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Why Patagonia, REI, and just about every other gear retailer are going PFAS-free.
Hiking gear exists so that, when nature tries to kill you, it is a little less likely to succeed. Sometimes this gear’s life-saving function is obvious — a Nalgene to carry extra water so you don’t die of thirst, or a fist-sized first-aid kit so you don’t bleed to death — while other things you don’t necessarily purchase with the thought that they might one day save your life. Like, say, a small Swiss Army Knife. Or, in my case, a raincoat.
Last summer, on a casual day hike in Mount Rainier National Park, my family was overtaken by a storm that, quite literally, rose up out of nowhere. It had been a sunny, clear day when we left the parking lot; at four miles in, we were being lashed by hail and gale-force winds on an exposed alpine trail, with no trees or boulders nearby for shelter.
Then, one member of our hiking party tripped.
In the split second before she stood up and confirmed she could walk out on her own, my mind raced through what I had in my pack. Stupidly, I had nothing to assemble a makeshift shelter, no warmer layers. But I did have my blue waterproof rainshell. In weather as extreme as the storm off Rainier that day, keeping dry is essential; if we’d had to wait out the rain due to a broken ankle, we’d have become soaked and hypothermic long before help arrived. My raincoat, I realized during those terrifying seconds, could save my life.
But what made my raincoat so trustworthy that day on the mountain could also, in theory, kill me — or, more likely, kill or sicken any of the thousands of people who live downstream of the manufacturers that make waterproofing chemicals and the landfills where waterproof clothing is incinerated or interred. Outdoor apparel is typically ultraprocessed and treated using perfluoroalkyl and poly-fluoroalkyl substances, a class of water- and stain-resistant “forever chemicals” that are more commonly referred to as PFAS (pronounced “pee-fass”). After decades of work by environmental groups and health advocates, states and retailers are finally banning the sale of textiles that have been treated with the chemicals, which in the outdoor industry often manifest in the form of Gore-Tex membranes or “durable water repellent” treatments.
These bans are fast approaching: Beginning in 2025 — less than 12 months from now — California will forbid the sale of most PFAS-treated textiles; New York will restrict them in apparel; and Washington will regulate stain- and waterproofing treatments, with similar regulations pending or approved in a number of other states. Following pressure from activists, the nation’s largest outdoor retailer, REI, also announced last winter that it will ban PFAS in all the textile products and cookware sold in its stores starting fall 2024; Dick’s Sporting Goods will also eliminate PFAS from its brand-name clothing.
This will upend the outdoor apparel industry. Some of the best coats in the world — legendary gear like Arc’teryx’s Beta AR and the traditional construction of the Patagonia Torrentshell — use, or until recently used, PFAS in their waterproofing processes or in their jackets’ physical membranes. Though the bans frequently allow vague, temporary loopholes for gear intended for “extreme wet conditions” or “expeditions,” such exceptions will be closed off by the end of the 2020s. (Patagonia has “committed to making all membranes and water-repellent finishes without [PFAS] by 2025,” Gin Ando, a spokesperson for the company, told me; Arc’teryx spokesperson Amy May shared that the company is “committed to moving towards PFAS-free materials in its products.”)
Even if you aren’t buying expedition-level gear, your closet almost certainly contains PFAS. A 2022 study by Toxic-Free Future found the chemicals in nearly 75% of products labeled as waterproof or stain-resistant. Another study found that the concentration of fluorotelomer alcohols, which are used in the production of PFAS, was 30 times higher inside stores that sold outdoor clothing than in other workplaces.
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The reason outdoor companies have historically loved PFAS so much is simple: The chemicals are unrivaled in their water repellency. PFAS are manufactured chains of fluorine-carbon bonds that are incredibly difficult to break (the precise number of carbons is also used in the naming process, which is why you’ll hear them called “C8” or “C6,” sometimes, as well). Because of this strong bond, other molecules slip off when they come into contact with the fluorine-carbon chain; you can observe this in a DIY test at home by dripping water onto a fabric and watching it roll off, leaving your garment perfectly dry.
