YUMA COUNTY
As embers whipped through dry cornfields and overgrown sagebrush in 70 mph winds, Clarence Young climbed up into the cab of his 5-ton John Deere tractor and headed straight toward the massive orange glow on the horizon.
The Yuma County cattle rancher and corn farmer had no firefighting experience. But with evacuation orders spreading after wildfires sparked the night of Dec. 17, Young hooked a 30-foot vertical till — normally used to break up crop residue ahead of the planting season — to his tractor and began plowing strips of land at an angle to the approaching wall of flames. As the sets of heavy blades sliced through the stalks and buried smoldering soapweed with dirt, he hoped to slow the fire by stripping it of fuel.
By 10 p.m., the County Road 33 fire was spreading fast south of Eckley as two other fires burned in Yuma County on one of the Eastern Plains’ windiest days of the year. Smoke and dirt churned so thick around Young’s tractor that he could barely see, forcing him to rely on the flashing lights of nearby fire engines for guidance.
Earlier that day, county officials braced for the windy forecast and asked farmers with tractors and discs, heavy farm implements used to break up soil and chop up vegetation, to be ready if fires sparked. Months of unusual summer rain had left weeds towering more than 5-feet tall — fuel that later dried out in the heat — and the land hadn’t seen measurable moisture since October.
“So when the winds start to whip like that and you get a fire, that’s so much more fuel that just feeds it,” Young said from his family’s farm, remembering how he watched the 8-foot flames from his tractor.
“I’ll be honest, I was scared driving over there and looking at the flames and going, ‘Oh my God — where am I going to go?’”
Clarence Young (pictured below) used a John Deere 9320 Tractor attached to a Landoll Vertical Tillage machine (above) to combat the County Road 33 fire in Yuma County last month. (Jeremy Sparig, Special to The Colorado Sun)If you can, you help. If there’s a way to help, you try.
He was halfway across a field when the fire caught up to him. Young drove the tractor at its top speed, about 25 mph, south toward a green rye field. He folded up the till, as best he could, and plowed through an electric fence to get away from the fire’s path.
Across the county that night, more than a dozen farmers like Young did what they were never trained to do: They drove tractors toward fast-moving wildfires, alongside volunteer firefighters from more than 20 agencies, to contain multiple fires pushed by relentless wind. Armed with little more than heavy equipment and local knowledge of the land, the farmers cut firelines through fields and yards, stepping into danger to protect neighbors, homes and livestock.
Some farmers and ranchers checked in with incident command and asked where they were most needed, Jake Rockwell, Yuma County’s emergency manager, said. Others just showed up, taking direction from firefighters in the fields.
That reflex to look out for one another, so familiar in rural communities it often goes unnamed, also has a basis in science. But in the moment, it’s just an innate commitment that no one battles alone.
“When you grow up in an ag setting, where you know your nearest neighbor might be 5 miles away, they’re still your neighbor,” Young said.
“You look out for each other. And it’s just one of those things that’s just understood when there’s a need in the community and an emergency like that: If you can, you help. If there’s a way to help, you try.”
As emergency officials urged hundreds of residents to flee, Young said turning toward the fire felt less like a decision than a responsibility. Psychology experts say that “moral courage” is not so uncommon, especially in tight-knit rural communities.
“The threat quickly becomes a collective threat versus an individual threat,” said Gwen Mitchell, co-director of the International Disaster Psychology: Trauma & Global Mental Health program at the University of Denver. “So immediately there was a sense of like, ‘This is happening to us.’”
By 3 a.m., the flames were knocked down and Young headed home, having burned through about 60 gallons of fuel. He kept the till attached to his tractor, just in case.
But the trained volunteer firefighters would remain at the scene, putting out hot spots as the winds continued to blow.
