My Journey Into Wildland Fire

My Bucket List is full of adventures, personal-growth retreats, destinations, plus physical and mental challenges. Yours may be similar or completely different. Either way, becoming a wildland firefighter was on mine, and this one had to be earned.

I’m a lifelong adventurer. I’ve logged plenty of 20-mile hiking days, rim-to-river-to-rim hikes, canyoneering routes, and light mountaineering. Still, the physical demands of the wildland fire position require that I get myself back into what I call “military shape”. Which I haven’t been in since I was 20 …this time I am 54.

At 54, it wasn’t about proving anything to anyone else; I was trying to prove I still belonged to myself.

To earn the coveted Red Card, passing an arduous packtest is required. Although it is black text on white card paper, this card serves as proof that you have a current arduous pack test certification and lists your credentials for qualification level and the jobs you can perform while on a Resource Order, an official request for personnel, equipment, or supplies assigned to a fire.

Arduous pack test, the title tells all. Still, for details, the purpose of the test is to assess your physical fitness level as a barometer for the work you would have to do on a fire line for a day. Hopefully, you are imagining a LONG day. For this test, you must wear a 45-pound weighted vest or backpack and cover 3 miles in under 45 minutes without running. Speed walking is the only way to pass it. To add to the mix, the ranger station I know, love, and test is at 7,000 feet above sea level. That sounds like me: stack the deck against me, see what happens.

I’d just come off a timber contract where I walked two to seven miles a day through the same forest, carrying a backpack loaded with food, water, layers, and a panama-a presurized metal container holding a couple of gallons of paint used to mark trees as take or off limits for timber harvesting. I thought that would have me totally ready for the test.

Still, I trained anyway.

I am glad I did because the test pushed my cardio to the limit. I passed, but didn’t feel right for a day or so, similar to my first rim-to-river-to-rim. A rim-to-river-to-rim, in its simplest description, is hiking from the top (rim) of the Grand Canyon to the river below and back out again in one push. All in a day. The hike is 15–21 miles with an elevation loss/gain of 4,800–5,800 feet, depending on the route you take. That’s descending 5,800 feet, hiking across the bottom and back up the other side, a gain of 4,800 feet in elevation, or the other way around.

After passing the pack test, I spent the next month or so learning the details of being on patrol as a member of Fire Prevention. Fire Prevention is different from most Wildland Fire jobs because it requires interaction with the public. We spend most of our workday out in the forest, mostly in a patrol vehicle, with instructions to hike PT regularly.

During fire restrictions, we check for compliance, put out any illegal campfires, and provide education about the restrictions and why they help keep the forest from burning. Compliance is always the goal; so is your enjoyment of these natural resources. Yet sometimes citations are issued, usually for serial offenders or entitled people who don’t think the rules apply to them.

My favorite part of the job thus far is being able to self-dispatch to smoke checks or fire flashes called in by lookout towers (the famous fire towers that host a human who spends the day looking at the tops of forests, checking for smoke or flames). They are busiest after thunderstorms and after holiday weekends. Unfortunately, a majority of forest fires are human-caused; abandoned campfires and dragging trailer chains are the biggest culprits.

When the lookouts call in a smoke check or fire flash, they provide an azimuth from their tower and an approximate distance along that line to the smoke or flames. Some of us can self-dispatch; the DO (duty officer) dispatches others. In both instances, our goal is to find the new fire as quickly and safely as possible. For me, it’s an off-trail treasure hunt with a sense of urgency and danger. A good adrenaline, so to speak, I am out there attempting to find a recent lightning strike and the fire it created while keeping me safe.

Once we find it, it is time for the initial attack.

The IA (Initial Attack) is when firefighters first contact a new wildfire and work to construct a fire line around it to prevent its spread. Mop-Up is when the fire has a constructed line around it, and firefighters are working to burn fuels within the containment area. Once the wildfire is considered safe and the fuels have fully burned, we check the entire fire area three more times for smoke or heat before a DO can call it out.

One day, one of the engines and I were tasked with checking a fire that had started two days before from a lightning strike. There was a fire line around it, and we were in the mop-up phase of the fire. The prior day, I had gone out to the site with a different engine. We were all busy because a series of thunderstorms had raced through the area two days in a row.

We arrived in a staging area to unload a five-seater “side by side” off-road vehicle. I had not been in the field with this engine before and did not know the crew. The engine boss approaches me and confirms that I was here yesterday with a different engine. Then he says, “It might get squirly out there. If you want, you can not go, and we can tell them you went.”

My instant thought was ‘no f-ing way’, what came out of my mouth was, “Let’s save that one for later.”

I laughed in my head after saying that. The gist of it was that I am not a liar; I already know this job is highly physical, and if it comes to climbing 1,000 feet asap, I may volunteer to stay with the engine or shuttle people with the UTV. I may take him up on that offer then. I also knew it may have been a test: How bad does this guy want to do this job?

There is a rotation in place; at times, not everybody needs to go, and even then, there can be multiple trips involved. Needless to say, I did go, and it was a story in itself: After a few-mile ride on a side-by-side, we parked at the bottom edge of a mesa, and we grabbed our gear as a thunderstorm brewed in the distance.

We did a fast ascent up the small mesa and arrived at the fire site as the skies darkened around us. After a quick patrol of the fire area, it became obvious this fire was under control and almost out. As we gathered to report our findings to the engine boss, a jagged bolt of lightning pierced the sky, immediately followed by a loud crack of thunder. Within seconds, a deluge of rain fell from the sky.

Everything under control here, we hustled back down the mesa, treading lightly on soaked basalt rocks and increasingly greasy soil. We loaded up and enjoyed the 3-mile UTV ride in pouring rain: boom, another adventure in the books.

I write confidently, but I know I have a lot to learn. Even if I did have a good first year, I only have my foot in the door, a good first showing, now I have to pass that arduous pack test a 2nd time. The goal this time is to have a stronger core and legs when I show up. Solid legs are the key to wildland fire. They all tell me I did great, but my brain tells me I could do better. I focus on what I can improve and work to accept what I cannot.

Giving myself a win is paramount. If the toughest goals I set for myself are easy to obtain, then what is the point? What kind of stretch would it be, and what kind of growth would I receive? Definitely not as much, definitely less, and I don’t want to be less than I can be; I want to be the best I can be, not for you, for me.

Author note:

This piece was inspired by a writing prompt during a Medium’s Writer’s Circle event: “Writing prompt 1. Write about a moment that revealed a hidden value you hold.”

Integrity and sneakiness are what I got from my behavior. I don’t want to be out of integrity, aka lie and say I went when I didn’t, yet I’m aware there are times not everyone can load up, and someone needs to be in the rear with the gear. So I want to save that opportunity for when I am having a tired day or maybe sick, but working anyway.