It is also because of this bond that PFAS are so stubbornly persistent — in the environment, certainly, but also in us. An estimated 98% to 99% of people have traces of PFAS in their bodies. Researchers have found the molecules in breast milk, rainwater, and Antarctica’s snow. We inhale them in dust and drink them in our tap water, and because they look a little like a fatty acid to our bodies, they can cause health problems that we’re only beginning to grasp. So far, PFAS have been linked to kidney and testicular cancer, decreased fertility, elevated cholesterol, weight gain, thyroid disease, the pregnancy complication pre-eclampsia, increased risk of preterm birth and low birth weight, hormone interference, and reduced vaccine response in children.
Chemical companies and industry groups often argue that certain PFAS are demonstrably worse than others; the so-called “long-chain” molecules, for instance, are thought to have higher bioaccumulation and toxicity potential, and have mostly been replaced by “short-chain” molecules. But as Arlene Blum, a pioneering mountaineer and the founder of the Green Science Policy Institute, an environmental advocacy organization that opposes PFAS, told me, “in all the cases that we’ve studied,” forever chemicals have been found “to be harmful in one way or another,” whether they’re short or long.
From a health perspective, the good news is that activists are winning. While initial efforts to protect humans and the environment from PFAS in the mid-2000s resulted only in the voluntary phase-out of long-chain chemicals like PFOA and PFOS, the new laws target the entire class of thousands of compounds to prevent an ongoing game of whack-a-mole with chemical manufacturers. (A recent report by The Guardian found that the chemical industry spent $110 million in the last two U.S. election cycles trying to thwart or slow the various bans.) Public pressure campaigns mounted against ostensibly sustainability-minded companies like REI have prompted store-initiated PFAS bans that will also influence future gear sold in the United States. (REI was long a PFAS laggard, and was even hit in 2022 with a class-action lawsuit over allegedly marketing PFAS-containing clothes as “sustainable.” The company declined to comment for this story. Dick’s Sporting Goods did not respond to requests for comment.)
But as the days tick closer to the first PFAS bans coming into effect in stores this fall, outdoor apparel companies are still scrambling to redesign their clothing. Some alternatives to PFAS do exist — Blum swears by her PFAS-free Black Diamond jacket — though even the most ardent supporters of the forever chemical bans will admit the waterproofing alternatives haven’t 100% caught up yet.
“The main concern that most people have in the industry is the amount of work that it’s going to take to meet these guidelines,” Chris Steinkamp, the head of advocacy at the trade association Snowsports Industries America, told me. “Because PFAS is omnipresent. Unfortunately, they’re pretty much in everything.”
Many outdoor apparel companies genuinely want to comply with the coming bans, Karolína Brabcová, the campaign manager for toxic chemicals in consumer products at Arnika, a Czech environmental non-profit, told me. “It’s not such a matter of greenwashing here,” she said. “It’s more about the fact that you’ve got the chemical industry on one side and the downstream users joining the consumers on the other side. And the downstream users don’t know everywhere the PFAS are being used; it’s a business secret.”
In one case detailed by Bloomberg, the Swedish company Fjällräven had stopped using PFAS in its products, only to learn from a 2012 Greenpeace investigation that the chemicals were still present in its apparel. “A supplier using fluorochemistry on another company’s products was cross-contaminating Fjällräven’s,” the Bloomberg authors write, adding that “subsequent testing revealed” just having “products in stores near products from other companies that used the chemicals still resulted in low levels of contamination.”
It isn’t always the case, however, that clothing manufacturers are unwitting victims of chemical sloppiness. Some apparel companies have taken advantage of the alphabet soup of chemical names to look more sustainable than they are. “We’ve seen in recent years products labeled as ‘PFOA-free’ or ‘PFOS-free,’ which suggests that they do not contain the long-chain PFAS that have largely been phased out from production in the United States,” Blum warned me. “That’s really misleading because oftentimes it’s a signal a product likely contains other PFAS chemicals, which may be just as persistent and may also be quite toxic in production to disposal.”
The reason I could count on my raincoat to protect me in the mountains, though, was because, like most expedition-level gear, it is made of a membrane manufactured by Gore-Tex, with an additional DWR waterproofing finish that also contains PFAS. Gore-Tex is known in the outdoors industry for making the holy grail of performance fabrics: Its membranes are waterproof, durable, and breathable enough to exercise in, a challenging and impressive combination to nail. But to achieve this, the company has traditionally used the fluoropolymer PTFE, a notorious forever chemical you probably know by the trademarked name Teflon.
