Fire Water Canyon & Wild Horse Canyon Fires

Fire Water Canyon & Wild Horse Canyon Fires

Location: Ute Reservation, UT

Duration: 6/4/12 – 6/11/12

Tactics: Suppression

Size: Small (a bit more than 150 acres)

Fuels: Pinyon-juniper scrublands

Highs: Watching a Great North American Bison—tatanka—as it gamboled across a butte; making a lively attempt with Lee and Mason to corral some wild and roamin’ mustangs.

Lows: Gravely misunderstanding my Kings Peak-issued ground pad; much to certain crew member’s amusement, it took me four nights to figure out how to properly inflate the thing.

Also: gravely misunderstanding the (unspoken) breakfast rule, which required every member to be ready before the rest of the crew could eat or gain access to coffee—we dined together, always. My second morning of slowness (unbeknownst to me, I was being timed), a caffeine-deprived Lynn made things strikingly clear. First morning: 30 minutes between waking up, getting dressed, stowing everything in my gray bag and getting my gray bag in Fatty; second morning: 28 minutes; third morning: eleven. (Even with a six minute personal best—the trick was to lay everything out the night before, perfect the “breakfast tie” and rise in a semi-panic—I could never compete with Denny, a former shot who still held to the hotshot motto, “If you're not first, you're last.”)

...

I.

It was now 1400. Our fifth day on the Ute Reservation. At 1000 that morning, the sun had shifted dramatically, and Lee had promptly snapped a branch, dragged out a log, and sculpted a small sheltered nest for us in the boughs of a pinyon. He now lay fully stretched beside me, arms crossed meditatively over his chest, while on his other side, Denny flicked twigs down Jack’s shirt, Jack too busy—searching for ants to feed his ant lion—to notice. We’d spent the better part of the day sport eating from our white sack lunches and trading around packages of Twizzlers, which I was just now becoming desperate enough to consider eating. Occasionally one of us, maddened by the need to do something—anything—would crawl out from under the tree, walk ten paces across the baked rock, and peer down into Wild Horse Canyon. The sides of it were steep, all scrub brush and shale, and a few hours ago we’d caught sight of two bright colored flecks as they’d rafted the Green River far below.

Smoke drifted up from the near face of the canyon although the fire, irritatingly, remained hidden from view. There’d been a flurry of excitement earlier when a helicopter had dipped by with its full bucket, but, even from his vantage, the pilot couldn’t see anything either, and a few pointless bucket drops later, he had gone back to the Fire Water Canyon Fire just a few miles away. And here we were: unable—despite a lot of shifty scrambling—to get good eyes on the fire and unable—the canyon dropped off in short little cliffs—to descend. And so we waited.

Fire, I was beginning to realize, was a funny, unpredictable sort of thing. 

II.

We’d worked seventeen hours—0800 to 0100—on the Fire Water Canyon Fire that first day: the morning in the cache at Stockmore, then the phone call and Lee driving the dust roads into the Ute Rez, me sitting shotgun, nerves eating up my stomach; our trucks parking on a high butte as the sky purpled; the call going out to gear up and then the miles-long hike as twilight settled. I resurfaced on a hillside in the dark, eyes breaking from the ground for the first time, and saw the fire like a cityscape: a series of delicate glowing shapes, red and amber and white. There was the motion of headlights being stretched over hardhats: we were going to try and catch it. Tonight.

I was paired off with an engine captain, a great blond He-Man if I ever saw one, to cast about for spot fires in the green. And then we were called back, we were digging line, we were looking up at the fire as it waved magnificently. We chinked line in the dark, looping around a flank of the fire. I followed dumbly, all eyes, tool falling in an uneven rhythm, glad the ground was soft. Hours passed like that, and then at 0100 we fell into one line again, hiked out.

Someone read the flagging wrong, and we got lost, a line of bobbing headlamps twisting on itself in the night. I remember that the moon hung fat and lazy in the sky and that the nervous adrenalin buzzing in my arms and my legs told me that I could keep doing this forever, which even then I knew as a lie.

When at long last we arrived, I choked down an MRE in the truck, long-awaited dinner. I don’t know which one it was, although I can detail the taste quite accurately, unheated MREs all falling into more or less the same texture and flavor category: wet cat food. We made camp on a windy bluff and I threw down my gray bag near Lee: he’d agreed to wake me up at 0700 if my watch didn’t do the trick. I took off my boots, left on my socks and pulled a sweatshirt over my shoulders. The Kings Peak sleeping bag was unfamiliar, warm.

