Smokejumper

by Jason A. Ramos

  Sometimes you get lucky and find a good trail—even a game trail—that makes for an easy hike out. (“Easy” being relative, of course.)

  That doesn’t happen often in the North Cascades, though. So the pack-out is often the hardest part of a mission—and sometimes it can take twice as long as you anticipated it would.

  Once I was on a two-manner with another jumper from NCSB, on a small ridgeline in the Cascades. It was early summer, with plenty of snow lingering in the mid to high country.

  We put the fire out without any problem. When it was time to pack out, we radioed one of the ships flying overhead for intel on the nearest road.

  The helitack on board gave us some coordinates. “There’s one about a quarter mile below you,” he said. “A couple hours at most.”

  I looked at the steep slopes all around us. There were deep patches of snow in every shady spot and on most north-facing slopes.

  I shook my head. Two hours my ass. Yet another piece of helicopter intel that was certain to be a bit different on foot.

  We shouldered our packs and headed out. “It’s gonna take us at least four hours,” I said.

  Sure enough, the route that looked so short and easy from the air was anything but.

  No trail, for starters. Our route took us across one particular north-facing slope that was steep and covered with snow. A man-sized cheese grater of jagged boulders waited at the bottom. If a guy tripped, he’d better get that pack off quick before he started sliding.

  I tried to think Jedi thoughts and float across the surface crust without breaking through. My jump partner was heavier and was soon postholing knee deep.

  “Hey, dude, think light!” I stopped to watch and laugh as he floundered. I wasn’t far behind, but I figured I could stay on top of the crust.

  I started to punch through about halfway across. In some spots I went in past my knees.

  Now it was his turn to laugh. I heard him yelling something from above me but I was too focused on getting across to listen.

  When I stopped for a breather, he said, “Look down to your right.”

  A shallow trough ran down through the snow to the rocks below like a poorly planned sled run. There were deep grooves on both sides and traces of dark wiry hair in the middle.

  It was the unmistakable ass track of a sliding bear.

  The grooves must be where it tried to use its claws to slow down, like a mountaineer self-arresting with an ice ax.

  It looked like Smokey was having some fun, but I wonder how banged up he got at the bottom. In any case, I’m glad I wasn’t around. That would have been one pissed-off carnivore.

  “Son of a bitch, don’t fall now,” I muttered.

  We crossed the snowfield without incident and kept going. That two-hour hike took more than four hours.

  Near the end, I ended up having to grab thick hanging vines to cross a slippery creek: Tarzan of the Pacific Northwest.

  ANIMALS ARE SMART—THEY DON’T tend to stick around when there’s a fire nearby. It’s rare to see a charred carcass. We do occasionally cross paths, though.

  On one Kernville helitack mission we were hunkering in for the night near a small creek. We didn’t carry tents and usually weren’t allowed to make fires, since our supt believed sleeping on the ground built character. Being a California boy, I hate being cold, but orders were orders.

  After dark we heard a commotion near the creek. We grabbed a headlamp, and by its light we saw a big black bear playing in the water. He was jumping off the bank like a diving board, swimming back, and doing it again. It looked like he was having a blast.

  He didn’t seem to mind we were there, but we decided the situation warranted a fire. Just in case. We piled enough pinecones to last the night and slept warm as our friend splashed in the darkness.

  Later that night, the local forest lookout tower called on the radio asking us about a new start in the area we were in.

  “We have a large bear in the area,” was our radio transmission reply.

  IN THE DOWNTIME AFTER a fire is out, some of us go looking for dinner. Lots of jumpers are skilled hunters and fishermen; in another life they would have probably been mountain men.

  Once many years ago, on a full load mission in the Okanogan, in the Pasayten Wilderness near the Canadian border, I set out into the woods with my trusty slingshot.

  One of the jumpers who was on the mission saw me heading out. “Where are you going?” he said, half joking. “You city boys can’t hunt!”

