My First Season

At age 35, I was the second oldest on my crew despite being a rookie hotshot. Only one of the captains, who had discovered wildland firefighting as a prisoner in the California correctional system, was older than me. On my first day, I was issued my line pack, my Nomex greens and yellows and hardhat. Joseph, my new saw partner, showed me how to put on my Kevlar chaps. He probably guessed I had a lot to learn—and he wasn’t wrong.This was my first job that I had ever done with my hands.

"Line out, we're hiking", yelled our captain.

I hefted the dolmar—a plastic jerrycan for saw gas and oil—over my shoulder and got into line. Our test was Mount Bertha: 1,500 feet of elevation gain over a rocky trail, carrying a 40 pound pack plus assigned gear. We had 50 minutes to reach the summit.

Within five minutes, my heart rate spiked, the flats already making my lungs work harder than they should. I did not, did not want to fall behind. When we hit the climb, anxiety joined exhaustion in a negative feedback loop, and I felt panic rising. Six months of training—10-mile runs, 60-pound pack hikes on my local trails—had not prepared me enough. I began to worry:

I’ve waited over a decade for this chance. What if I’m not enough?

In college, my friend Rob and I read Norman Maclean’s Young Men and Fire during a backpacking trip in New Hampshire's Presidential Traverse. The Missoula smokejumpers inspired us even in tragedy and we talked about how we too could live lives of service and adventure. After college, Rob became a high school teacher and I joined the Army, where I deployed to Iraq with my friend John—who had spent five seasons on the Logan Hotshots. During downtime on deployment John told stories of firefighting: sleepless nights waiting out storms in the high country, grueling terrain, eating the emergency MRE for dinner due to no resupply and the undeniable pride of doing work that mattered. “I’ve never felt as good about what I did as when I was a hotshot,” he’d say.

After the Army, I took a remote tech job in Los Angeles. It was good work but unfulfilling, the days consumed by Zoom meetings and code. The hotshot dream became one of those lingering "what-ifs"—something I thought I’d left behind, one of those things that I would wonder about, wondering if I had what it took.

One day, I picked up Sebastian Junger’s book Fire, a journalistic account of wildland firefighters at work. Junger detailed a picture that he saw:

I saw a magazine photo of half a dozen forest fire fighters taking a break on the fire line. They wore yellow Nomex shirts and hard hats and had line packs on their backs and were leaning on their tools in a little meadow, watching the forest burn. In front of them was a wall of flame three hundred feet high. There was something about the men in that photo—their awe, their exhaustion, their sense of purpose—that I wanted in my life.

So I found the same picture, from the Yosemite Big Burn of 1988 and put it on the wall behind my desk. Like Junger, the picture of firefighters highlighted something missing that I desperately wanted in my life. I wanted my life and my efforts to matter and I wanted to live a life that would put me in touch with such awesome natural forces.That winter I got divorced after a year trying to fix a broken marriage, and decided to leave the company I had started. It was the perfect opportunity to try to do something I had always wanted to do. I applied to the Forest Service and despite having no fire experience got a spot for the next summer on a hotshot crew close to where I lived in Southern California.

As the Mount Bertha hike got steeper, my breathing became ragged and even more worryingly, my legs were cramping. I was getting dehydrated, sweating through my yellow fire shirt. The temperature was more than 90 degrees despite being 7000 feet up in the mountains. I narrowed my field of vision to the boots of my saw partner Joseph in front of me and tried mightily not to let them get any further from me. But the gap kept opening up and eventually guys in the tool order behind me started bumping me, fast-hiking around me and taking my spot in the line.

Rounding a switchback, I could see the top, a radio repeater tower on the top of a pile of rocks. I kept my legs moving, worried that they'd lock up. My back was hunched over under my pack; I was almost crawling. I touched the finish line at exactly 49:58, 2 seconds before the cutoff, and immediately collapsed.

During the second week of training, we switched from physical tests to learning how to do our assigned roles on the crew. As a swamper for a saw team, my job was to enable the sawyer to cut efficiently and progress. From overhanging tree branches to hazard snags to brush in the intended path of the fire line, I needed to remove the fuel as soon as it was cut and get it out of the way. Sawyers and swampers often work within inches of each other with a running chainsaw between them and there are lots of ways to get hurt, so coordination was key. The difficult part was keeping up. I trailed behind my saw partner Joseph like a puppy dog picking up sticks. Running back and forth to swamp the brush that he was cutting, I would gas out and fall behind. In my fatigue I made stupid mistakes like reaching over the bar of his saw, putting myself at risk of getting cut.

By the end of Critical 80, I had learned how to dig fire line with a hand tool, how to interpret and predict fire behavior, and was slowly beginning to figure out how to work in sync with my saw partner. I would predict what needed to happen and wrap my arms around the brush, exposing the branches to make them easy to cut. Joseph would zip them with the saw and I'd grab more until I had a large bundle and toss it across the line.

But I was still very raw. Each hike up Bertha was a humbling reminder of my very real limits, and every day as the sawyers revved their chainsaws and we prepared to cut line, I could feel the nervousness rising with my breakfast in my throat. Could I hold my own on a real fire, with flames and chaos? The idea of my first fire filled me with equal parts anticipation and dread. During this period, I had come up with a mantra for myself:

Always do something positive.

I told myself, that no matter how bad the situation, no matter how hard I was being on myself, there was something positive I could do to improve the situation, to help our saw team, to better our crew. Maybe this mindset was what I became a hotshot to try and learn.

We had a busy season of fires: 7 fire assignments back to back kept us on the road all summer. In Alaska, a fire was ripping through black spruce, a crown fire. A fire like that cannot be stopped by human means. It was all we could do to try to prep houses for when the fire reached them. But on our last day, almost miraculously, it started raining, what interior Alaskans called a season-ending rain, that divided the summer fire season with the incoming winter. I learned about how fire sometimes is an uncontrollable natural force where human interventions are laughable and futile.

