Twenty-five miles up a winding, bumpy, access road off Tenino Road on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation, there are no street names, no signs, no cell service — just towering ponderosa pines, the occasional loose horse or cow and miles of dirt road.
And the firefighters. Lots of them.
On Thursday, crews battled the sprawling Bench fire amid a suffocating haze of burned pine needles, surrounded by blackened trunks and smoldering ash. The unmistakable smell of burning pine hung heavy in the air.
Along the road, stray groups of firefighters torched what little land the 66,000-acre fire hadn't, using drip torches to ignite dry pine needles and brush.
According to Javin Dimmick, the Warm Springs wildland fire public information officer, the counterintuitive firefighting method, known as tactical firing, has been a key tool, helping crews save land, homes and lives. The goal is simple: keep the fire from jumping the road by destroying the remaining fuel before the wildfire could beat them to it.
It works. Crews were able to limit the fire's growth to about 4,000 acres after it had exploded by roughly 15,000 acres the previous night. But despite the progress, the fire remained just 22% contained, said Warm Springs Secretary-Treasurer and CEO Edward Henderson. And along the way, it destroyed eight homes and five structures across the reservation.
For tribal members, Henderson said, the wasteland of burned forest is more than charred trees. Many feel, in a sense, an unavoidable failure to protect the land they are so deeply connected to.
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"A lot of tribe members will go up into the woods, and it's just something about being in the woods and walking and just taking it all in, so it is very difficult for us," he said. "First of all, you get the stress and the trauma of the fire and being displaced in real time, and then as you're taking a lot of inventory you are realizing the things you lost with the land."
"We're supposed to be the stewards of the land," he added, "and our land's burning up, so you take that kind of hard."
For local tribal member Wilson Wewa, there was no time to evacuate his livestock the roughly 20 miles to the emergency livestock shelter in nearby Madras, he said Wednesday outside the reservation's evacuation shelter.
As the flames neared his home, Wewa opened his gates, freeing his two horses to fend for themselves.
Wewa then spent the night in his truck, trying to outlast the wall of flames and protect his home. But as the fire closed in, he was forced to flee.
When he returned home earlier this week, he found his house still standing. His two horses had returned as well, joined by nearly a dozen others that had wandered to the water trough in his yard.
Wewa was far from the only one who refused to heed the Level 3 (go now) evacuation orders. In fact, nearly every resident outside the shelter could name family members who stayed behind with garden hoses and prayers that their homes would be spared.
They said the desperate attempts were about more than saving a house or a piece of property. They were trying to protect centuries-old beadwork, artwork and other belongings passed down through generations.
Those family heirlooms, combined with the multigenerational households common on the reservation, are what make losing a home especially devastating, Henderson said. A single house often shelters great-grandparents, grandparents, parents and grandchildren under one roof, meaning a fire doesn't just displace a family — it uproots several generations at once.
"There's a thought that a house here is the same as a house on the outside or off the reservation, and that's not true," Henderson said. "It's not a one-for-one correlation because the house that's owned outside generally is one family. Here we're usually generational families."
In one of the eight homes lost in the blaze, Henderson said, a woman lost baskets and heirlooms handed down from her great-great-grandparents in the 1800s.
"I can't even fathom. You can't even replace that," he said.
The community also lost a church dating to the 1800s, Henderson confirmed. Outside the evacuation shelter, several residents spoke fondly of the church and the memories they had there.
But despite the immense — and, in many cases, irreplaceable — loss, Henderson said the Warm Springs community has endured hardship for centuries and will endure this, too.
He traced that resilience back to the arrival of Christopher Columbus and the generations that followed, saying tribal nations survived disease, displacement and genocide. The reservation itself, he said, was not land that was simply "given" to the tribes, but what remained after their ancestors fought to preserve it.
As for the Bench fire, Henderson said that same resilience is rooted in a bond with the land that has endured for generations.
"We're very resilient people," Henderson said. "When you're part of the land and that's part of you, you somehow survive."
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