When Don Pike takes his daily walk, he laces up his brown hiking boots, grabs his walking stick and bucket hat and heads outside. Ten feet later, he carefully slips past barbed wire and enters the Tonto National Forest. Unlike other parts of the Tonto, where the ground between native plants and trees is covered with dry grasses, the earth is pale, crusty and barren, like it’s meant to be.
That’s because Mr. Pike has been pulling weeds.
“You won’t find any of them in this area here because I’ve removed them,” said Mr. Pike, 84, a retiree from Maine who installed floor-to-ceiling windows in his living room to better see his beloved desert.
Mr. Pike is at war with buffel grass and fountain grass, two invasive species that are spreading in the Sonoran desert, choking native plants, increasing the risk and intensity of wildfires and threatening a vibrant ecosystem.
He began hunting the thick grasses, which were introduced to the area by landscapers, almost 15 years ago. Since then, he estimates that he and his team of volunteers have cleared 550 of the roughly 14,000 acres they oversee. In 2024, that earned him the title of Arizona’s Weed Manager of the Year.
Work by volunteers like Mr. Pike has always been an important supplement to managing federal lands, according to government workers who say their programs have been underfunded for years. But since the Trump administration and the so-called Department of Government Efficiency began mass firings of federal workers, volunteers like Mr. Pike have become more vital than ever.
“It’s going to be important for the federal agencies, the Forest Service in particular, to find ways to engage people,” Mr. Pike said on his back porch in March. “There’s a lot of people that want to get involved. Particularly retirees who have a lot of skills.”
Ine February, at least 2,000 employees had been eliminated from the U.S. Forest Service, which is responsible for lands across the country that, together, rival the size of Texas. Forests like the Tonto are at risk as climate change increases the chances of wildfires and as invasive species spread. But citizen scientists like Mr. Pike are working to reduce fire and heat risks, clear hundreds of acres of invasives and capture data on threatened cactuses, helping to save what otherwise might be lost.
Bringing in Reinforcements
Patti Fenner was an invasive weeds specialist for the United States Forest Service in 2011 when she gave a presentation to a retirees group that included Mr. Pike.
After the talk, Ms. Fenner and Mr. Pike took a hike and she pointed out how invasive grasses had begun overtaking native plants. That first outing led to a decades-long obsession, and when Ms. Fenner retired three years later and founded Friends of the Tonto, a volunteer group with about 70 members that assists the national forest, Mr. Pike became one of the first members.
Ms. Fenner had worked in the forest since college, doing a variety of jobs. She liked the Forest Service-style of land management because it demanded compromise from all parties. Unlike national parks, Forest Service land is used by multiple interests, including logging, mining and ranching in addition to recreation.
But maintaining an ecological balance is also key, and when Ms. Fenner became the forest’s first noxious weed manager in 2003, it felt like a Sisyphean task to clear three million acres of rapidly multiplying invasive species.
Mr. Pike decided to concentrate on a smaller scale, homing in on what’s known as the wildland urban interface, or the space where developments like his neighborhood creep up on wilderness areas like the Tonto. A former engineer, he created a map to track the progress he made with his team of volunteers, pinning a green flag where invasives were cleared. The flag turns yellow after two years as a reminder to clear the area again. While his system is effective in his relatively small section, it’s an unlikely fix for an entire forest.
“In the direction that we’re headed, the desert will become a grassland,” Mr. Pike said.
Lightning-strike fires have always been possible in the desert, but excess vegetation like red brome, a grass that dries into short hay-like tufts, has contributed to bigger and more frequent wildfires in the Tonto.
One of the first huge wildfires came in 2005, when the Cave Creek Complex fire burned 243,000 acres. Then, in the summer of 2020, Mr. Pike watched the sky turn orange as the Bush fire burned 193,000 acres, killing roughly 80,000 saguaros, the distinctive cactuses with cartoonish curved arms. Invasive plants grew back quickly, outcompeting the native saguaros and palo verde, the state tree with flowers like tiny yellow bells.
So, Friends of the Tonto started a second monitoring program for the saguaros. In late 2023, Mr. Pike created another map with more than 9,900 tiny saguaros. On this one, green signals good health and black means the cactus is dead. He’s trained about 40 people to find additional saguaros and monitor the ones already in the database.
Staff at the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix and the Saguaro National Park near Tucson are also monitoring the plants. But Mr. Pike’s group is a citizen science program done exclusively by volunteers using simple tools. They measure, somewhat based on guesswork, the height and number of arms, and share visual observations of the cactus’s health, along with a photo.
The Future of the Forest
The main office at Tonto has been closed for years because the Forest Service had trouble staffing it, even before the recent hiring freeze and terminations, largely because the pay was low, Ms. Fenner said. Other offices within the forest used to stay open on weekends during the busy season, but that also ended years ago because of a lack of employees.
“If you’re trying to get ahold of somebody there’s no one to talk to,” Ms. Fenner said of the forest staff. “It’s like nobody’s home.”
Ongoing budget and staffing issues at the Tonto have limited the scope of volunteer work, which is based on an agreement with the Forest Service that spells out the terms of the relationship.
The Forest Service did not respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Pike has been struggling to contact federal employees who can help him apply for grants. In 2024, he helped win a $105,000 grant from the state’s Department of Forestry and Fire Management to hire a contractor to apply herbicide and organize a youth group to cull invasive plants in the forest.
“It’s not going to get better, it’s going to get worse,” Mr. Pike said of communication with forest managers. He’s wants to secure more grants to better manage the invasive plants but without support from forest officials, he said, “I can’t logically expand the area that I’m covering.”
Still, they are tackling the impossible, weed by weed. At the top of a hill overlooking the Tonto called Sears-Kay, which features ruins almost 1,000 years old, Ms. Fenner spotted buffel grass in late March. She tried to pull it with her bare hands but it was rooted too firmly. So she called Mr. Pike, and he encouraged her to go back with a shovel.
She went on a walk and pulled the plant the next day.
Austyn Gaffney is a reporter covering climate and a member of the 2024-25 Times Fellowship class, a program for journalists early in their careers.
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