It’s been nearly four years since the Bear Fire swept through northern California, leaving a wake of destruction in its path. The fire was one of 21 fires sparked by lightning in mid-August of 2020 in Plumas and Butte counties of the Plumas National Forest, developing into the larger North Complex Fire. The fires engulfed nearly 320,000 acres, killing 16 people, leveling nearby towns and destroying thousands of acres of land and infrastructure.
Among those deeply affected was California rancher Dave Daley, whose family has ranched in the mountains for generations spanning back to the late 1800s. The fire wiped out the heart of the family’s cow herd, more than half of the total herd, with losses reaching nearly 400 pairs.
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“It was tough in lots of ways because we had been taking cattle up there since the late 1800s, 1880 or so, according to family diaries, and it was a beautiful landscape,” Daley told WLJ. “It was tough financially, but it was also the loss of the landscape and the family history.”
The land is still recovering, several years later, and Daley said he doesn’t expect it to fully recover in his lifetime, but maybe in his grandkids’ lifetimes.
Fire impacts
The Daleys manage their cattle in the forest on a unique permit that is half federally owned by the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) and half privately leased from Sierra Pacific Industries (SPI), a forest-products company. The permit covers about 100,000 acres and is home to Feather Falls on Fall River, one of the highest falls in the U.S. The grazing permit is on the west slope of the Sierra Nevada mountain range and unlike traditional cattle country, the permitted area is primarily timberland with a few scattered meadows.
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The grazing season begins June 1 and runs until late October. Then the cows return to privately deeded ranches and are wintered in the foothills of the Sacramento Valley. Daley is a firm believer in crossbreeding, and the cow herd reflects that. The herd is mostly made up of a black base using Angus/Hereford crosses, with some Red Angus genetics. It is a fall-calving herd, and the majority of the cows calve in the mountains starting in early August.
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When the fire struck in September, the majority of cows already had young calves by their side or were close to calving, adding to the emotional toll of the losses. A small saving grace was the family always keeps first-calf heifers and a few other cows that aren’t suited for the mountain terrain on the home ranch, sparing some of the herd from the fires.
Most of the deceased cattle were never found, and the ones that were found were so burned and disintegrated that little more than bones remained. Some cows were found alive and brought home but were euthanized due to burnt hides, ears, udders and hooves. The cattle that survived and recovered have earned themselves a permanent spot on the ranch, Daley said.
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Following the fires, Daley took a year off grazing on the forest permit but needed somewhere to run cattle after they came off their winter range in the foothills. Sierra Pacific was willing to work with Daley to put cows back on the lease, but at the time, the company was trucking hundreds of loads of logs a day out of the mountains down a singular, narrow mountain road, making it difficult to get up to the permit area. In the meantime, the Daleys were able to find private leases to run cattle for a season while they began to rebuild the herd.
“You have to be resilient,” Daley emphasized. “You cannot quit.” He noted that they could have found completely new leases and given up the mountains, “but nobody wanted to do that.”
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Recovery efforts
Beginning in 2022, Daley slowly started running cattle on the original lease and has built back to full utilization, but the landscape has drastically changed. Millions of trees have since been planted, but there remains limited feed for cattle to graze.
“This is big timber country,” Daley said. “These are not small pine trees—these are huge trees and they’re standing dead for about 60,000 acres of the forest. It’s a tough landscape because there’s feed coming up between it, but the first big wind that comes, these trees start to fall. You don’t go anywhere without a saw right now because everything’s going to be blocked by the dead timber.”
USFS was limited in its cleanup efforts on the federal allotments because there’s no mill capacity anymore, and because of how slowly the bureaucracy functions, Daley said, so there was nothing to do with the timber besides stack it and burn it. Private entities were able to take some timber to the mills, but the government failed to get a contract done while the timber still had value, leaving massive trees standing dead or stacked to burn.
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“It’s really tragic from a resource perspective and also from the landscape,” Daley said. He noted that it’s still tough for the family to go up to the mountains because there is very little regeneration in place.
“We just had a fire the other day where we lost 1,000 acres of our winter ground,” Daley said, “but that’s a grass fire. A forest fire and a grass fire are not the same thing. The forest fire had so much fuel because the trees have not been managed and the federal government has not thinned them. There was just so much to burn.”