  Later that evening I was back at camp with enough for dinner, grouse cleaned and ready to eat. All by slingshot.

  We ate like kings that night.

  IN THIS PROFESSION JUMPERS have to find the humor in the midst of the days that really suck. Otherwise they won’t last long.

  There’s a plant called devil’s club, a relative of Siberian ginseng that thrives in the Pacific Northwest forests.

  Native cultures use it for all kinds of medicinal treatments. If you try to hike through it, however, you’ll learn why its scientific name is Oplopanax horridus. It’s covered with brittle spines that break off under your skin and are almost impossible to get out.

  I got to know this evil shrub intimately on the west slope of the Cascades in Washington. It was the end of a fire mission. I and another NCSB jumper volunteered to recon a way out while the rest of our crew stayed behind to mop up.

  We left early in the morning carrying just our PG bags, maybe twenty-five to thirty pounds each. It was only five or six miles to the nearest road.

  As we were packing up, an NCSB rookie had told us he thought the path was impassable. We both laid into him immediately. “You’re a jumper now, rookie! What the hell do you mean, impassable?”

  Within a few hours we weren’t so cocky. The broken terrain was making our compass act funny, and the vegetation was so thick we couldn’t get a GPS signal. Most of it was devil’s club.

  We flailed through thickets for hours, tripping and falling, our faces and backs stinging with thorns.

  At one point I got so frustrated I bit a branch. That just left me with thorns in my mouth.

  We followed a river as much as possible to escape the plants. After being tormented by their barbs, I welcomed the freezing water and slippery rocks. More than once I just lay down in the water and floated a few yards, exhausted. I could only drift a little way each time from all the rocks and debris.

  There was no way the jumpers back at the fire could catch up and make it out in one day. My jump partner radioed the JIC to tell him, in so many words, we’d hiked into hell and they should call for a helo pickup.

  All we could do was keep thrashing. At one point I had to stop to scarf down a can of beanie weenies. As I finished my lunch, I saw a lone wood duck surfing a wake in the river, the only other living thing I had seen for hours besides a giant slug.

  Wonderful, I thought. Now I’m hallucinating.

  The others must have taken our advice, because impatient calls started coming over the radio hours later. They were at the pickup spot and wanted to go home—where the hell were we?

  As dusk began to fall, I started looking for a hooch site to dig in for the night. Just then my partner’s voice came on the radio: “I’m at the fucking trailhead. You’re almost there dude, just keep heading downstream.”

  An hour later I heard a hooting through the trees, something we do to give each other a bearing when we’re close. It was one of the other jumpers who had gotten a helo ride out. He had hiked in a little ways to help guide us out, and now he was a little disoriented.

  I couldn’t help laughing. “Now you know what I did all day, dude.”

  The JIC hiked in as well so we could leave this Club Med. Together the four of us reached the pickup spot as the sun was setting, almost fourteen hours after we had set out that morning.

  We spent the night at a local ranger station. Whoever had slept in the bed last had used nice shampoo, because the pillow smelled great. I relaxed and enjoyed the lu
xurious smell of a woman’s freshly washed hair . . . as I drifted off to sleep, it occurred to me that I really did hope it was a woman’s pillow and not some guy with long hair who liked good-smelling shampoo.

  BAD LANDINGS, ROLLING ROCKS, and shitty pack-outs are all occasional hazards. The biggest danger on a fire, of course, is fire itself.

  Almost half of all recorded fatalities on wildfires in the United States have been caused by burns or burnovers, when firefighters can’t get out of the path of a moving flame front.

  A burnover is a disaster regardless of whether it ends with people dying. It means someone screwed up badly or was really unlucky—often both.

  Every firefighter carries a personal fire shelter as a last resort. The idea goes back at least a few centuries. In 1804, William Clark and Meriwether Lewis were trekking across North Dakota when they came across the aftermath of a fatal prairie fire. With his typical creative spelling, Clark wrote in his journal: “A boy half white was saved unhurt in the midst of the flaim . . . The course of his being Saved was a Green buffalow Skin was thrown over him by his mother . . . the Fire did not burn under the Skin leaveing the grass round the boy.”

