06/13/2026
In the summer of 2020, wildlife biologists surveying a burned landscape north of St. George, Utah, found a Mojave desert tortoise with two layers of fire damage on its shell. The fresh burns were from the Turkey Farm Road Fire, which had just scorched nearly 12,000 acres of the Red Cliffs National Conservation Area in July.
Underneath the fresh damage, in the flaking older plates, biologists found a second set of burn scars. Those were from the Mill Creek Fire in 2005. Same tortoise. Same ground. Fifteen years apart. The animal's entire fire history was written on its back in stacked layers of scorched keratin.
The Turkey Farm Road Fire was started by three teenagers setting off fireworks. They were charged in juvenile court. The fire consumed large sections of a conservation area that had been established in 2009 specifically to protect habitat for the Mojave desert tortoise, a federally threatened species whose population has been in decline for decades. Biologists with the Red Cliffs Desert Reserve led survey crews into a landscape one of them described as looking like the surface of Mars. Their feet broke through the scorched crust into underground hollows left by incinerated root systems. They were looking for dead tortoises. They found some alive.
A Mojave desert tortoise survives a wildfire by doing the only thing its body allows. It goes underground. The tortoise digs a burrow or occupies an existing one, retreats deep enough that the surface heat cannot reach it, and stays there until the ground cools. The Utah Division of Wildlife Resources says the burrow must be deep and stable, and the tortoise must remain inside until the surrounding ash is no longer hot enough to burn its skin. If the tortoise panics and surfaces too early, or if the burrow is too shallow, or if the fire burns hot enough to bake the soil to depth, the animal dies underground. If it does everything right, it walks out into a landscape that no longer has anything for it to eat.
The 2005 fires were a disaster for this population. Three large wildfires burned a combined 14,634 acres on the Red Cliffs reserve that summer, consuming roughly a quarter of the entire protected area. Ann McLuckie, a wildlife biologist with the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources, estimated that nearly 700 tortoises were killed. The survivors emerged into a burned desert that would take decades to regrow its native shrubland.
It did not regrow. That is the core of the problem and the reason the same tortoise burned twice.
After a fire strips the native Mojave shrubs, the ground does not sit empty and wait for them to return. Invasive grasses move in first. Cheatgrass, red brome, and Sahara mustard colonize the burned soil and establish dense stands that the native plants cannot compete with. These grasses are fine-textured, fast-growing, and highly flammable. Native Mojave desert does not carry fire well. The spacing between shrubs is too wide, the fuel load too thin. But a continuous mat of cheatgrass burns like paper. The grasses create the conditions for the next fire, which kills more native shrubs, which opens more ground for grasses, which burns again. Each fire accelerates the cycle.
The landscape converts from desert shrubland to exotic grassland one burn at a time, and the tortoise that depends on native plants for food, shade, and burrow structure loses all three with every pass of the flame.
Fire is the number one cause of mortality for the Mojave desert tortoise. Not predators. Not disease. Not vehicles. Fire. And the fires are increasing in frequency and intensity because each one seeds the ground for the next.
The tortoise with two sets of burn scars survived both fires by going deep and staying there. In 2005, it was underground when 700 of its neighbors died. Fifteen years later, on the same ground, with the same grasses carrying the same type of fire started by teenagers with bottle rockets, it went underground again. It survived again. Biologists could read both events on the plates of its shell the way you read rings on a stump.
It is illegal to pick up a Mojave desert tortoise in the wild. If handled, the animal may empty its bladder in a stress response, and in the desert, losing that stored water can be fatal. A tortoise that has survived two wildfires across fifteen years can be killed by a hiker who picks it up to take a photograph.
The Red Cliffs reserve was built for this animal. A quarter of it burned in 2005. Another 12,000 acres burned in 2020, much of it the same ground. The tortoise that carries both fires on its shell is still out there, somewhere in the ash and the cheatgrass, waiting for the third one.
Source: Utah Division of Wildlife Resources, September 2020. Associated Press / Salt Lake Tribune, September 2020. Red Cliffs Desert Reserve Habitat Management Plan, revised 2025.
