A magical corner of Oregon has the highest US rate of wildfire smoke deaths. How do residents live with the haze – and grief?
Driving into the county, you can’t miss the sign.
The letters are so big they form an arch over 6th Street in Grants Pass.
Locals tell me it’s a flex – or was before the irony set in. This evergreen corner of Oregon, near the California border, is a beautiful tangle of mountains and forest carved out by the Rogue and Illinois rivers. Once upon a time, the climate was the draw. Cool and wet in the winters, sunny but not too hot in the summers. The forests protected you from unbearable heat beyond the ridge.
Now, you don’t hear the term summer much.
Across the US and Europe this summer, people have choked beneath red skies and endured extraordinarily unhealthy air – scenes that would be grimly familiar to anyone in the American west.
Josephine county is the deadliest place for wildfire smoke in the US, according to a 2025 study published in Nature magazine. It ties with Trinity county, California, as having the highest rate of wildfire smoke deaths linked to climate breakdown between 2006 and 2020, the years the researchers analyzed, with an estimated 17 premature deaths per 100,000 people.
Everyone here has a story about how bad it can get.
They describe ash falling from the sky and coating their cars like snow. “You can taste it!” says Cynthia Hewitt, a retiree and restaurant owner. When the smoke is particularly thick, she wets towels and wedges them around her doorframes to try to prevent the haze from coming into her living room. “It gets on the furniture and everything,” she says.
Everything includes wine. If you taste certain bottles from bad smoke years, I’m told, that campfire tang clings to the grapes.
Randi Maldonado, a beautician I met in a hair salon with two workers and three air purifiers, tries to calm her toddler’s lungs by sitting in the bathroom with the door closed and hot water roaring from the bathtub faucet. “Like a humidifier,” she says. It helps her child breathe.
Her mother, Kim Williams, the other salon worker, tells me that her client’s husband died not long after leaving the windows open overnight during a wildfire smoke inundation.
A local nurse, Joann Reed, says the smoke has gotten so bad in recent years that even hospitals can’t keep it out. She recalls a summer, a few years ago now, when a hospital where she was working tasked employees with standing near exits, in part to shut doors as fast as possible. “You could see a smoke cloud, just a haze, as you walked up and down the hallways,” she tells me. “There’s no filtration system strong enough to get rid of that much constant smoke.”
Some wear masks. Others wish they were brave enough to wear masks but they get tired of the stares from people who still see masks as code for “woke America”. (Josephine county is far more conservative than Oregon’s familiar “Portlandia” tropes. More than one person suggests to me that the way to solve the wildfire problem is to log or even clearcut the forest so there’s less of it to burn.)
It is true that the area’s forests are thick, and its valleys are deep, trapping smoke in place for weeks or sometimes months at a time. “Socked in” is a phrase you hear a lot – as in, we’re just socked in with smoke.
