If we weren’t called to a wildfire, my normal day went like this: Show up at the station at about 7:40 a.m., dressed in my green fire pants, a T-shirt, boots, and a hat. Grab a water (everyone else drank coffee), get my lunch together, sit on the front porch, put a chew in, and shoot the shit with the other guys. At 8:00, we’d have a morning briefing on fire conditions, weather, and JAH, or job analysis hazards, meaning what might kill us out there (falling trees, lightning storms, and a bunch of other dangerous shit). We’d load up and do PT. I’d be nervous as hell, because whether I could make it to the end of a hike was always an open question.
Come back, do solid core body work. A pyramid of pull-ups, which means you do one, come all the way down, then do two, come all the way down, until you get to ten. Then you count back all the way down to one. By the end, you’d do a hundred pull-ups. Or planks. Or push-ups.
Break for lunch. Then go out and do fuels work around Prescott. Drive to different locations in town and cut brush, make the houses defensible. Three or four hours of that, then head back to the station, clean the ’saws, wash out the trucks. Final meeting with Eric, where he reviewed our performance.
It was grueling. We’d be out on the trail and someone would look up at the sky and say, “For God’s sake, someone start a fire!” Or another guy would call out, “Where’s the lightning when you need it?” We wanted to fight fires, not only because that’s what we’d been trained to a fine edge to do, but because Eric’s training was such a killer.
Fires also meant overtime. There were part-time guys on the crew making twelve or fourteen dollars an hour. They really loved the job, but the money was hard to justify with two or three kids at home. Fires were the only way they could make a decent living. So, in a way, you prayed for the thing you feared.
We didn’t turn down fires. You want us in Oregon, Florida, Hawaii? We’re there.
In the beginning of a season, we’d do an overnighter. Head out to a mountain that had been flagged and fight an imaginary fire to keep sharp. Spend the night out there and tell some stories and laugh some.
But if there was a fire, we’d be out in the bush. Sometimes we were even sent out to New Mexico or other hotspots and “pre-positioned,” staged into an area where there was a high likelihood of flames touching off or lightning strikes. And that summer, the fires were unrelenting. One after the other: Yuma, Chiricahua, southern Arizona. I’d end up putting in 1,100 hours of overtime that season.
I loved what I was doing. Every fire, I learned something different. I learned how to read terrain and how to use a compass to navigate trackless forests. I got better at predicting the weather. I learned basic medical techniques, because if you get hurt on the fire line in the wild, you’re likely to die. The work sites can be so remote a chopper could take hours to get you to a hospital.
I started to learn about the different kinds of wildfires. Grass fires, for example, are fast and dangerous. A tall grass fire is a killer. It moves quicker than any other type. If a good wind gets behind it, you’d better pray the wind doesn’t shift, because if it does, and you’re caught in the green—unburned terrain—that fire is going to run you down. The only good thing about grass blazes is that they tend to die down at night, so you can sneak around them and cut them off before they get going again in the morning.
Big timber is another thing altogether. A fire going through a wilderness with tall pine and sycamore will “crown”: It’ll fly across the treetops, moving so fast it doesn’t even touch the timber, just burning up the needles and leaves as it speeds a hundred feet above your head. In a crowning fire, the flames are almost your second-most-dangerous adversary. It’s the trees themselves that’ll kill you. You’re working ahead of the fire, cutting through pines that are two and three times as thick as your own torso. Mistakes are easy to make. Guys have lost their legs or had their heads caved in.
I started looking at different types of vegetation as fuel and learning their characteristics. Juniper is spread across the Southwest and we often found ourselves fighting blazes where it was the majority of the fuel. It’s dry and dusty and especially dangerous because it tends to throw spot fires. Scrub oak will spot less, but it burns super hot. And when you go out into the forest to fight a fire, you have to be aware of what animals like to hide in scrub oak: not only wild turkey and mule deer, but black bear.
Manzanita (“little apple” in Spanish) is an evergreen hardwood that seems to burn forever; the oils stored deep within the plant sustain blazes long after you think they’re dead. Trees that carry a lot of oil or resin (pine is one example) will burn faster than hardwoods like maple or cherry. That’s why the fatwood you may use to light your fire comes from the heart of a pine—it’s packed with resin. The only good thing about manzanita is that if you get poison ivy out in the field, you can use the tree’s berries to treat it.
Scrub, brush, and trees react to the radiant heat of the sun. A shrub or a tree can hold three times its weight in moisture. When a fire hits a plant like that, it barely burns (think of green wood smoking and not catching in your fireplace). When temperatures increase, plants release moisture. A piece of timber or brush that experiences a high, dry heat will go from having 300 percent moisture to 30 percent fairly quickly. That number fluctuates more than you would think—a hot sun with low relative humidity can dry out a shrub quick. That’s why hotshots take weather measurements each hour. You’re measuring how dry the fuel around you is, and that can fluctuate significantly over the course of sixty minutes.