This technology — or rather, these chemicals — are incredibly and irresistibly good at what they do. “The terrible truth,” Wired wrote in its list of raincoat recommendations updated this past December, “is that if you’re going to be exposed [to inclement weather] for multiple hours, you are probably not going to be able to rely on a [PFAS]-free DWR to keep hypothermia at bay.”
When I reached out to Gore-Tex about its use of PFAS, company spokesperson Julie Evans told me via email that “there are important distinctions among materials associated with the term PFAS” and that the fluoropolymers Gore uses, such as PTFE, “are not the same as those substances that are bioavailable, mobile, and persistent.” She stressed that “not all PFAS are the same” and that PTFE and the other fluoropolymers in the Gore arsenal meet the standards of low concern, and are “extremely stable and do not degrade in the environment,” are “too large to be bioavailable,” and are “non-toxic [and] safe to use from an environmental and human perspective.” The National Resource Defense Council, by contrast, writes that PFAS polymers like PTFE, “when added as a coating or membrane to a raincoat or other product, can pose a toxic risk to wearers, just as other PFAS can.”
Some of the environmental health advocates I spoke with said Gore-Tex’s language was misleading. Mike Schade, the director of Toxic-Free Future’s Mind the Store program, which pressures retailers to avoid stocking items that use hazardous chemicals, told me that while it is “laudable that the company has phased some PFAS out of their products … what we’re concerned about is the entire class. We think it’s misleading to consumers and to the public to suggest that other PFAS are not of environmental concern.”
Blum, of the Green Science Policy Institute, admitted that while “probably your Gore-Tex jacket won’t hurt you” — there is limited evidence that PFAS will leech into your body just from wearing it — there’s a more significant issue at the heart of the PFAS debate. “When you go from the monomer to the polymer” in the chemical manufacturing process, she said, it “contaminates the drinking water in the area where it’s made.” The disposal process — and especially incineration, a common fate for discarded clothing — is another opportunity for PFAS to shed into the environment. People who live near landfills and chemical manufacturing plants in industrial hubs like Michigan and many cities in Bangladesh suffer from PFAS at disproportionate levels.
So then, where do we go from here? Hikers, skiers, mountaineers, fly-fishers — they all still need clothing to stay dry. “Our industry is committed to performance and making sure that the gear that people are sold can live up to the standards that athletes need,” Steinkamp said. “I know that is top of mind, and that’s what’s making [the transition] so hard.”
But it also might be the case that our gear is too waterproof. “When we think about the intended performance of outdoor gear, there’s a lot of expectation that your gear will keep you extremely dry,” Kaytlin Moeller, the regional sustainability manager at Fenix Outdoor North America, the parent company of outdoors brands like Fjällräven and Royal Robbins, told me. “But when we really start to look at it,” she added, “I think part of the question is: What is the level of functionality that is really necessary for the customer to have a positive experience outdoors and be prepared for their adventure?”
It’s probably less than you think; consumers frequently don Everest-level technologies to walk their dogs for 15 minutes in a drizzle. “As responsible creators of products, it’s our job to balance functionality with impact,” Moeller said. “And in terms of [PFAS], it just wasn’t worth the risk and the carcinogenic qualities to continue putting that treatment on our products when there are other innovative coatings and constructions that we can use.”
Those alternatives, like innovative fabric weavings and proprietary waxes, might not sound as high-tech as hydrophobic chemicals. Still, for the vast majority of regular people — and even most outdoor recreators — it’s likely more than enough to stay comfortably dry. “We’ve been going into the outdoors for hundreds and hundreds of years without these chemicals,” Schade pointed out. “We can do it again.”
Luckily for everything and everyone on the planet, new waterproofing products are getting better by the day. Gore-Tex has spent “the better part of the last decade” developing its new PFAS-free “ePE membrane,” Evans told me. Short for expanded polyethylene, ePE is fluorine-free (albeit, derived from fossil fuels) and has been adopted by Patagonia, Arc’teryx, and others in the outdoor industry as a PFAS-free alternative. Evans described it as feeling “a little lighter and softer” than old-school Gore-Tex, but “with all the same level of performance benefits” as the historic products.
Other companies, including Patagonia, have been transparent about their phase-out goals and the ongoing difficulties of the PFAS-free transition; Gin, the Patagonia spokesperson, told me that as of this fall, “92% of our materials by volume with water-repellent chemistries are made without” PFAS, and that the new waterproofing “stands up to the demands of our most technical items.” Deuter, Black Diamond, Outdoor Research, Jack Wolfskin, Mammut, Marmot, and prAna are among other outdoor brands that are working to remove PFAS from their gear.
