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Burn, Prairie, Burn:
Tourists in Kansas
Come to Torch Grass

Charging $100, Mr. Jantzen Turns Chore Into Fun; ‘Playing With Fire’
By JIM CARLTON
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
May 9, 2005; Page A1

EMPORIA, Kan.—As Mike Lanzrath stood at the edge of a windblown prairie one sunny afternoon, he fiddled with matches. “It don’t get no better than this,” he said in anticipation.

Then rancher Jan Jantzen, the property’s owner, gave the order to set it ablaze. Mr. Lanzrath, a brawny carpenter, and 41 other guests bent down, struck matches and held them to tinder-dry grass. In seconds, a firestorm soared up to 20 feet high, crackling across the prairie. The inferno snapped and popped as dark clouds of smoke billowed into the blue sky.

“Flames in the Flint Hills,” now an annual event, started at Mr. Jantzen’s ranch three years ago. Here, spring is range-burning season when ranchers torch their prairies to revitalize the grass for livestock and kill off invasive plants. It’s a dirty, smoky and sometimes dangerous task usually done by a rancher and one or two hired laborers.

Yet the 61-year-old Mr. Jantzen has managed to turn the burn into a cash cow by getting others to pay for doing his work—something tantamount to Tom Sawyer snookering pals into whitewashing his aunt’s fence. Instead of dead rats, apples and marbles, Mr. Jantzen gets paid $100 by every burner.

He makes an all-day party of it, offering snacks, a cash bar and dinner with a live bluegrass band. Well after nightfall into last month’s burn, flames licked the prairie’s ridgelines as guests from as far away as Finland stood sipping beer and swaying to music.

A Kansas native, Mr. Jantzen spent most of his adult years as a college administrator before buying a 135-acre spread near here 11 years ago. He ran some cattle on the rolling prairie and began hiring himself out as a guide for horseback rides.

At range-burning time, he followed his neighbors’ practice of driving into the pastures on an all-terrain vehicle. Mr. Jantzen would rake up piles of dead grass, set them on fire and then walk from one side of a pasture to another, spreading the flames. He would then tromp on the charred ground, extinguishing stray embers with a portable water tank. “It’s a chore,” he says.

Horse-riding customers got him thinking about alternatives. “I’d tell them, ‘Everywhere we are riding, this will be on fire,’ “ he says. “They’d go, ‘Wow, I’d like to see that.’ “

In 2003, Mr. Jantzen tested the market for burn tourism. He sent out fliers inviting visitors: “Feel the heat, hear the crackle, smell the smoke, and witness the leaping flames, all as close as you want to be.” To his surprise, 15 people signed up. Mr. Jantzen was worried about what he’d gotten himself into: “I had to see if I could keep people safe,” he confesses.

As 15 strangers converged on the range that year, Mr. Jantzen’s neighbors were puzzled. “I was wondering, ‘who are those people?’ “ recalls Leigh Ann Swigert, a neighboring rancher. “I can’t imagine folks will keep paying for this.”

Mr. Jantzen’s customers set a range fire on his Kansas ranch.

It went off without a hitch and “nary an eyebrow singed,” Mr. Jantzen says. Word got out, and the next year he sold slots to 30 guests. The burn was oversubscribed, so he added a second day for 30 more. He had to cancel the second burn because of gale-force gusts, but the turnout convinced him he had a solid business plan. This year, he increased his burn crew to 42 slots, all of which sold out.

“It’s worth every penny,” said Eunice Pennington, a 72-year-old retired nurse from Wichita. Most of the burners, like Ms. Pennington, were from nearby cities. One was from Pennsylvania, visiting local friends. Leo and Marianne Miller and their two teenage children traveled from Monroe, La., just for the burn. Another customer was Raimo Myllyniemi, a 40-year-old dairy farmer visiting Kansas from Finland. “I wish we could do this back home,” he said.

All this fun just doesn’t seem right to the neighbors. “It’s irritating,” says rancher Kathy Mildward. “I like Jan. But he’s making money on something that people can see for free just by driving around.” Mrs. Swigert calls the paid burns “silly,” and says this approach trivializes an important ranching duty. But she adds, “If people are willing to pay to do it, maybe I’ll start charging $50 instead of $100.”

At this year’s burn, Mr. Jantzen seemed apprehensive as winds gusted above 20 miles per hour. “If you had your druthers, you wouldn’t want to burn on a day like this,” Mr. Jantzen said as guests began arriving on a dirt road. His neighbors on two sides had agreed to burn the same day, reducing the chance his fire would spread much.

Inside the limestone walls of an old barn, Mr. Jantzen donned a cowboy hat and addressed his guests. “I don’t want to scare you, but you are assuming complete risk,” he warned. “We will literally be playing with fire.” A range fire can outrun a person, he cautioned. The best hope of escaping, if it turns the wrong way, is to think “black or blue: Go for burned, black ground, or jump in the blue water,” he said. “If you can’t swim, you have to decide if you want to burn or drown.”

Some guests chuckled nervously. “Good old family fun,” said a grinning Richard Miller III of Emporia, whose parents had brought him up as a 19th-birthday present. Another guest, Virginia Parker, became so spooked that she and her husband, Dennis, abandoned the event. “Fire scares me,” said Mrs. Parker, a retired postal worker from Leawood, Kan.

Mr. Jantzen led the way to a two-acre pasture, where dry grass stood waist high. Perched on his all-terrain vehicle, he tossed some grass in the air to check the wind direction, then positioned his fire crew with matches and rakes. After the grasses were lit, the pasture erupted in a fireball so hot that most firelighters had to step back several paces, blinking in amazement.

The fire consumed the pasture in three minutes, 29 seconds, by one timekeeper’s estimate. Then the firelighters adjourned to a dinner of biscuits and ranch stew before another evening burn.

Write to Jim Carlton at jim.carlton@wsj.com

reprinted with permission