WIDE RUINS, Ariz. — Driving up a dirt road in this part of Navajo Nation, all that can be seen for miles is sagebrush until reaching Harry Joe Ashley’s house.
The Navajo elder lives in a hogan, a traditional home, built for him by neighbors in Wide Ruins, a remote town of 175 people in northeastern Arizona, about 250 miles from Phoenix. The dwelling has no electricity, running water or heat.
He can get by without the water and power, but he uses his handmade wood stove everyday to heat his home on the Navajo reservation, where temperatures can reach 15 degrees F in the winter, and his water, which he receives from neighbors and a veterans nonprofit or has shipped in and stores on his property.
He doesn’t have a way to collect wood himself, and a truck bed of firewood would cost him $300 to be delivered by others on the reservation.
“I only get a small pension from the military,” said the twice-enlisted Marine Corps veteran. “That’s just not enough.”
It’s a situation the Navajo, Hopi and other tribes in the Four Corners region face every winter. Many drive hours to the nearest forests for permits to cut down wood for themselves and to sell at reduced prices to people who cannot afford commercial deliveries or are unable to leave the reservation.
The pandemic and the 2019 closure of a coal-powered plant on the Navajo reservation that generated electricity for the Navajo and Hopi nations created a “home-heating crisis,” said Sasha Stortz, Southwest region director of the National Forest Foundation, a nonprofit that works to preserve U.S. wildlands.
The growing demand for firewood sent expenses soaring for tribal members and prompted Stortz in 2020 to start Wood for Life, a program that takes salvaged wood from fire prevention efforts in national forests and gives it to Native communities that do not have local sources of firewood.
“We try to bring everybody together and kind of help make matches between the needs that are out there…
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