“We have to work together, collaboratively, if we really want to eliminate them — to the point of the verbiage around being [PFAS]-free,” Moeller stressed. “No one can be [PFAS]-free ‘til everyone in the industry is, because of the risk of cross-contamination.”
Then there are the consumers who will need to adjust. I admit, in the weeks before beginning the reporting for this article, I bought myself another raincoat. It was on sale from one of my favorite outdoor brands, and I was attracted to its aggressively cheerful shade of Morton Salt-girl yellow, which I thought would also help me stand out in the case of a future emergency.
At the time, I hadn’t even thought to check what it was made of; what mattered to me was how, when I slipped it on, I became amphibious — like some kind of marine mammal, slick and impervious to the rain. Stepping out of my front door and into a downpour, I felt practically invincible.
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Half of all Americans are sweating under one right now.
Like a bomb cyclone, a polar vortex, or an atmospheric river, a heat dome is a meteorological phenomenon that feels, well, a little made up. I hadn’t heard the term before I found myself bottled beneath one in the Pacific Northwest in 2021, where I saw leaves and needles brown on living trees. Ultimately, some 1,400 people died from the extreme heat in British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon that summer weekend.
Since that disaster, there have been a number of other high-profile heat dome events in the United States, including this week, over the Midwest and now Eastern and Southeastern parts of the country. On Monday, roughly 150 million people — about half the nation’s population — faced extreme or major heat risks.
“I think the term ‘heat dome’ was used sparingly in the weather forecasting community from 10 to 30 years ago,” AccuWeather senior meteorologist Brett Anderson told me, speaking with 36 years as a forecaster under his belt. “But over the past 10 years, with global warming becoming much more focused in the public eye, we are seeing ‘heat dome’ being used much more frequently,” he went on. “I think it is a catchy term, and it gets the public’s attention.”
Catching the public’s attention is critical. Heat is the deadliest weather hazard in the U.S., killing more people annually than hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, or extreme cold. “There is a misunderstanding of the risk,” Ashley Ward, the director of the Heat Policy Innovation Hub at Duke University, told me. “A lot of people — particularly working age or younger people — don’t feel like they’re at risk when, in fact, they are.”
While it seems likely that the current heat dome won’t be as deadly as the one in 2021 — not least because the Midwest and Southeastern regions of the country have a much higher usage of air conditioning than the Pacific Northwest — the heat in the eastern half of the country is truly extraordinary. Tampa, Florida reached 100 degrees Fahrenheit on Sunday for the first time in its recorded history. Parts of the Midwest last week, where the heat dome formed before gradually moving eastward, hit a heat index of 128 degrees.
Worst of all, though, have been the accompanying record-breaking overnight temperatures, which Ward told me were the most lethal characteristics of a heat dome. “When there are both high daytime temperatures and persistently high overnight temperatures, those are the most dangerous of circumstances,” Ward said.
Although the widespread usage of the term “heat dome” may be relatively new, the phenomenon itself is not. The phrase describes an area of “unusually strong” high pressure situated in the upper atmosphere, which pockets abnormally warm air over a particular region, Anderson, the forecaster, told me. “These heat domes can be very expansive and can linger for days, and even a full week or longer,” he said.
Anderson added that while he hasn’t seen evidence of an increase in the number of heat domes due to climate change, “we may be seeing more extreme and longer-lasting heat domes” due to the warmer atmosphere. A heat dome in Europe this summer, which closed the Eiffel Tower, tipped temperatures over 115 degrees in parts of Spain, and killed an estimated 2,300 people, has been linked to anthropogenic warming. And research has borne out that the temperatures and duration reached in the 2021 Pacific Northwest heat dome would have been “virtually impossible without human-caused climate change.”
The link between climate change and heat domes is now strong enough to form the basis for a major legal case. Multnomah County, the Oregon municipality that includes Portland, filed a lawsuit in 2023 against 24 named defendants, including oil and gas companies ExxonMobil, Shell, and BP, seeking $50 million in damages and $1.5 billion in future damages for the defendants’ alleged role in the deaths from the 2021 heat dome.
