The menu includes campfire favorites like freeze-dried meals, energy bars, trail mix, candy, beef jerky, Ramen noodles, or anything that comes in a can: chili, meat, soup, fruit. Spam is highly prized. If there’s no Spam, some jumpers can get a little pissed off.
Everyone has his or her favorites. You might be a Snickers dude or a canned peach guy. Some jumpers seem to like eating corn and oatmeal all day. Others bring extra food, like frozen gourmet meats shoved in a leg pocket.
I’ve never met anyone who really likes MREs.
When I jump on any fire, one of the first things I do is to grab my food and water and shove it in my pack. I’ve learned the hard way.
After a few times returning to the jump spot tired and hungry and finding that some professional eater has inhaled most of the food—including all the good stuff—you learn to take precautions. Food box poaching is no laughing matter.
At our base there are always two food boxes: one for you, one for your jump partner.
CANOPIES GATHERED, CARGO UNPACKED, LCES in place: it was time to fight the fire. Otherwise known as cutting line, our main job on the ground.
Just as every fire is different, so is every fire line. But there is an overall strategy. Picture a fire from above: it has a head, where the flames are spreading the fastest; usually a couple of flanks, or sides; and a heel, often back near the point of origin.
The idea is to start building line at the fire’s heel, ideally from an anchor point like a road, a river, a lake, or a cliff. This should keep the fire from flanking you, that is, sneaking around from behind to make a much bigger problem. You want to contain the flanks and pinch the fire off at the head, like fingers snuffing out a match.
That’s how it works on paper, anyway. Sometimes even in real life.
Roads, streams, and trails can make good natural fire lines, and we’re happy to use them if they’re in the right place. Usually we have to dig the line ourselves once the sawyers have done their work. From scrubby bushes to hundred-foot trees, if it’s on the fire line, it’s getting chopped by those howling orange Stihls.
A fire line is usually between one and three feet wide, depending on the situation and the crew. In national parks, crews try to make fire lines as narrow as possible to keep from scarring the landscape. Some hotshot crews are known for the almost machinelike neatness of their lines.
Jumpers are somewhere in between. You want to dig an effective line while conserving as much energy as possible, since you never know how long you’re going to be out. We’re not worried about tourists complaining about a ruined view, but we’re also often working with less manpower.
Lines are measured in chains, a term left over from seventeenth-century English surveyors. One chain is sixty-six feet, so that makes eighty chains in a mile. (And ten chains in a furlong, for your next trivia showdown.)
Line-digging speed is mostly dictated by terrain and vegetation. In moderate brush, a Type 1 crew of eighteen or twenty hotshots should be able to dig six chains of line, about four hundred feet, in an hour.
For jumpers there are extra variables like how many bodies we have and whether we have chain saws or just hand saws. It’s always heavy physical labor regardless.
Sometimes firefighters are cutting into thick mats of tangled roots, using their pulaskis to slice their way through. On a slope they might have to cut small trenches to catch embers from rolling downhill. We’re always looking for hidden heat, slicing open smoldering stumps and searching for hotspots where the duff is smoking from buried heat.
OUR FIRST REAL SMOKEJUMPER fire sucked. There was lots of dead and down, a.k.a. fallen trees, so we were constantly tripping over trunks and branches. Sweat stung our eyes and trickled down our grimy faces. The chain saws never seemed to stop roaring.
We dug straight through the night, chasing down the glow of spot fires in the darkness, like kids catching fireflies and stomping them to death.
A crew of hotshots came in the next day to help out. We were out for a few days in all. When we got back to the base, we were finally allowed to wear shirts that said SMOKEJUMPER.
We were still rookies, though. You’re not considered a “real” jumper, at least at NCSB, until you’ve stuck around at least four or five years. Even now I consider myself an “old rookie.”
