The Rough and Tumble Fire World

Since my last update we have continued the same basic work. This past week we burned around 150 acres of wilderness in controlled underburns with the Forest Service. For this I have cut line, gophered fuel down the line, set up hose lays, used those hose lays to mop up the fires, and even put down lines of fire in a progressive burn pattern (just a fancy term for marching in a staggered row through the woods with a drip torch, a can that drips a gasoline/diesel mix, behind you). I'm continuing to love the work, even when we do 12 hour days or longer, because of how stinking cool it is. I get to see amazing things that most people never see on a daily basis. And when we're not working ourselves stupid on the line we're playing basketball or catch or reading and telling stories while we wait.

On Tuesday I was pushed to the breaking point while burning. For the first few hours that morning we were tasked with holding the line as the forest burned. Our job was to watch the fire and the green zone behind it to make sure that it didn't jump the line or start any spot fires across it. Myself and Anthony did a little extra work digging line around a snag (dead tree) to make sure fire didn't weaken it, making it a danger to us. Other than that we just stood on the line, watching the fire burn slowly across the prescribed area without much excitement. Eventually we began to be used for other purposes as the fire demanded, and myself and Ron were called off the line for another assignment.

We were tasked with burning using drip torches after we tied in with a few of the hot shots. We each grabbed a torch and linked up with three hot shots who were already burning. We had basically no training on what we were doing (besides the general idea which we received in basic training months ago), and were thrown into things right away. It was awesome. We started burning up and down the hillsides like this:

^^^^^^^(Fire)^^^^^^^^^^
---------------------------------x (Lead Burner)
^^^^^^^(Fire)^^^^^
--------------------------x (Me)
^^^^^^^^^^^
-------------------x (Steve - Hot Shot)
^^^^^^^^
---------------x (Ron)
^^^^^
----------x (Carissa - Hot Shot and previous Americorps NCCC member)

What this did was to create a large fire behind where we were burning without putting us in danger of being caught by it. We hiked back and forth across the area to be burned for five hours straight. It was the most demanding thing I've done in months. My pack had extra water in it because of the work and the low humidity that day, so it weighed somewhere around 35-50 lbs, the drip torch about 15-20 lbs. This made hiking back and forth through thick brush, steep slopes and uneven terrain very difficult, and I began to feel it early on. By the 4th hour my legs had lost all feeling as well as my arms and shoulders, and I was having a great time. While fueling up after a run we turned around to see a 35 foot fire whirl, which looked something like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbwfNSLshW8 It was no more than 50 feet from us and we had to quickly pick up all our fuel and get away in case it turned and came towards us. We saw huge flames engulf everything behind us as we marched through dense foliage that caught us and tripped us and did everything in it's power to knock us down while we lit. This was much more intense than anything we had done before because we were within the burning area. We were no longer sitting on the outside watching while things burned, we were walking alongside the flames in land that would within seconds be consumed by fire and turned from lush green to black ash. It was a great day, and one I wont soon forget.