“As we learned in this country when we took on Big Tobacco, this is not an easy step or one I take lightly, but I do believe it’s our best way to fight for our community and protect our future,” Multnomah County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson said in a statement at the time. The case is now in jeopardy following moves by the Trump administration to prevent states, counties, and cities from suing fossil fuel companies for climate damages. (The estate of a 65-year-old woman who died in the heat dome filed a similar wrongful death lawsuit in Seattle’s King County Superior Court against Big Oil.)
Given the likelihood of longer and hotter heat dome events, then, it becomes imperative to educate people about how to stay safe. As Ward mentioned, many people who are at risk of extreme heat might not even know it, such as those taking commonly prescribed medications for anxiety, depression, PTSD, diabetes, and high blood pressure, which interfere with the body’s ability to thermoregulate. “Let’s just say recently you started taking high blood pressure medicine,” Ward said. “Every summer prior, you never had a problem working in your garden or doing your lawn work. You might this year.”
Air conditioning, while life-saving, can also stop working for any number of reasons, from a worn out machine part to a widespread grid failure. Vulnerable community members may also face hurdles in accessing reliable AC. There’s a reason the majority of heat-related deaths happen indoors.
People who struggle to manage their energy costs should prioritize cooling a single space, such as a bedroom, and focus on maintaining a cool core temperature during overnight hours, when the body undergoes most of its recovery. Blotting yourself with a wet towel or washcloth and sitting in front of a fan can help during waking hours, as can visiting a traditional cooling center, or even a grocery store or movie theater.
Health providers also have a role to play, Ward stressed. “They know who has chronic underlying health conditions,” she said. “Normalize asking them about their situation with air conditioning. Normalize asking them, ‘Do you feel like you have a safe place to go that’s cool, that you can get out of this heat?’”
For the current heat dome, at least, the end is in sight: Incoming cool air from Canada will drop temperatures by 10 to 20 degrees in cities like Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., with lows potentially in the 30s by midweek in parts of New York. And while there are still hot days ahead for Florida and the rest of the Southeast, the cold front will reach the region by the end of the week.
But even if this ends up being the last heat dome of the summer, it certainly won’t be in our lifetimes. The heat dome has become inescapable.
On betrayed regulatory promises, copper ‘anxiety,’ and Mercedes’ stalled EV plans
Current conditions: New York City is once again choking on Canadian wildfire smoke • Torrential rain is flooding southeastern Slovenia and northern Croatia • Central Asia is bracing for the hottest days of the year, with temperatures nearing 100 degrees Fahrenheit in Uzbekistan’s capital of Tashkent all week.
In May, the Trump administration signaled its plans to gut Energy Star, the energy efficiency certification program administered by the Environmental Protection Agency. Energy Star is extremely popular — its brand is recognized by nearly 90% of Americans — and at a cost to the federal government of just $32 million per year, saves American households upward of $40 billion in energy costs per year as of 2024, for a total of more than $500 billion saved since its launch in 1992, by the EPA’s own estimate. Not only that, as one of Energy Star’s architects told Heatmap’s Jeva Lange back in May, more energy efficient appliances and buildings help reduce strain on the grid. “Think about the growing demands of data center computing and AI models,” RE Tech Advisors’ Deb Cloutier told Jeva. “We need to bring more energy onto the grid and make more space for it.”
That value has clearly resonated with lawmakers on the Hill. Legislators tasked with negotiating appropriations in both the Senate and the House of Representatives last week proposed fully funding Energy Star at $32 million for the next fiscal year. It’s unclear how the House’s decision to go into recess until September will affect the vote, but Ben Evans, the federal legislative director at the U.S. Green Building Council, said the bill is “a major step in the right direction demonstrating that ENERGY STAR has strong bipartisan support on Capitol Hill.”
A worker connects panels on floating solar farm project in Huainan, China. Kevin Frayer/Getty Images
The United States installed just under 11 gigawatts of solar panels in the first three months of this year, industry data show. In June alone, China installed nearly 15 gigawatts, PV Tech reported. And, in a detail that demonstrates just how many panels the People’s Republic has been deploying at home in recent years, that represented an 85% drop from the previous month and close to a 40% decline compared to June of last year.
The photovoltaic installation plunge followed Beijing’s rollout of two new policies that changed the renewables business in China. The first, called the 531 policy, undid guaranteed feed-in tariffs and required renewable projects to sell electricity on the spot market. That took effect on June 1. The other, called the 430 policy, took effect on May 1 and mandated that new distributed solar farms consume their own power first before allowing the sale of surplus electricity to the grid. As a result of the stalled installations, a top panel manufacturer warned the trade publication Opis that companies may need to raise prices by as much as 10%.
