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

Never Underestimate the Dangers of the Unfamiliar

Every fire involves danger, but the greatest danger of all comes when you encounter the unfamiliar -- when you're fighting fires in a region where you've never been before, or working under conditions that you've never experienced before. Those are the kinds of situations that require the greatest amount of focus and discipline.

In 1993, we had one of the quietest fire seasons in Montana history. The next year, we had one of the busiest fire seasons ever. Putting out a fire now and then is one thing; dealing with dozens of fires at once is a different game altogether. Usually, a fire season has a predictable progression from beginning to end. The fires in Alaska and New Mexico typically start the show. When they fade away, fires in Montana, Oregon, Idaho, and northern California begin to burn. For the finale, southern California and the eastern United States start to burn. But in 1994, every state was "onstage" at the same time -- and every firefighter was out performing. What's more, we had all types of fires going at once. Typically, we get either a lot of small fires, which require initial fire-fighting attacks, or a bunch of ragers, which require sustained fire-fighting activity. This time, we had brand-new small fires starting every day, yet the big, long-burning fires were still trucking. In August of that year, there were 10,000 firefighters and operations people battling blazes in Region One alone. (Region One covers more than 25 million acres in Idaho, Montana, Washington, North Dakota, and South Dakota.) Air tankers dropped more than 4 million gallons of retardant. Our base in Missoula shipped about 3.8 million pounds of equipment to various fire camps around the country.

That type of crisis creates two potentially dangerous situations. First, you have a shortage of people and supplies. Second, everyone is stretched to the max; everyone is working to the point of exhaustion. You can't underestimate the problems that those factors can cause. In fact, those conditions are what contributed that year to one of the biggest tragedies in fire history -- a fire that took place in South Canyon, Colorado. That fire, with temperatures as high as 2,000 degrees, turned into a 200-foot wall of flame that raced up a steep slope at 40 MPH; it killed 14 firefighters. I knew a lot of the people who were working on that fire, and I was a member of one of the first rescue teams to head into the canyon. It was a disturbing tragedy, and it confirmed an invaluable lesson: The type of fire that you're fighting matters just as much as where you're fighting it.

Location makes a huge difference -- and it affects the kind of strategy that you can devise.

Traditionally, Colorado is not a state that has a lot of fire activity. I've been fighting fires since 1977, and I had never fought a fire in Colorado. In 1994, I fought three there. Colorado has fuel situations that are similar to those found in southern California, a place where we're always putting out fires. In both states, there's a brushy kind of fuel, but the fuel in Colorado looks really different. The brush in southern California looks as if it will burn: It's dry and creepy. But in Colorado, the fuel is a plush, green oak, and you probably couldn't get it to burn even if you tried. But the South Canyon fire was so hot that it had burned underneath the brush. So, when the fire came ripping out of the canyon -- with the proper winds and levels of humidity -- that brush became trouble. This time, it was ready to burn. In a lot of ways, the conditions surrounding the South Canyon fire were typical. But for various reasons, that unfamiliar terrain tricked people and caught them off guard, making them do things that they wouldn't have done if they'd been in a different place.

Every Crew Needs a Skeptic

The worst thing that you can do is to have too many nice guys working on a fire. We work in small, tight teams that have a formal structure -- foremen, squad leaders, and so on. But the beauty of being a jumper is that we're all really in charge. As the foreman, I involve everyone in the decisions that I make. When you're asking people to work themselves to the bone and, in a lot of cases, to risk their lives, it's absurd to exclude them from the decision-making process. I love it when someone on my team questions one of my decisions and says, "This is bullshit." In fact, I invite it. People deserve the right to do that.

Once, when we were fighting a fire in the middle of New Mexico's Gila National Forest, we saw a huge plume of smoke a short distance below us. I had decided that the best strategy was to continue cutting a control line downhill. But two of the jumpers on my team told me that they were uncomfortable with that decision. They felt that the fire down the hill could catch us if we stayed where we were. Not only was I familiar with this terrain, having fought fires in this area for years, but I also remembered spotting a big rimrock wall from the airplane as we approached the fire. I realized that the fire we were seeing was behind that wall and that there was no way it could reach us.