On a quickly spreading grass fire on BLM grazing lands in Idaho, we spent all night burning ten thousand acres in front of the fire, taking away its fuel as ranchers evacuated their livestock behind us. The next morning as we stumbled back to our buggies, faces black, a rancher woman in a cowboy hat stopped her pickup by us and handed two pepperoni pizzas out her window, hot and fresh. I learned what it felt like to do something meaningful for a community and to see that recognized.

In Southern California during a record heatwave, a motorist crashed their car into a ravine and it quickly became thousands of acres as it burned up a steep hillside. Our crew was pushed back by a surge of fire at the head and the Calfire corrections crew holding the line with us reverse tool ordered and ran away, thinking their lives were at stake. I learned how to trust in the experience of others on my crew in distinguishing what was a dangerous situation from merely impressive fire behavior.

But this is the one I remember most.

The Coffee Pot fire was tearing through tens of thousands of acres along the border of Sequoia National Park. The plan was to box it in—protect the town of Three Rivers while steering it into the wilderness, where it could burn safely for weeks. For 13 nights of a two week assignment, we fought it indirectly, lighting backfires and holding lines, hoping that our efforts could contain the fire.

One night, we dropped down a steep dozer line to the Kaweah River Valley to conduct a backfire. I carried a drip torch, dripping fuel onto the brush at my feet, setting fire to stop fire. Flames climbed behind us, latching onto snags that burst into towering infernos. Across the valley, distant flames glimmered along the ridges, silhouetted against the stark granite peaks that loomed over the park. We spent all night laying fire down and pausing to watch its progress until the morning arrived and a relief crew came to take our place. We had been at work for 32 hours.

We held that backfire from the safety of a ridgeline for the next few nights. I spent nights watching the fire, making bets with myself on when specific snags would torch, when the fire would spread to certain landmarks that I had set for myself. When the cold seeped into my bones, I’d sit on a recently burned ashpit on the black side of the line to warm my legs.

A call over the radio: "Half-acre spot, spreading moderately in the underbrush, you guys seeing that?" Below us, the fire had jumped the control line and it was burning in live fuel in the green. A crew went down to cut it off, but it was spreading fast, and access was difficult. "Retreat back up," came the order.

We lined out to hike back up the ridgetop to the peak, where we had parked the buggies. One of our sawyers, Aidan, leaned over with a lopsided smile:

“One of my favorite parts of this job is running away from fire.”

The next night, our last shift, we crossed the Kaweah River to attack the fire directly. By dusk, it was already lighting up the ridge we’d lost the night before; small points of light were everywhere all over the slope. A Chinook helicopter rumbled over a granite cliff, headed back after its final bucket drop before nightfall.

We started cutting fire line through some of the steepest, thickest brush we’d faced all season, directly next to the active fire. As a swamper, I scrambled to haul away the heavy oak branches my sawyer, Joseph, cut down, throwing them to the other side of the line. Stobs from the brush snagged my chaps, tripping me as I staggered up and down the slope.

Four hours into the shift, Joseph suddenly sat down. “I’m not feeling good, ” he said before vomiting between his boots. Our squad leader, Kyle, grabbed the saw. I stayed on to help swamp, struggling to keep pace. Kyle was relentless—cutting through thick heavy oak without bucking and poison oak alike. I was drowning, my body heavy, my mind stuck on the thought of failure.

“You’re not cutting it,” the lead saw said, suddenly appearing. “You’re a mile behind your sawyer, picking up sticks"

I was done. I’d bonked—physically, mentally, emotionally. My legs dragged, my undershirt was completely wet with sweat. I had let down the team.

There’s no greater sin on a crew than failing to carry your weight. It’s an unspoken competition: who can haul the most, endure the longest, take the heaviest burden.

I hung my head, hands on my knees, trying to steady my breath and swallow the shame. I thought about quitting, about handing off chaps to someone else and stepping out. But I remembered what I’d promised myself at the start of the season: at every breaking point, choose courage over comfort. This was why I had wanted to be a hotshot, to run around the woods and through this experience find some courage and agency in myself.

I stood up, took a long drink of water, and hurried after Kyle. Slowly, my strength returned. We got into a good rhythm as a saw team, leapfrogging the other saw teams and making progress on our line.

Finally, we broke through the brush into a small clearing. Across the way, eight guys in yellow shirts and orange helmets charged out, chainsaws roaring, cutting and hurling brush downhill. The other crew. Over the noise of the chainsaws, someone was yelling. Actually, everyone was yelling. We had reached the tie-in, the endpoint of our work.

Despite being alone and outnumbered, Kyle let out a war cry, and I followed. We plunged in, cutting and hauling as fast as we could. It was chaos: chainsaws roaring, branches flying, bodies colliding as we raced to clear the line. Pride was on the line—ours and theirs. Despite the appearance of raw competition, the tie-in was really a shared triumph for both our crews, a chance to show that we were skilled and competent and that we did good work and had pride in our crew's legacies, the logos on our hardhats.

When the work was done, we sat down, exhausted. Usually, we ate sandwiches together and loudly compared notes about the experience, slightly deaf from all the chainsaw noise. But tonight I wanted to be alone. I had almost broken and then picked up the shattered pieces, putting them back together on that line.

There were no congratulations or compliments that night. We were tired, covered in poison oak, and ready to go home. But looking back, knowing what we had just gone through—I had an inkling of what those firefighters were feeling in Sebastian Junger’s picture. Exhausted, in awe of the power of wildfire, but also proud of ourselves and our crew for putting in good work and making a difference.