Editor's Note: The cause of the Ross Fire has been linked to equipment used following a tire blowout, Texas A&M Forest Service Law Enforcement announced Wednesday evening.

Jamie Landers and Niamh Ordner

The Dallas Morning News

(TNS)

DALLAS — Fire is an opportunist; it moves toward whatever will feed it. And in Palo Pinto County, the land was primed to burn.

Little is known about how the fire started Aug. 24, only that it ignited somewhere along Highway 180, about 60 miles west of Fort Worth. What came next was written into the landscape: High winds and higher temperatures drove flames through valleys of brittle grass, dry brush and timber.

By the next morning, the Ross fire had burgeoned from 7,000 acres to more than 50,000, crossing into Jack County, forcing hundreds from their homes and ravaging a beloved Boy Scout camp that has stood for nearly a century.

The fire’s footprint has hardly changed since it surpassed 80,000 acres on Aug. 26. As of Tuesday morning, officials were reporting just over 90,000 acres of scorched land, with the blaze only 31% contained.

The Ross fire is not an anomaly so much as a warning. Only two years have passed since the Smokehouse Creek fire reached historic levels of destruction in the Panhandle, burning well over a million acres in a region home to the vast majority of Texas’ cattle. That fire showed the worst of what can happen when the most volatile ingredients — wind, heat, drought and vegetation — converge. Ross is showing how readily those conditions can resurge — and how hard they can be to combat.

Nearly all of the land in Texas is privately owned, making it virtually impossible to enforce universal mitigation measures. So lawmakers and foresters are working to make preventative tools more accessible, with the hope of giving Texans a better chance to prepare and curb the fuel available to fire.

‘Flashy fuel’

Palo Pinto and Jack counties are particularly susceptible to wildfire: The region’s dense vegetation and rugged terrain not only affect the speed at which fire spreads, but the time it takes to contain it.

“We’ve been around so many fires out here, my goodness,” Palo Pinto resident Bud Price said. “It’s just part of life in this area.”

As firefighters work to contain a wildfire, they carve out a perimeter by removing vegetation and other fuels, creating a barrier that can slow or stop the spread. For the Ross fire, that perimeter exceeds 130 miles, according to Adam Turner, a spokesman for the Texas A&M Forest Service.

“It’s a lot of work,” Turner said. “It takes time.”

While some of that work is done by hand, digging out a barrier often requires bulldozers and other heavy machinery. It’s a difficult feat for the Ross fire, Turner said, because the blaze trails steep slopes and rocky hills.

The region also is packed with Ashe juniper, a tree species Weldon Dent, a coordinator for Texas A&M Forest Service’s Wildfire Risk Reduction Program, calls a “flashy fuel.” The trees contain highly-flammable oils and bark that can launch hundreds of feet when burned, igniting additional spot fires, according to the U.S. Forest Service.

While cattle can graze down grasses, the woody underbrush — including juniper — isn’t forage.

Herbicides can kill juniper, while bulldozers, mulchers and other mechanical methods can clear dense stands, said Greg Pleasant, a fire management coordinator for the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. But these strategies can be expensive and difficult to maintain, especially across large stretches of private ranchland.

“It’s just not cost-effective for most people to stay on top of that, unfortunately,” Pleasant said.

What can be done?

Wildfires are an inevitable part of life in Texas, said State Sen. Kevin Sparks, R-Midland. As the state grows, homes and other structures are increasingly being built in areas that were once rural, putting more people and property in the path of fire.

That makes managing the landscape before a fire starts increasingly important, he said.

Historically, land managers have relied on two primary methods: mechanically clearing brush and using prescribed, or controlled, burns.

Bart Simmons, founder of 2S Ranch in Palo Pinto, said he’s used prescribed burns at his 2,700-acre property in the past — not for wildfire prevention, but to improve the health of his grass. The burns were conducted by a local volunteer fire department, a service Simmons paid for himself.

Simmons, who has owned land in Palo Pinto since 2001, said he wasn’t aware of anyone in the area who has used controlled burns with wildfire in mind. Instead, the focus is on brush control, which Simmons does mechanically.

In the past, he would pay hourly for a bulldozer to clear hundreds of acres of juniper, mesquite and bramble weeds. Nowadays, Simmons finds it’s easiest to stay ahead of the growth, using a skid steer to remove invasive species as they come.

According to Sparks, prescribed fire can be the more cost-effective option because it removes grasses, brush and other vegetation that accumulates over time. But in Texas, where private landowners control an estimated 95% of the state's land, only a small percentage regularly use prescribed fire as a land-management tool.

A 2019 survey found that 325,000 acres in Texas were treated with prescribed burns, down nearly 24% from the previous year. Survey participation has dipped even further in recent years, Dent said, and Texas A&M Forest Service is working to increase the number of responses.

For landowners, conducting a controlled burn can be risky and intimidating. There are also relatively few entities licensed to conduct them, Sparks said, compared with the vast number of acres that could benefit.

As an incentive, Texas A&M Forest Service offers prescribed fire grants to reduce hazardous fuels, Dent said. One of these grants is the Community Protection Program Grant, which is geared toward private landowners to help offset the cost of conducting a burn on their properties.

In addition to exploring incentives for landowners to reduce wildfire risks, Sparks said the state is also trying to better understand where those risks are greatest.

Senate Bill 34, passed during the most recent legislative session, directs the Texas A&M Forest Service to conduct a statewide study of fuel loading, mapping where vegetation and other combustible materials have accumulated and where mitigation efforts could be most urgently needed. The results of the study will be summarized in December.

The effort reflects a broader shift in how Texas approaches wildfire, Sparks said: trying to change the landscape before the flames arrive.

“There’s no doubt,” he said, “that if we’re more proactive in managing the lands, then we can definitely have better opportunities to control the amount of damage.”

_____

©2026 The Dallas Morning News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.