The entrance to the Young Farm as seen Jan. 3, 2026, in Eckley, Colorado. (Jeremy Sparig, Special to The Colorado Sun)A farmer’s obligation
Crews spent nearly 20 hours containing three fires sparked, possibly, by downed power lines in this swath of northeastern Colorado. The blazes scorched 14,050 acres, nearly 22 square miles, destroying several outbuildings, an uninhabited house and an airport hangar. Some chickens and a rabbit were lost, either to the wind or the fires.
Only springtime will reveal the agricultural impact on the fields, now littered with ash.
Farmers will figure out how to deal with the charred residue, as they always do. But Mitchell, a psychologist, says their response to the flames reveals something deeper.
That willingness to act and run toward danger, rather than away from it, is rooted in identity — in how farmers see their role and obligation to their communities, she said.
“There’s a kind of honor culture around being ready to act and respond. Saying, ‘I’m committed because others would do it for me,’ is a powerful way of making sense of that responsibility,” Mitchell said. “Some people might explain it as training or duty, but for farmers, it’s tied closely to identity — how they understand risk, look out for one another, and step up when help is needed.”
Studies show intervention in emergency situations becomes higher when there’s a shared identity between the helper and the person at risk.
Ground scorched by County Road 33 Fire in mid-December stands against the surrounding landscape. Below, a fallen windmill and metal rooster sculpture show additional damage. (Jeremy Sparig, Special to The Colorado Sun)In a 2005 experiment, a group of social psychologists found that soccer fans were more likely to help an injured stranger if that person wore their team’s shirt than when wearing a rival team shirt. In a follow‑up study, they tested a much broader group identity (like all soccer fans, rather than those from one team) and help was extended to those who were previously seen as outsiders, but not to those who showed no signs of being a soccer fan.
There’s extensive research that shows that people are less likely to intervene during an emergency when in the presence of others than when alone. But a 2020 study that aimed to answer the question for victims — will I receive help if needed? — found that during 9 in 10 public conflicts, at least one bystander, but typically several, will do something to help.
In short, there’s a universality in whatever context those common bonds occur.
“I think some of it is the small community, the compassion for each other. We just grew up together,” said Gina Eastin, whose house was within a quarter-mile of the flames. “But it didn’t matter if you just moved here. … We help each other.”
For Gina and her husband, Dennis, the acrid smell of smoke brought memories of the devastating Heart Strong fire, which destroyed two homes, including Dennis’ parents’ house, and injured several firefighters as it raced across 24,000 acres, or 38 square miles, on a gusty day in March 2012.
This time around, dusk was settling in as the winds began to pick up. Corn stalks were strewn among the fallen power lines. Ash was falling from the sky. About an hour later, neighbors called and told the Eastins they needed to get out.
“I went outside and stepped around the corner of the house and I told Gina, we had minutes to leave,” Dennis Eastin said. “It was just flames. Big, huge, tall flames.”
Gina and Dennis Eastin stand for a portraiton Jan. 3, 2026, in Yuma County, Colorado. (Jeremy Sparig, Special to The Colorado Sun)Without calling, neighbors started to show up, helping them load their car and transport their vehicles and other belongings.
“All of a sudden, you’ve got people in your driveway helping you. ‘What do you need us to do?’ And that was pretty special,” said Gina, who returned the favor once out of her home, making calls to anyone she thought might live in the fire’s path.
“You push the boundaries and you start to learn about the boundaries. … How far can I go to help? And when is it not safe for me?” she added.
The couple drove to a top of the hill, about 5 miles west, where they watched the fingers of the fire suddenly shift direction, wherever the wind would take it. The glow turned dark as blowing dirt engulfed the flames. The Eastins were certain their home was gone.
“It looked so close,” Gina Eastin said.
But their house was spared. The fire’s tentacles crept within 200 yards of their pasture, where 40 head of cattle roam, and stopped.“After this, you just have a desire to help people,” she said. “To get through what you’ve gone through.”
Oil field workers pitch in
In the pitch of night, Tom Blach and his son Justin stayed in constant contact over hand-held radios and relied on a GPS app to navigate as dust and smoke swallowed the fields around them.