  Modern fire shelter development began in the late 1950s by the Australians. The shelters were bell-shaped, made out of aluminum foil laminated to fiberglass cloth, and looked like a teepee. The firefighter would stand inside. Later in the ’60s the U.S. began experimenting with little silver A-frame pup tents.

  A shelter is supposed to reflect the heat of a fire and trap enough cool, breathable air to survive a burnover. I’ve never had an occasion to test this in person, and I pray I never do.

  The hottest part of a wildfire is around two-thirds of the flame height, around 2,600 to 2,800 degrees. At ground level, the temperatures are at their coolest but can still be as high as 1,800 degrees. A person can survive 200 degrees, maybe even 300 for a short time.

  Then just a few breaths of superheated air can make your throat spasm closed and your lungs start to fill with fluid. Most fire deaths are from suffocation, not burns.

  The Forest Service made shelters mandatory in 1977, the year after three hotshots died and one was badly burned in a fire near Grand Junction, Colorado. The firefighters had left their shelters behind in base camp and probably would have survived if they had them.

  First-generation shelters weren’t any good at withstanding direct flames or extreme temperatures. When flames touched them, the foil would quickly start to delaminate the adhevsive at around 450 degrees, and after that they were useless.

  Out of 1,239 documented deployments since 1977, the Forest Service says fire shelters have saved 321 lives and prevented 390 serious injuries.

  At the same time, forty-one firefighters died after fully or partly deploying their shelters. Some didn’t get inside in time; others left too early or couldn’t hold on in the flaming hurricane of a burnover.

  The rest died because their shelters failed them.

  There’s no excuse for a piece of safety equipment not doing what it was designed to do—every time.

  In the 1990s, after decades of calls for better shelters, the Forest Service ordered the Missoula Technology and Development Center (MTDC), its main fire research center, to find a better design. The shelters had to work better but they also couldn’t be too heavy, and they couldn’t cost more than $75 each.

  The government eventually settled on a design with a flattened oval shape like an overstuffed sleeping bag. The M-2002 New Generation fire shelter is made of separate layers of woven silica and fiberglass, with foil laminated to the inside and outside. It weighs over a pound more than the old one and packs larger, and also comes in a size large for tall people.

  Almost all firefighters were using the new shelters by the end of the decade. They’re better than the old ones, but they’re still nowhere near good enough. The adhesive that holds the aluminum foil to the cloth starts to break down and disintegrate at around 600 degrees. (At least manufacturers have stopped using the cyanide-based adhesive.)

  A shelter needs to work in every situation, from grass fires to timber crown fires. It should be able to survive a two-thousand-degree burnover, because those do happen.

  Would you drive a car if the seat belt only worked at less than 40 mph?

  A shelter that doesn’t do what it’s supposed to offers a false sense of security, encourages more risky behavior, and raises the overall chance of accidents. That’s why firefighters in Canada and Australia don’t even carry them. It’s also the reason I’m strongly supporting the development of a new fire shelter, which we’ll get into later.

  The best way to avoid problems with a fire shelter is to never have to use it. If you’re a firefighter with no choice, the deployment process has stayed the same.

  First you find the best location possible, ideally an open area free of burnable material. If you have time, cut away the closest fuels and toss aside flammable things like chain saws, gas cans, and fusees we use for starting fires.

  Pull the shelter from its plastic carrying case and shake it open. (“Shake and bake,” as they say.)

  Pull it over your back from feet to head like a fitted sheet. Then lie facedown on the ground. That’s where the air is coolest and most smoke-free. Bring some water and a radio inside if you can.

  Hold the floor of the shelter against the ground as tightly as possible. Heat and smoke and toxic gases will come through any gap.

  Then hold on for dear life. Fire winds can be strong enough to toss you in the air. The violence and heat and noise of a burnover can make even veterans panic.

