Stable Mesa Prescribed Burn

Stable Mesa Rx Burn Collage, originally uploaded by craptastica.

Wednesday was the Stable Mesa Prescribed Burn. Although my job mostly includes doing paperwork, they unshackle me once in a while. Besides, there's nothing like spending a day lighting shit on fire and coming home smelling like diesel fuel.

It's amazing to me how different firefighting is than one thinks. Running from flames licking at your heals, saving houses with huge pressurized blasts of water, and saying stuff like 'Holy shit! This mutha is blowin' up!" None of that happens.

Fires do blowup, but firefighting more resembles being a dog catcher. First, you never attack the beast head on. You don’t run to the fire line and point a hose at the flames. You’ll get bit. Most of the time you spend your time on a fire your digging a line with a shovel around the fire. Lure it into a closed trap.

Much of the firefighting is terribly inglorious. It's hurry up and wait. It's drive this truck over here, pick up that trailer, stand here, check the weather once an hour. Dig from here to there. And there’s always the resident hornets nest of dust and smoke.

Yet, driving up to a wildlfire, I always get a small jolt of excitement when I smell the first scent of smoke in the air. Then there's the angry crackle of torching bushes and trees that wrenches you to attention and steps you back from the impact of the noise and the subsequent blanket of heat. And the singularity of purpose that clearly leads the efforts of all.

The stable mesa burn was no wildfire, but a prescribed burn. An operation with 40 or so folks: burn managers, media team, fire staff from nearby districts, a hot shot crew, and other ‘red carded’ layabouts like myself out for a thrill. We got to the site sat around and talked for a bit and then ran through the morning brief.

The brief is like a very loose huddle in that once it’s done people scatter all over. We were burning about 1,000 acres that day. A ‘dog leg’ section on the northwest of the burn area. The group separated into two sections: Division A to the north and Division B to the south.

Then a brand new Parks Service truck began smoking and we were delayed a bit while a small engine fire was put out and it was pushed into neutral territory. (Fire 1: Forest Service 0)

Then things began. Very casually. A test fire was run to see how the vegetation took to the flaming diesel peppering the ground from the hot shot drip torches. It reacted hesitantly, burning slowly and without much heat. Cloud cover, 68 degree temperatures, and lack of wind kept its behavior predictable and the fire managers radioed the burn plan into motion.

My job was to help run the fuel truck. Everyone starts somewhere. I drove around with Ray, Cuba District wildlife biologist, filling up the 1 gallon canisters on drip torches from the 300 gallon tank trailing behind the truck. I did this all day. That night I came home reeking of diesel fuel, and of course the obligatory smoke-stained black boogars.

The fire was dragged across almost all of the ponderosa pine covered mesa by the time the sun began to fade. Temperatures drop, humidity picks up, and the fire lays down.

It wasn’t much better during the daytime. Many acres were burned, but the fire stayed cool. Only the very top layer of the blanket of pine needles was touched and few trees yielded to the flames. We didn’t quite ‘open up’ the forest as planned, but shit got burnt and noone got hurt (except the truck).