Where There's Smoke It Helps to Have a Smoke Jumper

From the airplane, we get a bird's-eye view of the fire. That big-picture information is essential both for understanding the problem and for formulating an initial strategy: where we're going to jump; where we'll drop our cargo; whether there are any natural fire breaks, such as rivers or open meadows; where we'll establish a safety zone and an escape route. This is the information that I store in one mind, or one memory.

But the first thing that I do once I get on the ground, after setting up the crew, is to walk around the entire fire and to start gathering information. This is when my other mind, or memory, clicks in. I set aside what I've been told -- or what I think is going on -- and simply do two things: I watch the fire, and I "feel" what's happening. A fire has complex behavior. It's a separate entity that doesn't unfold all at once but keeps throwing bits of information at you. The trick is to be open enough to see -- and feel -- those pieces of data, to figure out the type of fire "personality" that you're dealing with. Every change brings new details, and in my world, those details could have life-threatening consequences.

With a fire, conditions change constantly. If you're not aware of what's going on, the fire will catch you off guard. Sometimes it's the rookie smoke jumpers who are the most open to read such changes. They can't fall back on the comfort zone of experience, or on an archive of knowledge that might cut them off from what's really happening. But I never let myself become so focused on the fire that I lose sight of what's happening in a big-picture sense. Instead, I shift back and forth between my two "memories." And I stay alert -- because, when you're working in the wilderness, you might be sweating your socks off one day, and (especially if it's late in the season) you might be freezing the next day. It may not always be the fire that catches you off guard.

Speed Matters -- But Slower Can Be Better

One of the basic tenets of wildland fire fighting is speed: You need to reach a fire as quickly as possible, so that you can attack it while it's still small. In the case of small fires, the decisions that we make are fairly straightforward. We operate under a "10 AM policy": That is, we try to control the fire by the morning after it is discovered. On the flip side, if a fire is really up and roaring, it will make our decision for us. Typically, the best strategy is to play a waiting game. We wait until a fire runs into a different fuel type, until the weather changes, or until some other opportunity rolls in that lets us resume fighting the fire.

The most difficult decisions that we have to make come when we're faced with a medium-size fire. We're never sure which way it's going to swing. In an instant, it could lie down and die -- or take off and run. In those situations, it's easy to get tunnel vision and to fall into what we call the "overhead trap," in which you become obsessed with doing well, no matter what. You get this fever to catch every fire, and you don't recognize that it may be time to retreat for a while. I used to be like that. There's no question that I want to catch every fire that I jump, but I know that I can't do that in every situation. And the last thing that I want is to have someone's death on my conscience -- just because I couldn't accept the fact that some fires present challenges that are beyond my crew's ability.

A few years ago, we were fighting one of those medium-size fires. It was burning on both sides of a mountain. From the air, I had developed what I thought was a pretty sound strategy: First, we would attack the fire at its most inactive side, and then we'd work our way around it with our control line. But when I started walking around the fire, I realized that something was terribly wrong. It was 9 PM, and the air was way too hot for that time of night. All of a sudden, I realized that we were in the middle of an inversion layer: Hot air was getting trapped in the middle of the canyon's slope. An inversion jacks the heat way up and drives the humidity down -- two ingredients that could make a fire's behavior very dangerous.

I always carry a camera with me when I fight a fire, and the thing that really tipped me off that night was taking pictures of an alligator juniper that was burning out of control. The alligator juniper is a pretty untorchable tree, but that one was as bright as a Christmas tree. When I looked through my viewfinder, I realized that my light monitor was registering too much light, given that it was the middle of the night. At that moment, I knew that we were in trouble. I immediately told members of my crew to stop what they were doing and to start hiking up the hill to our safety zone, a large rock outcropping. Ultimately, it's never one thing that goes wrong when you fight a fire. Instead, there's a bunch of stuff that piles up and suddenly overwhelms you. And in this situation, too many small things were starting to pile up. After we reached our safety zone, I began to question my decision to leave the fire. I wondered if I was just being lazy. But 10 minutes later, the fire blew up, and the canyon that we had just left became a sea of flames.