  Firefighters have been killed after leaving their shelters too soon. Did they think their odds were better trying to outrun the fire? Or did they just want to get the inevitable over with quickly?

  Who knows. Deploying a shelter is a psychological effort as much as a physical one. If you have to do it, you know one of two things is about to happen: you’re going to live or you’re going to die.

  CHAPTER 13

  WE WERE EATING DINNER in the mess hall on July 10, 2001, when the news started coming in about missing firefighters just north of the base.

  The NCSB mess hall can be a loud place, filled with jumpers and anybody who happens to be at a fire camp nearby—pilots, hotshots, helitack, engine crews—shooting the shit and telling (and retelling) old stories and jokes.

  It was another hot and busy summer in the North Cascades. Severe drought conditions had primed the area for wildfires, with temperatures in the high 90s and relative humidity in the single digits.

  The day before, the hot exhaust pipe of a DNR fire patrol truck had sparked an explosive fire in tall, dry grass about twenty miles south. In its first twenty-four hours, the Libby South Fire had grown to over one thousand acres and forced an overnight evacuation of the entire Libby Creek watershed.

  Now maybe three dozen people were enjoying the company and the famously tasty chow when radios around the room started filling with ominous chatter. I closed my eyes for a second. News like this is never welcome. But if you’re in the fire service long enough, it’s guaranteed to happen at some point.

  Most experienced jumpers don’t skip a beat at reports of injuries or fatalities. We’ve learned the long, hard way that you can’t do much after the fact, and that often the best thing you can do to help is to focus on the job at hand.

  I finished my food; something told me we were going to get involved, and I didn’t know when the next real meal might be.

  After dinner a call came over the PA: three other jumpers and I were to report to the office as soon as possible. As we walked over we could see the unmistakable sign of a blowup to the north: two massive thunderheads with a quiver of lenticular clouds like flying saucers between them. It looked like an atomic bomb had just gone off near the Canadian border. It was a sure sign of high winds aloft and extreme fire behavior down below.

  “We have confirmed shelter deployments up north along the Chewuch,” the base manager said when we r
eached the office. The narrow, winding river canyon was about thirty miles north of Winthrop. “I need four jumpers to head up there and look for possible civilian survivors. You guys good to go?”

  The radio chatter at dinner was already a bad sign. If that kind of talk makes it onto the airwaves, that means bad shit has already gone down. Now a shelter deployment, which probably meant a burnover. Nothing good.

  It was a genuine request for volunteers, not an order. The immediate aftermath of a large fire is a dangerous place. But if people might still need help, there was no way we were going to say no.

  We packed four chain saws and gear into a van, and a few minutes later were rolling out the gate into the long evening shadows.

  The rugged walls of the Chewuch River canyon formed a steep V that rose almost three thousand feet on both sides. There was just enough room at the bottom for the meandering river, a narrow belt of trees and thick brush, and a dirt road on the west side of the canyon.

  The road dead-ended at a popular trailhead at the canyon’s northern end, not far from the Canadian border. The heavily forested gorge was full of dead and down timber, a perfect bed for fire, with a thick understory of shrubs and bushes.

  In 1929, the Remmel Fire burned forty thousand acres in the Chewuch River watershed. In 1994, it came close to burning again when the 4,780-acre Thunder Mountain Fire dipped into the canyon.

  The Thirtymile Fire, the one we were headed out to help with, was named after a nearby peak. It had started the day before from a carelessly abandoned picnic fire in the upper canyon. The previous evening, when it was only a few acres, a full crew of hotshots was sent in on initial attack and worked on it through the night. During the night, a twenty-one-person fire crew from the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest called up for the Libby South Fire was redirected to help with the Thirtymile Fire instead.

  Even when it’s this close to a base, jumpers aren’t called for every fire. Remember there are fewer than 500 of us on duty most years, and in the height of the summer fire season, jumpers are often reserved for starts in places with no road access.