The father-son duo, who work in oil field construction and know the land and machinery better than most, shifted into a kind of muscle memory, doing what logic told them had to be done as embers flew.
There are no major fire hydrants in Yuma County, so when wildfires spark, volunteer firefighters haul water to the flames from Yuma and Wray or pump water from the wells. To cut down on refill time, Justin Blach helped haul water from 8,500-gallon tanks, owned by fertilizer companies, to resupply fast-attack trucks, carrying an array of nozzles to ensure the hoses fit.
Tom Blach followed two of those trucks in his front-end loader and scraped through burning silkweed and sagebrush, pushing smoldering debris aside and covering it with sand.
LEFT: Justin Blach stands by a Caterpillar DH7 Dozer. RIGHT: Tom Blach stands beside a Caterpillar 980G Loader. Both of them oil field workers, Tom and Justin Blach used the heavy machinery to help combat the County Road 33 Fire in mid-December. (Jeremy Sparig, Special to The Colorado Sun)
“You have a big question mark in your head. Am I in the right spot?” Tom Blach said. “But the thing that I knew was, if there’s fire, it needs to be put out. Period. I know I don’t fight flames 30-to-40 feet tall with that loader, you don’t do that. I come along behind and clean up the mess so those trucks putting it out can go on down the line.”
The pair helped firefighters build fire lines as the sun rose. They made it home briefly, but by 6 a.m. their phones were ringing again.
The oil field experts fueled up and headed back out.
Mitchell, the DU clinical psychologist, said the locals’ knowledge of the land serves as their training. Blach and others’ work that night was likely reflexive rather than a result of cognitive processing.
When danger hits, the frontal lobe often disengages, limiting rational judgment and triggering a fight-flight-or-freeze response. Because the farmers and other volunteers were using familiar equipment and working on terrain they knew, they may have been better able to keep their frontal lobes “on,” she said.
“There was probably an acquired capability for them to have it all feel a little less risky because there was some muscle memory around driving the tractor, having to navigate dust and drought,” Mitchell said. “The idea that they weren’t trained is in juxtaposition to: They were actually trained and they were better suited to ride those tractors than even the firemen.”
The Blachs’ work during the County Road 33 fire was not too different, Mitchell said, from when plucky Ukrainian farmers dragged abandoned Russian military equipment out of fields following Moscow’s invasion in February 2022. Footage of the tank-towing farmers regularly appeared on social media and quickly became a defining image of the country’s resistance.
“There was a sense of this kind of collective sense of community,” Mitchell said, “and a moral interest in protecting two things: the land and their community.”
Black Angus cows, seen in a corral on the Young Farm on Jan. 3 in Eckley, Colorado, were spared from the mid-December blaze that scorched a large swath of the Yuma County landscape. (Jeremy Sparig, Special to The Colorado Sun)Across the West, that same commitment to help one’s community appears again and again, sometimes emerging organically, while other times, shaped by formal organizations.
In some states, farmers, ranchers and landowners have organized nonprofit volunteer firefighting groups known as Rangeland Fire Protection Associations, enabling locals to attack rangeland fires quickly and keep them small.
In Idaho, the groups are guided by the motto “neighbors helping neighbors” and receive state support in the form of training, funding and refurbished equipment. In Oregon, residents pay dues to help fund the associations.
Earlier this month, lawmakers in Washington introduced legislation that would allow for public-private partnerships in which citizens would work with fire departments to provide an initial attack.
In Colorado, the only organizing principle is the powerful, innate sense of responsibility.
For those living on the Eastern Plains, howling winds — and the threats they announce — sound the alarm that sends neighbors running toward the ominous glow on the horizon.
“It’s a calculated risk, I guess you could say,” said Young, recalling that night he faced the flames on his tractor.“But when stuff like this happens, that’s what makes it even more important to have good neighbors and watch out for each other and care for one another.”
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