Between missions we trained and worked on projects like prescribed burns, cutting hazardous trees, fencing projects, and so on. During wilderness first-aid drills, some of the group would be assigned imaginary injuries, from heatstroke to broken bones. The others would have to figure out how to treat and transport the “victims” using only the gear we’d normally bring on a jump, like packs and cargo chutes.
Hillbilly and I spent a lot of time trying to scare the crap out of each other. At night we’d hide in the darkness and leap out screaming. I’d get him coming out of the mess hall, and he’d hide under my van and grab my ankles.
Once I spent an hour and a half waiting in his closet as he watched TV in the next room. I eventually fell asleep; after years in the fire service, you learn to grab a snooze anywhere you can. When he finally came in, I woke up and threw open the closet door with a yell.
He jumped a foot in the air. “What the hell!”
“Give me a hand, dude,” I said. “My legs are asleep.” He laughed even harder as he pulled me out.
The base emptied out in the off-season as jumpers went on vacation, back to school, or off to other jobs for four to six months. Some jumpers traveled back east to work as arborists or on prescribed fires.
I returned to Riverside County for a few winters and started driving my van down to Baja California, Mexico. The Bahía de Los Angeles became my second home in the winter.
Sometimes I’d take paying clients on guided trips spearfishing or dolphin watching. Other times I’d just windsurf, kitesurf, or freedive, living off the ocean for weeks at a time.
If I got in the water early enough, I could usually catch enough food for the day by early afternoon. Between my van and the ocean, I was pretty much set.
A MISSION DURING MY second season took me three thousand miles in the opposite direction. In July 2000, we were requested to work out of a satellite base near Galena, on the Yukon River in western Alaska. As a California boy, it sure seemed to me to be the middle of nowhere.
Galena had about five hundred residents, a big deserted World War II air base, and little else. It was only accessible by air or water. In the summer the midnight sun made it seem even more desolate and creepy.
We stayed there for weeks waiting for an assignment, with nothing to do beyond daily PT and chores. We played midnight volleyball and kept an eye out for moose and grizzlies on our runs. Guys were so bored they’d have skidding contests on rusty old bikes we found lying around.
I sometimes pedaled one through the empty streets, everything gray and quiet, half expecting someone to pop out in a sundress or Don Draper suit like an episode of The Twilight Zone. I was having trouble sleeping. In fact, I was going a little batshit with all the waiting and the endless flat light.
One afternoon I was sitting out in the rain when another jumper walked out. “Are you fucking okay, dude?” he asked.
“Yeah. Why?”
“Well, because you’re sitting out here alone in the rain.” I came back down to Earth and went inside. Part of being a smokejumper is dealing with the hard parts of personal stuff when you’re in the middle of nowhere and thousands of miles away. No cell phones, no Internet back then. It put a strain on every personal connection we had.
At least we had a great cook assigned to us. I quickly made friends with him and started snagging extra late-night snacks. I was always starving at night.
I’d just smile when the others would ask where the hell I got the extra rations. That’s right, bitches, I thought. My dad taught me well: scrap when you can.
FINALLY, ON THE FOURTH of July, a call came in: a growing fire was threatening a group of cabins around a lake. Out of an eight-jumper load, three
of us were from NCSB. Even though two of us were still only second-year “snookies,” that jump plane carried approximately one hundred years of firefighting experience on board.
It was a twin-prop Dornier 228-202, a faster ship than the ones we used at NCSB. It was also a small door exit. To get ready to jump, you put your left leg on a step outside the door with your right leg bent inside the plane, kneeling to fit through the small opening.
When I was in the door, I asked the spotter if they were planning on slowing down on final. I could hear my jump partner laughing his ass off over the engine. The spotter just looked at me cross-eyed and told me to put my foot on the step. It was like sticking your arm out the window of a car—a Formula One.
Compared to the Northwest, Alaskan jump sites are relatively flatter, covered with rolling tundra instead of boulders and big trees. There are hazards, sure, including plenty of water to land in and huge distances to cover if you find yourself stranded.