For years now, Fortescue, the world’s fourth-biggest producer of iron ore, has directed much of the earnings from its mines in northwest Australia and steel mills in China toward building out a global green hydrogen business. But changes to U.S. policy have taken a toll. Last week, Fortescue told investors it was canceling its green hydrogen project in Arizona, which had been set to come online next year. It’s also abandoning its plans for a green hydrogen plant on Australia’s northeastern coast, The Wall Street Journal reported.
“A shift in policy priorities away from green energy has changed the situation in the U.S.,” Gus Pichot, Fortescue’s chief executive of growth and energy, told analysts on a call. “The lack of certainty and a step back in green ambition has stopped the emerging green-energy markets, making it hard for previously feasible projects to proceed.” But green hydrogen isn’t dead everywhere. Just last week, the industrial gas firm Air Liquide made a final decision to invest in a 200-megawatt green hydrogen plant in the Netherlands.
The Trump administration put two high-ranking officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on administrative leave, CNN reported. The reasoning behind the move wasn’t clear, but both officials — Steve Volz, who leads NOAA’s satellites division, and Jeff Dillen, NOAA’s deputy general counsel — headed up the investigation into whether President Donald Trump violated NOAA’s scientific integrity policies during his so-called Sharpiegate scandal.
The incident from September 2019, during Trump’s first term, started when the president incorrectly listed Alabama among the states facing a threat from Hurricane Dorian. Throughout the following week, Trump defended the remark, insisting he had been right, and ultimately showed journalists a weather map that had been altered with a black Sharpie market to show the path of the storm striking Alabama. NOAA’s investigation into the incident concluded that Neil Jacobs, the former agency official who backed Trump at the time and is now nominated to serve as chief, succumbed to political pressure and violated scientific integrity rules.
In March, North Carolina’s Republican-controlled Senate passed a bill to repeal the state’s climate law and scrap the 2030 deadline by which the monopoly utility Duke Energy had to slash its planet-heating emissions by 70% compared to 2005 levels. Governor Josh Stein, a Democrat, vetoed the legislation. But on Tuesday, the GOP majorities in both chambers of the legislature plan to vote to override the veto.
Doing so and enacting the bill could cost North Carolina more than 50,000 jobs annually and cause tens of billions of dollars in lost investments, Canary Media’s Elizabeth Ouzts reported. That’s according to a new study from a consultancy commissioned by clean-energy advocates in the state. The analysis is based on data from the state-sanctioned consumer advocate, Public Staff.
For years, a mystery has puzzled scientists: Why did Neanderthal remains show levels of a nitrogen isotope only seen among carnivores like hyenas and wolves that eat more meat than a hominid could safely consume? New research finally points to an answer: Neanderthals were eating putrefying meat garnished with maggots, said Melanie Beasley, an anthropologist at Purdue University. “When you get the lean meat and the fatty maggot, you have a more complete nutrient that you’re consuming.”
Oregon’s Cram Fire was a warning — the Pacific Northwest is ready to ignite.
What could have been the country’s first designated megafire of 2025 spluttered to a quiet, unremarkable end this week. Even as national headlines warned over the weekend that central Oregon’s Cram Fire was approaching the 100,000-acre spread usually required to achieve that status, cooler, damper weather had already begun to move into the region. By the middle of the week, firefighters had managed to limit the Cram to 95,736 acres, and with mop-up operations well underway, crews began rotating out for rest or reassignment. The wildfire monitoring app Watch Duty issued what it said would be its final daily update on the Cram Fire on Thursday morning.
By this time in 2024, 10 megafires had already burned or ignited in the U.S., including the more-than-million-acre Smokehouse Creek fire in Texas last spring. While it may seem wrong to describe 2025 as a quieter fire season so far, given the catastrophic fires in the Los Angeles area at the start of the year, it is currently tracking below the 10-year average for acres burned at this point in the season. Even the Cram, a grassland fire that expanded rapidly due to the hot, dry conditions of central Oregon, was “not [an uncommon fire for] this time of year in the area,” Bill Queen, a public information officer with the Pacific Northwest Complex Incident Management Team 3, told me over email.
