An evacuation order spread across the entire North Rim. Robin Bies, a staff member at the Kaibab Lodge, some fifteen miles to the north, drove two hikers and their grandchildren to the South Rim, four hours away. At about 2 A.M., she looked back across the canyon and saw the red glow of Dragon Bravo. “It was just surreal,” she told me. The blaze ultimately covered a hundred and forty-five thousand acres in the span of three months, making it the largest American wildfire in 2025. Bies often wondered why firefighters hadn’t simply put it out to begin with.
A few weeks after Dragon Bravo was fully extinguished, I went to the North Rim in hope of understanding its impact. Driving through the Kaibab National Forest and Grand Canyon National Park, I crisscrossed the fire’s footprint for more than fifty miles. Some roads had only recently reopened. The last few miles of Arizona State Route 67, which led to the Grand Canyon Lodge, were still blockaded; the lodge had burned to a husk, and dozens of other homes and buildings were gone, too.
Once Dragon Bravo broke containment lines, firefighters tried every available tool to stop its progression: aircraft, fire engines, bulldozers, handcrews, hotshots, drones. These battles were written into the landscape. I could see that, in some places, firefighters had halted Dragon Bravo’s advance at a road. Herds of bison were grazing on grass that had sprouted in the blackened soil. In other spots, I saw that the fire had jumped a road and raced up a steep slope. Some evergreen trees were so crispy that they looked like matchsticks.
I stayed the night at the Kaibab Lodge, which had served as a federal-incident command post after the North Rim was evacuated. Bies helped provide food and accommodations for hundreds of wildland firefighters. “They became like family,” she told me. She made weekly trips into town to fetch them cigarettes. A sign was still hanging over the reception desk: “Welcome Dragon Slayers.”
I stood with one of Bies’s colleagues, Mark Harvey, the lodge’s handyman, in front of a grand stone fireplace. Snow was falling outside; now and then, he fed the fire a cured aspen log. How had their lodge survived? “Just luck,” Harvey said. “The wind changed direction.” He showed me videos of orange flames pulsing against the night sky. Not until mid-August did rain help firefighters corral Dragon Bravo, and the fire wasn’t fully contained until late September. Still, Harvey didn’t see the fire as a calamity. “It’s just a cycle of the forest,” he said. “We’ve got to burn all the old stuff out.” He was looking forward to spring, when he predicted that piney grouse would return and morel mushrooms would proliferate.
Many of my sources feared that Dragon Bravo would invite scrutiny of the very idea of managed wildfires. Arizona’s Democratic governor, Katie Hobbs, called for an official investigation, arguing that “Arizonans deserve answers for how this fire was allowed to decimate the Grand Canyon National Park.” Other politicians have been voicing skepticism that any wildfires should be allowed to burn. Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation policy agenda that has heavily influenced the Trump Administration, criticized the Forest Service for using “unplanned fire” for vegetation management, advocating instead for timber extraction. The Republican governor of Montana, Greg Gianforte, has demanded that the Forest Service “fully embrace an aggressive initial and extended attack strategy.” This year, Trump’s appointee to the chief of the Forest Service said in an annual letter that it was “critical that we suppress fires as swiftly as possible.”
The backlash is coming at a pivotal moment. Historically, thousands of firefighters have worked for diverse agencies within the Department of the Interior: the Bureau of Land Management, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the National Park Service. These entities’ goals are more nuanced than fire suppression; they also value conservation and wilderness protection. But, as early as January, 2026, the Trump Administration plans to consolidate these firefighters under a new agency, the Wildland Fire Service, which will “reflect the increasing risk to people, property and infrastructure,” according to a September press release. (The Forest Service is part of the Department of Agriculture, so its eleven thousand firefighters will remain separate for now.) The Department of the Interior declined to elaborate on the new agency’s priorities.