On that jump I had my first experience with another special Alaskan menace. At about five hundred feet I could see thick dark clouds hanging in the air. What was that haze? The second my boots touched the ground, I found out: mosquitoes. Billions of mosquitoes.
If you’ve never been to the Alaskan bush in the summer, you have no idea how bad mosquitoes can be. The state has thirty-five species, and most of them love the taste of people. They can make herds of migrating caribou change direction and send little kids to the hospital.
Between mid-June and late July, round-the-clock sunlight turns the endless acres of wetlands into ideal breeding grounds for the little bastards. (Actually the biting ones are all females, but who’s counting.)
We were there smack in the middle of prime season. It’s the closest I’ve ever come to experiencing a biblical plague. Mosquitoes were in our mouths, in our food. The tiniest piece of exposed skin became a mosquito mosh pit. (A scientist once recorded 435 bites on his arm in five minutes.) When they bit, the mosquitoes swelled up like tiny grapes, and when you wiped your arms clear, your hand would come away bloody.
According to native legend, long ago mosquitoes only used to bite animals. One day an old woman came home and found that every piece of food she had stored up for winter was gone. The mosquitoes had eaten everything: fish, caribou, even her seal oil.
In a fury she tore off her clothes and ran outside, shouting, “You mosquitoes have eaten all my food, so now you might as well eat me too!”
That’s how they found out people have nice, smooth skin that’s easy to pierce, and no tails to brush them away. Ever since then we’ve been their favorite prey.
Thanks a lot, lady.
Not surprisingly, the cabins were unoccupied. The only people there were a couple with a young girl and a dog who were living in a tent while they built a cabin of their own. Until flames came over the horizon, our job was to provide assistance to them, conduct structure protection, and keep track of the fire’s progress by radio.
The couple, both artists, had left the Lower 48 to make their dream of living off the land in Alaska come true. They appeared to have plenty of financial resources but, to me, they seemed a little out of place up here. Everyone was covered in mosquito welts, and the father’s boots were wrapped with duct tape.
One of the jumpers was born and raised in Alaska. She noticed the guy was building the cabin from instructions in a book and was using birch planks, a wood that rots quickly.
She didn’t mince words. “So you only want to have it for a couple of years?” she said. “You have a dog, that’s good. Do you have a gun? If you’re spending the winter, you should really have a gun to protect your family.”
We couldn’t force them to give up their crazy plan, so we just helped them move logs and played with the girl. The jumper talked half seriously about checking in on them by plane, maybe dropping a care package.
MOSTLY WE JUST TRIED to avoid the mosquitoes. One of the worst times was when you had to answer the call of nature.
Some parts of the body are just not meant to be bitten by insects. My first reaction was to swat. Big mistake.
Smokejumpers are nothing if not resourceful, though, and Hillbilly soon came up with a makeshift solution. If you covered your body with a trash bag, with a hole cut for your head, you could (mostly) avoid being eaten alive while you did your business. And thus was born the potty poncho.
The only real way to escape was to go out on the water on a boat. Ten feet from shore and the mosquitoes vanished. It was the strangest thing.
There were a lot of late-night pike fishing excursions.
We were thrilled to find an outhouse at the far end of the lake. We made that our incident command post and nicknamed it “Club Med.” It had a water view, all the facilities, and a million biting insects.
The stories you hear of people going crazy from Alaska’s mosquitoes sound like tall tales, but who knows—another week at Club Med and I might have flipped out myself.
We spent six days by the lake and the fire never got close to the cabins. The experience taught me a different side of being a jumper. We can be animals when necessary, but on that bug-infested pond, we were public ambassadors more than anything.
That, and there are some things no training can ever prepare you for.
CHAPTER 9
THE RIDGELINE ABOVE ME in the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest was glowing red. A hundred yards away, tree-high flames soared skyward with a sound like telephone poles snapping in a windstorm.
“Jumper F, Ramos, do you copy?”