At the same time, the Cram Fire can also be read as a precursor. It was routine, maybe, but also large enough to require the deployment of nearly 900 fire personnel at a time when the National Wildland Fire Preparedness Level is set to 4, meaning national firefighting resources were already heavily committed when it broke out. (The preparedness scale, which describes how strapped federal resources are, goes up to 5.) Most ominous of all, though, is the forecast for the Pacific Northwest for “Dirty August” and “Snaptember,” historically the two worst months of the year in the region for wildfires.
National Interagency Coordination Center
“Right now, we’re in a little bit of a lull,” Jessica Neujahr, a public affairs officer with the Oregon Department of Forestry, acknowledged to me. “What comes with that is knowing that August and September will be difficult, so we’re now doing our best to make sure that our firefighters are taking advantage of having time to rest and get rejuvenated before the next big wave of fire comes through.”
That next big wave could happen any day. The National Interagency Fire Center’s fire potential outlook, last issued on July 1, describes “significant fire potential” for the Northwest that is “expected to remain above average areawide through September.” The reasons given include the fact that “nearly all areas” of Washington and Oregon are “abnormally dry or in drought status,” combined with a 40% to 60% probability of above-average temperatures through the start of the fall in both states. Moisture from the North American Monsoon, meanwhile, looks to be tracking “largely east of the Northwest.” At the same time, “live fuels in Oregon are green at mid to upper elevations but are drying rapidly across Washington.”
In other words, the components for a bad fire season are all there — the landscape just needs a spark. Lightning, in particular, has been top of mind for Oregon forecasters, given the tinderbox on the ground. A single storm system, such as one that rolled over southeast and east-central Oregon in June, can produce as many as 10,000 lightning strikes; over the course of just one night earlier this month, thunderstorms ignited 72 fires in two southwest Oregon counties. And the “kicker with lightning is that the fires don’t always pop up right away,” Neujahr explained. Instead, lightning strike fires can simmer for up to a week after a storm, evading the detection of firefighting crews until it’s too late. “When you have thousands of strikes in a concentrated area, it’s bound to stretch the local resources as far as they can go,” Neujahr said.
National Interagency Coordination Center
The National Interagency Fire Center has “low confidence … regarding the number of lightning ignitions” for the end of summer in the Northwest, in large part due to the incredible difficulty of forecasting convective storms. Additionally, the current neutral phase of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation means there is a “wide range of potential lightning activity” that adds extra uncertainty to any predictions. The NIFC’s higher confidence in its temperature and precipitation outlooks, in turn, “leads to a belief that the ratio of human to natural ignitions will remain high and at or above 2024 levels.” (An exploding transformer appears to have been the ignition source for the Cram Fire; approximately 88% of wildfires in the United States have human-caused origins, including arson.)
Periodic wildfires are a naturally occurring part of the Western ecosystem, and not all are attributable to climate change. But before 1995, the U.S. averaged fewer than one megafire per year; between 2005 and 2014, that average jumped to 9.8 such fires per year. Before 1970, there had been no documented megafires at all.
Above-average temperatures and drought conditions, which can make fires larger and burn hotter, are strongly associated with a warming atmosphere, however. Larger and hotter fires are also more dangerous. “Our biggest goal is always to put the fires out as fast as possible,” Neujahr told me. “There is a correlation: As fires get bigger, the cost of the fire grows, but so do the risks to the firefighters.”
In Oregon, anyway, the Cram Fire’s warning has registered. Shortly after the fire broke out, Oregon Governor Tina Kotek declared a statewide emergency with an eye toward the months ahead. “The summer is only getting hotter, drier, and more dangerous — we have to be prepared for worsening conditions,” she said in a statement at the time.
It’s improbable that there won’t be a megafire this season; the last time the U.S. had a year without a fire of 100,000 acres or more was in 2001. And if or when the megafire — or megafires — break out, all signs point to the “where” being Oregon or Washington, concentrating the area of potential destruction, exhausting local personnel, and straining federal resources. “When you have two states directly next to each other dealing with the same thing, it just makes it more difficult to get resources because of the conflicting timelines,” Neujahr said.
By October, at least, there should be relief: The national fire outlook describes “an increasing frequency of weather systems and precipitation” that should “signal an end of fire season” for the Northwest once fall arrives. But there are still a long 68 days left to go before then.