A piece of printer paper reading “PLANS” in all caps, 200-point font, is taped to the door of a yurt farthest back in a ring of tents and trailers. Through its distorted plastic window, a group of warmly dressed figures gathered around a “war” map spread over a large, square table.
The meeting was for leaders only, a debrief of the day’s battle. The enemy? A 31,000-acre wildfire burning through the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest.
It’s already been a full 14 days since this incident base camp was erected at the rodeo grounds in Francis. Originally headquarters, the crude tent city is now considered a spike camp since a larger camp in Duchesne was built after the fire jumped to a higher complexity.
But with 848 personnel on the fire Sunday, the “smaller” camp is still a buzz of activity as crews come in waves after sundown, headed straight to a pavilion where a hot dinner is served each night. This night, plates were piled high with turkey, ham, mashed potatoes and gravy, salad and cream puffs and brownies for the sweet tooth. Most sat down and ate before chatting, letting the warm food fight off the incoming chill, and the exhaustion.
Morale is high. These crews know what they signed up for, but it’s been a long season.
“Folks are getting tapped out, they’re getting tired,” said Mathew Armantrout, a division leader on the strategic operations team and career firefighter. “You can see it on people’s faces. They’re just worn out.”
This season, he’s gone to fires in New Mexico, Idaho and Oregon. Many crew mates have similar stories, long summers sent all over the West.
So, for the firefighters and management crews deployed here, it’s all routine: yurts and trailers forming offices, camping tents pitched in grass fields as temporary homes, a covered area with picnic tables is the dining room for hot breakfast and dinner.
But what’s not normal? To be sent here, a high elevation forest, fighting this big of a fire in mid-October.
“I have been to fires in Utah before, but never 10,000 feet in mid-October and burning this well,” said Mike Hildebrand, branch director on the fire and part of the California Incident Management Team 2. “Usually high altitude stuff doesn’t burn that great.”
On many fronts, the Yellow Lake Fire is defying the lived experience of even old-timers. And it’s not just the fire, but the overall state of the country. A late-season wildfire is now overlapping with peak hurricane season, and this year’s double-whammy with Helene and Milton hitting the Southeast means resources and manpower to manage emergencies like these are scarce.
And firefighters are the men and women on-call for all types of natural disasters, like a utility player in baseball, said Jeff Armstrong, a full-time fire chief in northern Idaho who’s working as a public information officer for the Yellow Lake Fire.
“When there’s a hurricane, we’re going to jump in a bunch of pickup trucks with a bunch of equipment and some boats. When there’s a wildland fire, we go do wildland fire. When there’s an earthquake, we’re going to go to the earthquakes. So if another department or another public safety agency doesn’t handle it, it falls to the fire department,” Armstrong said.
Measured 1 to 5, the national preparedness levels are now at 5, the worst place to be.
“You got the hurricane, you got wildfires in Idaho and Oregon, here, Wyoming. We bumped into preparedness level 5 last week, and that’s the first time since 1990 that we’ve ever been in a PL5 in October,” said Armantrout.
No use dwelling too long on that head scratcher. Instead it’s “plug along.” Talking strategy, how are these leaders going to use the resources available to them to stop this fire as quickly as possible with as small a footprint as possible? It’s a lot of moving parts to consider.
Sierra Hellstrom, a public information officer with the U. S. Forest Service for the Yellow Lake Fire, explained the idea of “WTF” as factors that drive fire behavior: “weather, topography and fuels.” In the case of the Yellow Lake Fire, they’ve had terrible weather with hot, dry, windy conditions. There’s also tight canyons that channel winds up to 70 miles per hour, so the fire races through there. And fuels? It’s a nightmare despite management teams’ best efforts, especially with the sheer number of standing dead trees, killed by beetle infestations.
When it comes to fighting the fire, heat, oxygen and fuels are the three elements that make up what’s called a fire triangle, said Hellstrom.
“We can’t take away the oxygen, but we can minimize the heat, cool it down, and then we can reduce the fuels,” she said.
So they work with what they’ve got: water, fire retardant — which is like soapy water, allowing the moisture to linger longer in high heat areas — and other man-made tactics like bull-dozing makeshift “roads” as fire breaks, which are called dozer lines.
But ultimately, it’s the fire crews that are the biggest resources, the boots on the ground, the minds puzzling over how to protect the people, the structures and the land.
“We talk all the time that fire is the only natural disaster we ask men and women to go stand in front of. No one has someone to go stand in front of the wall of a hurricane coming or the tornado. But for some reason, they think these 100-foot flame lengths, we can just go stand there in front of it and do something about it,” said Hellstrom.
It gets scary, sure, but the risk comes with some incredible reward through the camaraderie those men and women share.
“We’re brothers and sisters out there. A lot of these crews spend all season together, and they become a real tight, cohesive group. In hard times, you pick each other up,” Armantrout said. “Usually it’s your worst times on fire that you remember. Those are the best memories that you have.”