The fire was blowing up, as we thought it might. Three jumpers were stationed above me on the narrow ridgeline. It was maybe fifty yards across at its widest, scattered with wind-twisted trees, with steep drop-offs to either side in some sections.
Two had already radioed in that they were heading up the ridge to the safety zone. But I couldn’t get a reply from the one closest to me.
I knew he was probably double-timing uphill and couldn’t hear me over the noise of the surging fire and aircraft overhead. Too busy to pull out his radio.
Nevertheless, as JIC part of my job was making sure all personnel were accounted for.
I called him three or four more times.
No answer.
AS A FIREFIGHTER, UNDERSTANDING what fire does—and more important, being able to predict what it’s going to do—is a matter of life and death.
Fire can burn uphill, downhill, and sideways. It can jump across canyons, outrun horses, and hide underground for months. It can flow like water in any direction and create its own weather, from thunderheads five miles high to flaming tornadoes that snap trees like celery.
People have been studying fire since the first caveman burned his fingers trying to cook a mammoth steak. We’ve had plenty of time to watch it, fight it, follow it, and examine its charred path. Now researchers dissect flames in labs using wind tunnels and high-speed cameras.
So what have we learned?
Let’s start with the basics. Remember seventh-grade science: Fire is a spontaneous chemical reaction that releases energy as light and heat. When it’s plant material burning, that energy came from the sun and was absorbed by a leaf. It was converted by photosynthesis into lignin and cellulose (among other things), the two most common organic molecules on earth.
You’ve heard of the “fire triangle”: fuel, heat, and oxygen, the three things fire needs to burn. In this case lignin and cellulose are the fuel, regardless of whether the plant is alive or dead.
Air is 21 percent oxygen, so there’s plenty of that.
Then all you need is some heat. Any kind of spark will do: lightning, volcanoes, a person’s cigarette. Heat drives flammable gases out of the fuel, which combine with the oxygen in the air and start to burn.
This process creates more heat, which forces out more flammable gases, which combust. Pretty soon you have a nice little flame going, plus a flying mix of burned particles and gases called smoke.
To stop the cycle, just remove any
of the corners of the triangle. Contain it with a fire line so it uses up all its fuel and dies of starvation. Smother it with dirt to cut off its oxygen.
Water is good because it smothers and cools at the same time. The fire retardant or “slurry” that air tankers drop has additives like ammonium phosphate to make the water extra “sticky,” fertilizers to kick-start regrowth, and red dye to show where it landed. Hopefully not on a firefighter’s head, since a gallon weighs over eight pounds and a plane can dump thousands at a time.
That’s what fire is. How about what it does?
There are three main things that affect how a wildfire burns: fuels, terrain, and the weather. We can only control one of those. Fuels can be anything from dry pine needles on the forest floor to three-hundred-foot redwoods. Light fuels like grass, leaves, and brush burn fast and hot, which is why you start a campfire with the smallest kindling.
Living plants that have lots of flammable resins or oils in their leaves, like sagebrush and Gambel oak, make excellent light fuels. When you have a dry landscape covered by these, like the chaparral of Southern California, look out.
Heavy fuels—trees, large shrubs, fallen logs, stumps, piles of logging debris—don’t ignite as easily. But once they do, they’re much harder to put out.
The next most important measurement is moisture content. The drier a fuel is, the better it burns. And smaller fuels dry out faster, since they have a higher surface-area-to-volume (SAV) ratio.
Put those together and you get the four fuel size classes, differentiated by how long their moisture content takes to equalize with the surrounding air. The fuel classes range from “one-hour fuels” a quarter inch in diameter or less, like grasses, to “thousand-hour fuels”—big fuels three to eight inches in diameter and buried deep in the duff of the forest floor, like dead logs covered in years of pine needles and leaves.
Under the right conditions, living green plants can ignite too. I’ve seen piñon pines go up like they were soaked in gasoline, lodgepoles shoot off in sequence along a ridgeline like Roman candles on the Fourth of July.
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