, at this time of year the fuels would usually be too wet to incinerate.

“California can get fires that large, but it’s more rare,” Curran said. “Northern California grasses and small fuels are drying quicker than average this year. But nothing like what they have been seeing in the Midwest.”

While Nebraska does get some fires, the Morrill Fire shocked firefighters who say they are used to seeing that kind of fire behavior later in the season, said Tim Casperson, a former wildland firefighter who now runs The Hotshot Wake Up, a news source for all things wildfire.

As of Monday, a pair of sprawling fires in the Cornhusker State were both more than 96 percent contained – having scorched a combined 770,000 acres, according to data from the National Interagency Fire Center.

Before this year, 2012 was considered Nebraska’s worst fire season, when more than 500,000 acres burned. The Morrill Fire shattered that record in a few days.

“It’s a big heads-up,” Casperson said. “Have I seen it before? Yes. In Utah back in 2012 when there was a low snow pack. But then, you know, you have a 15-year lull where you don’t see something like this.”

With a gap like that, some can forget what the risk means for their area, he added: “People kind of have amnesia when it comes to wildfire.”

Jordan Adams, who has lived in Nebraska his entire life, said he’s never witnessed anything like the blazes torching tens of thousands of acres.

A hunter from Grand Island, Adams had placed a trail camera in the west-central part of the state near Brady – full of grasslands and canyons – hoping to capture deer, elk, coyote and bobcats. But he captured much more than he bargained for.

A separate blaze dubbed the Cottonwood Fire engulfed his camera as it was rapidly expanding in size to more than 125,000 acres. He didn’t expect to salvage any footage, but after peeling the melted mass apart, he saw that the camera’s SD card was intact.

“Upon opening the files on the computer, I think I had to pick my jaw up off the floor realizing what I actually had photos of,” he said.

The area around his camera was engulfed in flames within seconds, a sign of the aggressive fire behavior and spread that can be largely foreign to this part of the country. At the time, winds were gusting to around 50 mph and relative humidity was extremely low in nearby North Platte. On this winter’s evening, it was around 70 degrees – a typical high temperature in mid-May.

Citing a recently released report about climate change in Nebraska, state climatologist Deborah Bathke said winter and spring temperatures have been rising there, and the western half of the state is seeing fewer days with snow on the ground because of decreasing precipitation – while wind gusts during March are growing more intense.

These climatic changes are consistent with increasing wildfire frequency and a lengthening season.

“These changes are expected to continue through the end of the century,” said Bathke.

Over the next few weeks, there’s little relief in the form of rain on the horizon for Nebraska. Another big surge of wind is expected Thursday and will be preceded by record heat on Wednesday. A recently updated seasonal outlook from the Climate Prediction Center expects more drought through June.

The same goes for places such as New Mexico, Wyoming, Florida, Texas, South Dakota and parts of Arizona, said Casperson. It reached 84 degrees in Flagstaff, Arizona, on Thursday – a temperature that had never previously been reached in the city before May 2, considering records dating to 1898.

But the state Casperson is watching the most closely?

“Colorado is where I’m looking,” he said.

The state has a history of powerful, explosive blazes that can rip through dry grasslands and forests and have only been getting worse – 17 of the 20 largest wildfires occurred in the last 10 years. In 2020, three wildfires shattered records with how much land they burned, damaging large parts of state parks. A year later, the Marshall Fire destroyed more than 1,000 homes in the suburbs outside Boulder.

And now, a historically low snowpack in the state has enabled small fires to grow faster than they would normally in March. According to the Colorado climate center at Colorado State University, “essentially all of Colorado is in a snow drought.” Mountain ranges that would usually be covered in white this time of year have large patches of dirt exposed, and the amount of water stored in snow is the lowest it’s been since 1987, the Climate Center reported last month.

One blaze called the 24 Fire currently burning near Fort Carson by Colorado Springs more than doubled in size in about 24 hours: Growing from 1,927 acres Saturday evening to 4,607 by Sunday afternoon, according to updates from the Fremont County Sheriff’s Office. Firefighters in Eagle County, home to the world-class ski resort Vail, are preparing for their “worst wildfire season ever” due to the extremely dry state of the timber, the Daily Vail reported.

Democratic lawmakers have also been tracking the deteriorating conditions and sounded the alarm to federal officials. On March 4, the state’s Democratic senators, Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper, and four other lawmakers from the state wrote a letter to Tom Schultz, chief of the U.S. Forest Service, urging him to prioritize wildfire mitigation initiatives across the state and the West due to what is shaping up to be a “potentially catastrophic fire season.”

The Forest Service has been struggling with staffing and retention for years. In 2025, the agency lost 16 percent of its workforce largely due to cuts and buyout programs by the Trump administration’s U.S. DOGE Service. The Agriculture and Interior departments also cut thousands of workers. Such losses resulted in a 38 percent reduction in hazardous fuel work last year compared to the previous four years, according to the letter.

“With the West heading into the 2026 fire season during one of the worst droughts in history, the likely detrimental effects of staffing shortages and lack of critical wildfire mitigation are of grave concern to Colorado communities,” the letter states, listing projects such as forest thinning, insect treatments and prescribed fire that could help lessen the risk of massive wildfires.

“USFS’ lack of preparation last year puts communities across the West at risk,” the lawmakers argue. “The agency must take every possible action now to reduce the extreme danger we face going into potentially one of the driest summers on record.”

California is also bracing for a potentially devastating summer and fall.

While the state received beneficial precipitation this winter – it was declared free of drought in January, the first time in a quarter-century – the recent, punishing heat wave is pushing parts of the state back into dry territory. That means all that vegetation that grew thanks to the ample rains can quickly turn into fire fuel.

The northwest has also been losing federal firefighting teams for years. The region once had 14 Incident Management Teams (IMTs) and is now down to seven, according to a U.S. Forest Service official and a copy of a roster. The Trump administration’s deferred resignation program and probationary firings accelerated those shortages, two USFS officials with knowledge of the situation said.

Last year, California also lost two more of the specialized IMTs, which are largely made up of federal officers with various expertise who respond to large and complex wildfires. They are key when there is a major incident in a state that prompts the need for mutual aid, when fire teams from another state are deployed to assist. Firefighters and experts said with fewer in the region, that means there are less bodies and less experience to respond if and when multiple fires kick off simultaneously

“All of the handwriting is on the wall in terms of the strong heating, which will hasten the drying of fuels and snowmelts,” said Curran. “So, what’s next? That’s the question.”

CORRECTION: A previous version of this article incorrectly referred to Pete Curran as a former chief of the Orange County Fire Authority. He is a former captain.