CANYON CITY — A Grant County grand jury has indicted U.S. Forest Service burn boss Ricky Snodgrass on a Class A misdemeanor count of reckless burning.

Grant County Sheriff Todd McKinley arrested Snodgrass on Oct. 19, 2022, on suspicion of reckless burning.

On that day, the Forest Service was conducting a prescribed burn that escaped the planned burn area and charred about 20 acres of timbered ground belonging to an adjacent private ranch before the blaze could be put out.

Many factors hindered the sheriff’s investigation, according to a news release from Grant County District Attorney Jim Carpenter, but McKinley was able to complete the inquiry and present the results to the DA’s office for review.

The case was presented to the grand jury for consideration on Friday, according to Carpenter.

An arraignment has been scheduled for March 4 at 1 p.m. in Grant County Circuit Court.

“It is anticipated that this case will proceed through the court system like any other class A misdemeanor,” Carpenter said in a statement. “While this case remains pending, the state will have no other comment on the matter.”

Snodgrass was overseeing the 300-acre Starr 6 Burn in Bear Valley, about 17 miles south of John Day, when embers blew across the Izee-Paulina Highway and scorched about 20 acres of private land on the Holliday Ranch.

Amid escalating tensions between the property owners and Forest Service employees, the sheriff arrested Snodgrass and took him away in handcuffs while the fire was still burning.

Firefighters who remained on the scene brought the blaze on private land under control in about an hour and maintained control of the prescribed burn on national forest land.

Fallout from the arrest of a Forest Service employee traveled all the way to Washington, D.C., where Forest Service Chief Randy Moore called the arrest “highly inappropriate” in a memo to department employees and won’t “stand idly by without fully defending the Burn Boss and all employees carrying out their official duties as federal employees.”

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