PARADISE, Kansas — This time of year, rancher Rich Koester is normally busy caring for newborn calves or feeding his herd to get them ready for winter.
Instead, he’s busy burying livestock.
As he walked up to the edge of a freshly dug pit roughly the size of a backyard swimming pool, the charred stubble of prairie grass crunched beneath his feet.
Days after the wildfire that torched his pasture went out, the smell of smoke still hung in the air.
“It was burning so fast that it just went over the top of everything. … A lot of the cattle didn’t have a chance,” he said, fighting back tears. “I don’t know how any of mine survived.”
To his right, a construction excavator just finished lowering one more dead cow onto a pile of about 20 carcasses in this mass grave.
Koester said the fire killed more than a third of his 200-head herd and engulfed every bit of his roughly 800-acre pasture.
“As far as you can see around here, it’s burnt,” he said. “It took all of it.”
The unrelenting wind storm that tore across Kansas on Dec. 15 sparked widespread, devastating wildfires fueled by dry grass and up to 100 mph gusts. For ranchers like Koester, the days and nights since the storm have been long and filled with difficult choices. And this is just the start of a much longer road to recovery.
The land Koester has ranched in Russell County for three decades sat squarely in the path of a fire that tore through well over 100,000 acres following the storm.
Still, he considers himself luckier than most around here. The fire only burned his land and cattle. He said some of his neighbors lost a lot more — homes, barns, vehicles.
“So you can see how much it’s affected a lot of people, not just me,” he said. “I’m just a little drop in the bucket.”
Dust, soot and ash
Along the dirt roads near Koester’s ranch, other fields and rolling grassland hills have been charred black. Some that aren’t black are tan — the color of the wind-blown soot now covering them in rippled dunes that resemble a desert.
Ash gray tree stumps and scorched yucca stems poke out from mounds of dust. Half-burned wooden fence posts hang from barbed wire.
