Steph Larsen knew what she wanted in a community: A rural, friendly place where she could farm and raise her family. In 2014, Larsen and her husband Noah Weber bought land in Montana and started their farm. But their lives changed just three years later.
“The fire season in Montana was so bad that we couldn’t take our daughter, who had just turned one, outside for any reason for six weeks,” Larsen, 44, said.
The 2017 wildfires spread across 539,026 acres and cost a total of $380 million to suppress. Larsen, who was pregnant at the time, worried that the thick smoke would affect her baby and her other child. It was around then that she and Weber decided to move.
“As much as we loved Montana, as much as we loved the mountains and skiing and kayaking and all of the things that we were excited to do with our children, after that summer, we looked at each other and said, ‘what are we doing here?’”
