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Pat Maio / Reni Hill. Victor Goni sometimes likes to come out to his sanctuary off Buffalo Sussex Cutoff Road in Johnson County, pop open a Corona and jam a lime wedge in the long neck, then take a sip of the cold beer.

His next ritualistic move is to look out over the tallgrass and sage-covered prairie with his binoculars for lost sheep.

That seems to happen regularly.

The sheep sometime wander off in the valley below where the Nine-Mile Draw and Soldier Creek join in the prairie land.

The hill where he parks his dinged up, off-road Polaris to drink an occasional beer has a 17,000-gallon water tank buried in the hillside where he has connected a labyrinth of water pipes, pumps and troughs throughout the range to give his 1,100 sheep a place to drink water from.

He’s considering adding a second tank.

Goni, who runs a fence company out of Buffalo, nearly lost his piece of heaven this week.

On Wednesday, Goni saw the flashing lightning strikes that sparked the initial fire in the Trabing Road area south of Buffalo that led to the 175,000-acre House Draw Fire.

He contacted the local fire department to report the smoldering fire in its earliest stages.

The fire seemed non-threatening to his property and sheep, so he traveled to Buffalo that evening.

Life Changes Instantly

That’s when things changed.

A neighbor called Goni to urge him to get back as fast as he could. Strong winds had turned the fire around, pushing it quickly toward the plains where his sheep were grazing in grass and sagebrush.

Just like that, the area turned into what Goni described to Cowboy State Daily as a “war zone.”

“It blew my mind that the wind had switched just like that,” Goni said.

The 15 miles of rough asphalt, dirt and gravel roads leading to Reno Hill became the site of a firefighter attack to save property and the sheep.

“That’s when the calvary came,” he said.

Saving the area from going up in flames is important for Goni and others.

The area is rich in Basque culture and sheepherding in Wyoming, especially in Johnson County.

Goni’s father came to the area near the Reno Hill area back in the 1960s from Spain. Like other Basques who settled in Johnson County, many became sheepherders.

Their influence is most evident with the red-and-white cross and green saltire of Johnson County’s flag. The flag is very familiar to the Basque flag and the county seal placed over their intersection.

The pioneer history is everywhere in this slice of the world.

To the north, there’s the Bozeman Trail, which connected the gold rush territory of southern Montana to the Oregon Trail in eastern Wyoming.

To the southeast is Fort Reno, a military fort built in 1865 to protect travelers on the Bozeman Trail from Native American tribes.

In the Reno Hill area, Goni even found the gravesite of an unmarked “pioneer body.”

Feeding On The Bighorns

Goni’s father once worked on the old Esponda Ranch, whose Esponda family members were early pioneers and sheep producers in the 1800s in Johnson County.

In his youth, the 53-year-old Goni recalled working with his father to herd more than 30,000 sheep on an annual run every May from Crazy Woman Creek south of Interstate 90, east of Buffalo, to the Bighorn Mountains.

This pilgrimage gave the grass down below in the prairie land time to grow as “winter feed.”

With the House Draw Fire, this has become a concern for this upcoming winter, said Goni.

“It’s a big challenge,” he said, adding that many of the area sheep ranches will be hurt financially by the wildfire.

Goni’s neighbor, Joe Reculusa, a sheep rancher adjacent to Goni’s 7,000-acre ranch, lost much of his grass. The pastures on his side of his fence were blackened by the fire. The aroma of the burned grass hung in the air on Friday.

The death toll of sheep is unknown.

On Wednesday, hundreds of sheep were grazing alongside Reculusa’s sheep, which were able to move onto Goni’s land when firefighters and others cut the barbed fences or opened gates to let the sheep escape the fast-moving blaze.

Up In Smoke

“We lost a lot of grass,” Reculusa said. “We haven’t been around yet to see how much sheep we lost. We’ve been through this before.”

Reculusa declined to comment further.

“I kind of feel bad telling our story because I didn’t get hit as hard,” Goni said.

By 10 a.m. Thursday, firefighters in huge trucks with giant wheels needed to climb through tough terrain, had showed up to go to work to save the plains land.

And then the planes carrying red slurry showed up. They dive-bombed the prairie land several times, dropping their retardant on the grasslands.

Heavy equipment dozers scraped a fire line to keep the fire from burning into the ranches. Prairie dog holes were scorched by the fire.

All the while, Goni and his son, Gavin, and others hopped on motorcycles and four-wheelers, and sheep dogs provided by neighbors Charlie and Allison Gerard rounded up a few thousand sheep from the plains.

This was no easy task.

The goal was to get them to climb up Reno Hill, where Goni occasionally sips his beer in the quiet solitude of the area, and move the flocks to the west side of Buffalo Sussex Cutoff.

Sheep People

“I was born and raised in Buffalo,” Goni said. “Sheep people always come together.”

The neighbors in the area, all ranchers who either tend sheep, cattle or horses, gathered at Reno Hill to watch the late Thursday afternoon show of force by the firefighters.

“We had opened up all of the gates to the fencing and just let the sheep roam where they wanted,” Goni said. “We didn’t want them to get stuck because it would be catastrophic.”

Goni, Reculisa and others plan to get together later to sort out ownership of their sheep by placing them inside corrals. They all have uniquely painted brands to distinguish who owns what.

“That’s how we keep track of them,” Goni said.

Meanwhile, emergency management officials are still trying to get their arms around the extent of livestock affected by the hellish fires that continue to light up the skies with an orangish glow.

Watch Out

On Interstate 90, electronic message boards along the main arterial road between Buffalo and Gillette were warning of livestock that may wander onto highway.

Johnson County Sheriff Rod Odenbach said two cattle were found in the middle of I-90 on Friday morning a day after the route was reopened to travel after briefly being shutdown due to the aggressive fire and smoke.

Odenbach couldn’t immediately say whether other livestock have been discovered wandering around on the federal highway route.

On Friday afternoon, firefighters Cody Edgeington and Drew Gibson of the Bar Nunn Fire Department were sitting in their “Big Boy” truck watching for flareups.

“This is a good example of a wind-driven fire,” Edgeington said. “It’s looking good today, but the wind can shift. For a prairie this isn’t uncommon.”

They watched dust devils whipping up their tornado-like funnels on the plains below Reno Hill. Tens of miles away on the horizon, huge smoke plumes could be seen swirling into the air from the House Draw Fire closer to Buffalo, the Remington Fire moving well north of Sheridan, and two others outside of Gillette in Campbell County.

The Remington Fire exploded Friday from 18,000 acres to an estimated 130,000 pushing north into Montana.

The fires have chewed up more than 300,000 acres, and fire emergency management officials are now saying the fires may be combined into a “complex” classification to gain more resources, including firefighters, helicopters and planes.

On Thursday, the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s District 8 headquarters in Denver authorized the use of federal money to help with firefighting costs for the House Draw Fire.