Fire Camp

After traveling for four to five hours we finally reached the road that would lead us to the battle. You could smell the smoke in the air and could now look up and see under the cloud. It looked like a straight column of smoke jetting into the sky. The only reference I had in seeing such a view was the pictures of the A-bomb we dropped on Japan during WWII. I wondered if they looked at that cloud the way I was looking at this one that day?  Theirs was a view of utter destruction, while mine was letting me get there so I could help stop this thing.

This was not a developed area. We were on dirt roads all the way in. It was a wilderness area. If you wanted to be here you had to make some effort to get here. There were no conveniences. You had to bring in everything you needed to survive. We arrived at a wide open area. This was my first view of what a fire camp looked like. There were firefighters, trucks, equipments, tents everywhere. It looked like pictures of the invasion of Normandy. You saw Hotshots crews from all over California, Arizona, Montana, Idaho and New Mexico. We knew we had arrived. This was the big time.

Once we got settled in, we began talking to the other crews.  We learned the fire had gotten into a remote area and that it was threatening the Condor habitat. The next question was, what started it? Usually, in this type of remote area, it was a lightning strike. That was not the case in this fire. They knew where it started, knew the point of origination. In fact, they could show us where the fire started. 

In high parched dry grass sat a pickup truck with a camper unit on the back. At the rear of the truck, down by the exhaust system, you could see blackened burnt grass starting from a small area under the truck.  It had quickly fanned out into a broad burned area leading to where the active fire now raged. 

The truck was not burned, but every inch of the body of the truck and camper had cuts, scrapes and dents left by the crews that were going out to fight this fire.