Weed Manager of the Year: One Man’s Quest to Save the Sonoran Desert

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.”