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If you've seen cheat grass burn understand

A couple years ago, we watched a cheat grass fire from a couple miles away. The flames were 50' high. It's so hot that firefighters can't get near it. The heat from cheat fires kills the sage and other native plants. The cheat seeds can survive the heat and the next year, cheat is all that's left.
The video shows someone driving through heavy smoke. A few years ago in so. Idaho, 2 firefighters were killed when they tried that. The smoke choked out their engine and it died. Then the fire caught up with them.

It's not the cheatgrass fires "heat" that kills sagebrush. Pretty much any level of fire kills sagebrush and it doesn't resprout, therefore it must colonize the burnt area from seed. The natural dispersal rate of sagebrush is measure in feet/year. The biggest issue with the native grasses, which are fire adapted, isn't that they are killed. They are outcompeted by cheatgrass; which some think is partly how it got it's name. It grows earlier and faster than the native grass species giving it a competitive advantage. One of the big issues with the native grasses is too much of the sagebrush rangelands have way too much sagebrush in them. This reduces the amount of space/resources for grass. Generally the same amount of native grasses will be found before and after a fire. The resulting "free" space created is what is taken advantage of by the cheatgrass. Where cheatgrass can cause the death of native grasses isn't due to the "heat" of the fires, but in the frequency. Native grasses often do very well after a fire. However, in most sagebrush/grass ecosystems the historic fire interval was often greater than 25 years. In an area with cheatgrass that interval is cut down significantly. It's the repeated burns that kill out the native grass species.

Cheatgrass is a Brome. The stuff is EVERYWHERE. Good luck getting rid of it. I hope your successful.

People use Bromes for pasture and hay.

I think cheat grass gets its moniker from the fact that it grows so vigorously and so quickly that it depletes soil moisture before the native perennial grasses get a chance to utilize it.

I haven't worked in the range management field for 30 years, but I still remember old Bromus tectorum.

They are spraying the cheatgrass with pesticides in the burn scar from the 175,000 acre fire last year in my area. (The fire hit mostly woods, not the rangelands.) They also have to monitor the effects of the pesticide on the ecosystem before going too crazy with the spraying. They said that if they don't eradicate the cheatgrass now, it will become a monoculture that will destroy a lot of habitat essential to the critters and the health of the forest.