III.

Mason, our born-and-bred Utah boy, was enthralled: “We could be the first white people to have seen this land in years—maybe ever.” He waxed poetic for a while, excitement enlivening his face. We were on the second-largest Native American reservation in the States: over 4.5 million acres of cliffs, canyons and rivers; lonely tracts dotted with the bobbing heads of popping johnnies as they slurped oil from the ground. Utah was named for the Utes; in their language, ute stood for “land of the sun.”

Our second day—Utah living up to its Native American name—was blistering. We were working on a truly nasty slope, digging cup trenches and lining an apparently endless number of spots. I was exhausted, sun-beaten and, thanks to daylong extreme winds, perpetually losing my hardhat in a mad tumble that forced me to strap it tightly to my head (dignity, I reminded myself, has nothing to do with it). Sitting next to Lee in Fatty some fourteen hours later, I asked him, half-panicked, if it was always like this. He grinned at my complaints, his teeth sharply white against his ash-blackened face. He had run the saw all day, cleaning up snags and limbing on-fire trees. “It wasn’t hard for just you,” he said. He was right.

Kim, a bespectacled rookie on another module, had spent the day in heavily duct taped boots—the hot ash having melted the soles of her shoes the night before.

And Lynn—stony faced, relentless, always pushing for more—vomited after those sunlit hours, vomited quietly in the dark behind the fire camp’s stacked wall of Gatorade flats. She didn’t tell me until days later. She had been steps away from the caterer’s trailer when she’d caught the smell of bread. And that’d done it.

IV.

The third day—back in the sun, back to sidehilling—one of the senior firefighters on another crew gave me some advice: “Don’t complain. When it’s shitty, everyone already knows it’s shitty. Remember, you’re a GS-3,” he tilted the saw against his leg, “the best thing you can do is carry things. Always volunteer. Always ask questions. Show them that you’re not afraid to work.”

I thought about what he’d said, thought about it for a good long while. On the hike out that day, I hefted the chainsaw over my shoulder for the first time, the powerhead balanced on my pack, it's toothy bar close to my neck. Lynn’s lips twitched in a small little smile.

Lingo

Gray bag: A weather-resistant duffel assigned to each firefighter; holds firefighters’ personal gear, such as sleeping bag, tarp, extra clothes and toiletries; every firefighter must live out of this bag for up to 18 days; on suppression fires, gray bags must be re-packed and stowed in fire trucks every morning, keeping crews fully mobile.

Breakfast tie: Lacing fire boots only halfway before tying them, thus expediting the shoe-ing process

Spot fires: Spot fires refer to small fires that have jumped (or spotted) across the fire line; they are surrounded by green and have not grown back into the main fire.
MREs: Initially designed for military use, a “Meal, Ready-to-Eat” is a small brown package containing a high-calorie meal and is eaten when other food cannot be delivered to firefighters; it includes such delights as instant coffee (usually taken as a swilled-with-water-in-mouth shot), a flameless heater (which must be leaned against “a rock or something” while in use), jalapenos cheese spread, Hoo Hah! chocolate bars and such wonders as “Boneless Pork Chop,” “Beef Patty” and “Sloppy Joe Filling”; according to the inspired packaging, MREs are “Warfighter Recommended, Warfighter Tested, Warfighter Approved.” After discussing said MREs with a former-Marine-current-Smoke-Jumper, who lived on nothing but for six months, this was clearly not the case (although he did show me how to make a cookie with the creamer, sugar and matches in the condiments package).
Cup trenches: Deep trenches dug to catch on-fire material that might roll, thus preventing the spread of fire; dug below burning stumps or trees on steep slopes

Snags: Fire-weakened trees likely to fall.

Limbing: Cutting a tree’s limbs off, often to stop the spread of fire within the tree.

Fire camp: An established base where firefighters return every night (unless spiked out at a more temporary camp) to de-brief, eat and sleep; depending on the size of the fire, fire camps can become mobile cities, 

equipped with a food trailer, shower trailers, supply trailers, potable water trailers and other necessities.

Photos 1. North American Buffalo, the tatanka 2. Wild Horse Canyon 3. Lee trying to get eyes on the Wild Horse  Canyon Fire 4. Nighttime view from fire camp 5. Lee and Mason