Joe Stutler was in the woods a few days ago, walking through the verdant Cascade Range, whose peaks rise up from the Pacific coast. For as long as anyone can remember, winter has brought extraordinary masses of snow to these mountains. The biggest snowfall ever recorded fell in the northern reaches of the range, 29 metres in a single season. Even in the southern parts, where Mr. Stutler has lived since 1999 near the Oregon city of Sisters, determined skiers can often find suitable slopes in July.
But what Mr. Stutler found this year was unlike anything he, or anyone in recorded memory, has seen before. Rather than a glistening coat of white several feet thick, the ground was bare. The forest floor was not springy and wet. It was audibly dry.
This is not how the forest in early May is supposed to sound.
“As you’re walking, you hear your footsteps on the ground fuel. Hear it. It’s like walking in cornflakes. It’s a crackle,” said Mr. Stutler, 76, a former smokejumper who is looking ahead to his 58th forest fire season with disquiet.
Never before has so much of the American West seen so little snow. Eight states − Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah and Wyoming − reported record-low snowpack levels in April.
At some federally operated monitoring stations, this year’s snow had completely melted before the date at which it typically reaches peak accumulation. At one in southern Oregon, it happened 2½ months ahead of normal.
At one point on his recent walk, Mr. Stutler stopped to dig his heel into the ground, scratching past the decomposing layers that make up the forest duff, then down into the dirt below. “I had to go about eight inches until I reached any moisture at all,” he said. “We wouldn’t see that, in a normal year, until the end of July.”
Oregonians are eager to avoid a repeat of past devastating fire seasons. This is the Eagle Creek wildfire near Cascade Locks in 2017, an especially bad year for the state.Genna Martin/seattlepi.com via AP
What comes next will depend on a host of factors: whether rain falls, lightning strikes, cigarettes are carelessly tossed or arsonists seek to feed their lust for flame. But Mr. Stutler has spent more than a half-century watching fire devour forest, and he knows the magnitude of conflagration these conditions can produce.
“All the indicators are that this is going to be a pretty tough year,” he said.
Forecasters call it a snow drought. Oregon state climatologist Larry O’Neill calls it a distressing omen. “Much worse is yet to come. One big reason is because the snowpack is our largest reservoir of water. And it’s empty. It’s completely empty,” said Prof. O’Neill, who is also a climate scientist at Oregon State University.
Across the West, roughly half of the annual surface water supply initially falls as snow. In parts of eastern Oregon, it’s closer to 70 per cent.
Having so little snow has all sorts of consequences. Parched hydro reservoirs could cut back summer electricity output, perhaps by 10 per cent to 15 per cent. Fields that are normally irrigated could be left to dry and die.
States could find themselves in bitter legal battles over who gets to use what water remains, testing the Colorado River compact that has underpinned a century of western development.
And across a western landscape already blackened by years of burns, the forests are primed to once again erupt.
Those conditions bring considerable risk for Canada, where fully 8 per cent of the forest has burned in the past three years alone. But parts of the Canadian West have seen an unusual bounty of snow this year − with so much in the Rockies that Banff Sunshine Village is planning a summer ski season.
In the U.S., by contrast, large wildfires have already broken out in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Oklahoma and Montana. Smaller fires have erupted across the West.
Signs warn campers to be cautious near Bend. In the right conditions, a stray cigarette or overheated vehicle can start a fire.
“The handwriting is on the wall to probably be a catastrophic fire season,” said R.D. Buell, district manager of the Walker Range Fire Patrol, which oversees fire protection on private and state lands in and around the Oregon’s Deschutes River Valley.
He speaks from experience. At 75, this is his 52nd fire season. What he has seen this spring reminds him of the early days of his career.
The summer of 1977 marked what was then the driest 12-month period since recordkeeping began in 1849. Fire raged across southern Oregon and down into California. A single lightning storm sparked 30 fires. At least one local river ran dry. Members of the Air National Guard were called in to assist.
Forty-nine years later, Mr. Buell has been mulling those memories “all winter,” he said.
His worries have been reinforced by what he sees. In some places, too little snow fell to flatten old grasses, which now stand tall, dry and dangerous.
Moisture levels in downed timber are at 7 per cent to 14 per cent, between a third and half of what they should be this time of year. To his eye, the desiccated forest is even obvious in the logging trucks that roll by, their timber lighter than it should be because it lacks moisture.
That’s not to say that record-low snow will, with certainty, yield record fire.
“There’s not really a great correlation between active fire season and the snowpack,” said Ted Pierce, manager of the Northwest Interagency Coordination Center, which works with federal and state wildfire agencies. Early snowmelt can bring early fires − and some have already broken out in the south Cascades − but that does not necessarily portend a season of cataclysm.
Mr. Stutler recalled 2007, another dry year, when “people were saying Armageddon” was imminent. Instead, “it rained every day, off and on, from the middle of May to the middle of July.”
Still, he is anxious about the year ahead, especially with federal cuts that have harmed wildfire fighting capabilities.
“We could be pretty easily overcome here,” he said.
In Crater Lake Park – where a black bear ambles through a snowless field – someone had already cleared brush on the lone exit road, in hopes of preventing future fires.
That unease hangs over Crater Lake, whose cerulean high-altitude waters are among Oregon’s best-known places.
“We’re terrified,” said Bruce James, a Crater Lake National Park ranger. Normally, early May visitors drive up through a canyon of snow that towers nearly three metres. This year, most shoulders are snow-free. Conditions are dry enough to conceive of fire climbing toward the caldera rim, more than two kilometres above sea level.
Protective measures have been taken, including clearing brush from roadsides. But Mr. James looks at the cedar shakes on the roofs of park buildings, which date to the 1930s. “All it’s going to take is some embers drifting in here,” he said. “We could lose all of this.”
In other areas, people are wondering if things will be bad enough that they should take shelter elsewhere. Even if conditions prevent the worst fires from erupting, there is reason to expect this will be an unusually long fire season − and with it, extended periods of smoke, said Bennett Ariza, an EMT who was cycling outside of Bend, Ore., with a friend this week. They pedalled miles of road that would normally be impassable with snow.
Mr. Ariza usually travels in late summer. This year, he’s contemplating a much more distant escape.
“We were talking, like, Nicaragua, maybe?” he said. “Maybe Iceland.”
These roads near Bend, Ore., were atypically snow-free when Bennett Ariza and Tim Brown took a ride recently. Mr. Ariza mused about vacationing far away in late summer, when fire season is at its peak.