The catch pens and small corrals scattered around the lease also completely melted due to the heat of the flames. The family has rebuilt one corral to where trucks can load in and out, and plans to build another this summer, which should accommodate much of the gathering. In addition to lost infrastructure, the main road disappeared from the scorching heat and the amount of traffic from hauling logs out. This has also led to difficulties sourcing truckers to haul cattle to the lease, with few willing to brave the potholes and uneven terrain.
Rebuilding the herd
The No. 1 challenge the Daleys face now, and have faced over the past four years, is rebuilding their herd.
“That’s been an interesting challenge because we’re trying to expand in a really hot cattle market,” Daley explained. “It’s a catch-22. I’m really excited about it because the market is great, but if you’re trying to expand, it’s not the best time.”
Adding to the challenge is finding cattle that can adapt to the high elevations and terrain of the mountains. “There aren’t that many true range cattle that can run in remote and tough conditions,” Daley said. “So, we haven’t been able to expand as quickly as we would like.”
He added, “What we really have to do is get the heifers and their daughters bred to our bulls, raised in that environment to learn the country, and I think we’ll be better off.”
However, “Take the money out of it, and it’s still not a fast process to rebuild the cow herd that fits your range.”
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In terms of federal support for rebuilding efforts, Daley said the Farm Service Agency’s (FSA) disaster relief programs played a critical role in offering partial compensation. “I’m not a big fan of taking government money,” Daley said, but noted it felt necessary since the fire was caused by no fault of their own. FSA’s programs provided a bit of a safety net, which allowed them to begin their rebuilding efforts.
“That program helped us stay in business,” he said. “I think we would have done it anyway, but I don’t know how. It would have been hard, but we would have just had to do something. Because we can’t just quit.”
Regulatory fixes
Fire has been a deeply personal topic for Daley, but now it’s grown to more than that. “For me, it started with the Bear Fire,” he said. “I knew about how important it was, but I’ve been studying it so much that now it’s way bigger than me losing my cow herd.”
He continued, “I’ve seen this play out over and over throughout the West, and it’s an issue we have to keep in front of people.” He said most people don’t see wildlands fires, so while they’re sympathetic at first, it quickly becomes out of sight, out of mind. But now that the public is becoming more afraid of losing their homes and insurance, pressure is starting to come from more than the ranching community.
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“If we try and push this as ranchers alone, nothing’s going to change, folks,” Daley said. “We need to build alliances with all the groups who realize they’re losing the landscape of the West.”
Daley continued that he thinks the conversation around fires is changing, but he’s yet to see much action on the ground. It’s a heightened issue that everyone is more aware of, but some of the mitigation strategies—like prescribed burns—are intimidating. There is a fear around conducting burns or thinning projects due to concerns over the potential for escaped fires, like recently happened in New Mexico, regulatory issues or legal repercussions related to endangered species.
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“In this paralyzed political environment, with so much division, it’s hard to get anything done,” he said. “Most of our challenges are not because of California regulations, but federal regulations that govern the National Forest System. People naturally assume this is a California issue. It is not, This is a federal issue that wreaks havoc throughout the west.”
He met with the USFS district ranger, who was understanding, but explained USFS simply doesn’t have the financial resources or the staffing to address the landscape at the necessary scale. The agency has funding coming through the Inflation Reduction Act, but efforts are focused on the wildland urban interface, the areas between unoccupied land and human development. This is an effort that Daley understands but says it “leaves those of us in the hinterlands a little bit on our own.”
Family legacy
Daley’s family members all play a part in the legacy and continuation of the ranch. Daley’s oldest son and his family are full-time on the ranch. His middle daughter is a veterinarian a few hours away, but she and her family remain involved and run cattle. His youngest son recently completed his military service and returned to the ranch, building a cow herd in addition to working as an ag teacher.
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“I’ve got one fully back and two partially back,” Daley said. “They’ll always be part of it. And like any legacy family planning, those dynamics you have to keep working through. That’s also part of resilience—who wants to be involved?”
Succession planning changes over time he said, adding that at 66-years-old it is definitely time to start figuring out what the transition to the next generation is going to look like.
“It’s the cows, it’s the finances, it’s the land and, most importantly, it’s the family. All of these make up the dynamic,” he concluded. “I think that’s why I love this business—because it’s not simple. It’s very complex. It’s very challenging. And I think that’s part of what makes us tick, keeps us going.”