When the plants gets hotter, the fuel becomes easier to ignite. That’s why the afternoon hours—when temperatures peak—are the most dangerous ones for wildland firefighters. At night, fires often go to sleep, but between noon and five p.m. is when you really earn your money.
You would think the high desert would have little to burn, but in fact everything in it is flammable. Even cactus catches fire. I never knew that until I became a hotshot. Those things will light up like a green cigar.
Guys told me stories of what to watch out for in the field. The season before, another crew Chris had been working with was doing fuels work in California in winter, when the temps are cooler and the wind isn’t as strong. It’s supposed to be easy, a way to rest up and get some hours in before the summer kicks off. But that winter was different. The temperatures were so high that helicopters were flying ice in just to cool the guys down. They were ferrying heatstroke victims out. “Tits up” is the technical term we used to describe heatstroke: You’re dehydrated, you’re exhausted, your muscles are cramping.
“I thought I’d die of dehydration,” Chris told me about that trip. I thought he was joking, but it’s true—hotshots have actually died from lack of water out in the field. If you’re working a blaze and you get so into it that you forget to hydrate, you can do yourself in. To guard against that, I ended up getting a CamelBak, which is a hydration pack filled with water that you wear like a backpack. That thing saved my ass multiple times.
There are lots of weird ways to die on a job. When you’re working big timber, you have to watch out for widowmakers. Those are the things up in the canopy that can come down and kill you. Dead branches, trees, even pinecones—I learned that there are pinecones in the California forest that are big enough to split your skull open.
One time, after we’d worked a thirty-two-hour shift and gotten flown off a mountain, Eric was leading us toward our camp so we could get some sleep. We were marching along the trail, and Eric told us to watch out for widowmakers. I was half-delirious by that time and completely misheard him. I thought he said “spider widow webs.” Don’t ask me how, that’s just what I heard.
“Eric!” I called back.
“Yeah?”
“Just take a rake and rake that shit up!”
I was talking about getting the spiderwebs out of the branches so a black widow wouldn’t drop down my neck and bite me.
Eric was confused. “What did you just say, Donut?”
“Get a rake and rake ’em up!”
“What are you talking about, son?” Eric said in his drawl. “Widowmakers, Donut. The stuff in the trees. That’s what I’m talking about.”
I got shit about that for a year. Jesse or Eric would be finishing up a safety briefing and ask for any questions and someone would raise a hand and say, “Sounds good, but when do we get the rakes to rake that shit up?” Guffaws.
There were other things out in the wild to be scared of. Lightning storms were terrifying. We’d be on the slope of mountain ranges and a storm cell would come over and start shooting high electricity down into the pines. The tallest trees acted like magnets for lightning. Then the chaotic winds of the thunderstorm that followed played havoc with the fire itself, driving it one way or another like a dog gone crazy with rabies. Totally unpredictable. A lot of times, if a storm moved in, we pulled back from the fire line, because the chance of getting caught in a shifting blaze was that much higher.
During those times, you’d run out of the tree cover and crouch in a clearing, praying for the lightning strikes to stay away. The rain and hail would be pelting you and freezing you to the marrow. Freezing cold rain running down your back into your underwear. Boy, that was an experience I could have happily missed.
Snakes were another job hazard. A lot of the terrain we were working in was the natural habitat for speckled rattlers, western diamondbacks, sidewinders, copperheads, and a bunch of other nasty critters. The main reason we wear high leather boots is the smoking debris we walk through, but another good one is to avoid snakebites.
I killed my share. We even had rock parties. When we spotted a big poisonous critter in the area we were working, we’d all grab a rock and have at it. One time we were hiking through a salt cedar swamp. I was trailing behind and all of a sudden I heard someone screaming. “Snake! SNAKE!”
“What the hell?” I said to myself.
The hotshot doing the screaming was Mondo, who was famous for his glossy black mustache. As he walked through the salt cedar, a baby rattler had dropped from the tree branches onto him. It was now wriggling on his chest strap. A baby rattler can’t control its venom like an adult snake can. It can give you ten times a fatal dose in one of its bites, making it far more dangerous than a grown-up rattler.
We circled around Mondo, wondering what to do. We couldn’t smash the damn thing or try to slap it off, for fear that it might strike and kill this guy with one bite to the chest. So we tried to calm him down as the thing wriggled on his shirt. His face was as pale as a sheet of paper.
Finally it dropped off. Mondo sat down, his chest heaving. It took him ten minutes to get calm enough to recover and get back on the trail.
Lizards were a different story. I loved the things. I’d find one on the first day or two of a fire and keep him as a pet, giving him little pieces of my rations to eat. I’d put one in my pocket and he’d just chill in there as I dug line. Let him out back in camp and let him crawl over me as I started to fall asleep. I even talked to the little guys. Why not? It’s just you and nineteen of your best friends. No one out here to judge you.
A bunch of the guys adopted little friends for our excursions. Crawdads, which are little crustaceans that look like mini lobsters, were a favorite. Guys would carry them around in little jars of water attached to their belt loops and then set them free when we left. Out on the fire line, you could get to feel like a machine working in a smoky, noisy, dangerous factory. Why not have a little buddy to call your own?
Don’t knock it if you haven’t tried it.
I’d expected dangerous animals as part of the job. If your workplace is the wild, you have to accept that. But what I didn’t foresee was the cartels.
Some of the fires we fought were in forests or mountain ranges that extended all the way down into Mexico. We were cutting brush and digging fire lines along well-known drug routes, and you had to be on your toes or you could find yourself with a nice neat hole in your head. The cartels ran drugs and illegal immigrants up and down the same trails we were using to reach the fire line. And often, they didn’t know we were coming.
Sometimes they even started fires to cover up their activities, whether it was smuggling desperate people across the border or moving bales of marijuana along the trails. The La Brea Fire in 2009 near Santa Barbara was caused by drug traffickers who were using some kind of cooking device. One hundred thirty-seven square miles of prime ranchland was turned into cinders. After hotshots went in and knocked the fire down, at the risk of their own lives, investigators traced the blaze to a remote little canyon in the Los Padres National Forest. Near the origin spot, they found an AK-47, charred to shit, and about thirty thousand marijuana plants.
Maybe the traffickers were cooking up their dinner as they watched over the plants when the fire started. Maybe they were getting some shut-eye and a spark from their campfire touched off a propane tank. Or maybe they were camped on a rival’s territory and they ignored the orders to leave, so someone got to them and burned their crop.
In 2011, the year I joined up, the Monument Fire erupted in eastern Arizona. It burned up about thirty thousand acres. Investigators traced the origin to the Coronado National Forest, which was closed to visitors and vehicles. The only people operating in Coronado were the cartels and drug traffickers. The cartels employ scouts to watch the trails for Border Patrol and rival gangs. Sometimes they light signal fires to let people know their sector is too dangerous for cartel soldiers. Or, at night, they get cold and they start a campfire to keep warm.
Two other fires burning at the same time—including one that burned over eight hundred square miles—were also started by humans. These were most likely not innocent mistakes. Cartels use fire as a weapon. If the authorities are busy fighting a raging wildfire, they have no resources to catch bandits or snakeheads, the guides who brought the illegal immigrants across the border.
A lot of the pot farms have armed guards. Other times the cartels leave the farms unguarded but will set traps—wire strung up across the road that can decapitate you if you’re driving in a UTV, or trip wires laid on the trails and attached to loaded shotguns or IEDs. We had to watch out for all of that shit.
One time we went out to the Arizona-Mexico border to fight a wildfire, and at the briefing, Eric paused and then said something I’d never heard before: “I want you guys to wear your yellows at all times. We have information that there are two cartels battling it out on the terrain we’ll be going into. There are reports they have high-powered rifles. And I’ve also been told that they know we’re coming in and, so long as we identify ourselves in our yellows, we’ll be left alone to fight the fire.”
Whaaaaat? This was some cloak-and-dagger stuff.
We went out into the brush line and started cutting. There was extra tension in the crew, just wondering if we were being watched. It’s a spooky feeling, gives you an icy patch at the base of your spine.
We didn’t get shot at on that job, but we did find a Mexican dude nearly dead of thirst on the side of the road. At first we thought he was a corpse. He was just lying there in the morning light, unable to move. We were on our way off the fireline and we said to each other, “What do we do?” Mondo gave him some Gatorade, but he was so messed up he couldn’t keep anything down and so dehydrated that an EMT we called to the scene could barely find a vein for an IV. The Border Patrol finally came and took him away.
I’m not sure if he was a cartel soldier or an illegal immigrant who got left behind. But a couple more hours out there alone and he would have been a goner.
Hotshots are at the mercy of the weather and of history. When 9/11 happened and the planes went into the Twin Towers, the FAA shut down all air traffic in the United States. You couldn’t even fly a helicopter. A crew of hotshots was working high up in California and they were stranded. They had to hike out some hellacious number of miles. When you’re a hotshot, you’re an afterthought, invisible to everyone except your family and your brothers. If you’re due to rotate off a mountaintop and fog settles in or high wind grounds the choppers, forget it. You walk.
We flew to Montana that summer and fought a big timber blaze. The choppers couldn’t come to us—the winds were too extreme. We were worn out after a week of swamping and cutting, cold food, and little sleep. We were like black-faced zombies.
“So what do we do?” I asked Eric.
“We hike out.”
Shoot me now, I thought. There were no roads where we were. It was the trackless wilderness. And it was wet; it had been raining on and off for four days. The worst part was our boots. When water gets into them, your feet rub against the leather and they turn to sushi. Just raw, pulverized flesh.
I didn’t say a word. This was the job. We hiked out.