Sept 12-14. Presents Pickin' in the Pines bluegrass festival. Flagstaff, AZ. What a crazy weekend. Meet Pam the first night. She picked the three of us (Bubba, Matt and I) up hitch hiking and stayed for a beer. The music was great, even picked up a few cds for the road trip back east.

Quick note. I'm enjoying not working for a little bit. If I find some pictures from my travels I'll post them soonish.

To: The person who left angry comments. I changed the contentious posts. Chill please! Thanks for bringing that to my attention.

Bird.

Deepest lake in the county. Second in the world. Created by a volcano collapsing. Check out the cool island. If I choose to become a pirate when I grow up... I might just storm that island.

Great place! Worth seeing.

Matt, Susan and Dewey

Bubba's squad. Or as they prefer to be called "The shrimp boat".

September 1. After days of indirect line and very little fire behavior crews started getting released. Today it was our turn. We headed for New Mexico short of a 14 day tour. Hurricane Gustav (sp?) is the only incident ordering crews, the fire world is at a stand still. This picture is of Creator Lake. It happened to be on our way home so we stopped briefly.

Huckleberry Finn. Dewey brought us a treat at the end of the day.

The Gila IHC logging games. Who can cut the rounds faster. A true test of your sharpening ability.

Pocket wilderness? This fire is burning in a designated wilderness area. Its an incredibly small wilderness when compared with the Gila. You can see in this picture how its burning in the re-prod from the 1996 burn. Healthy fire?

Smoke haze.

August 27. Olie our crews student hire has to leave and become a Paramedic. So today is our last chance to get a picture with the full crew of 2008. Here we are in full gear.

August 28. Sunrise Oregon.

August 27. Sunset in Oregon.

August 27th. The most fire we've seen yet...

August 26. Long day of line ended at a nice spot to take a Saw team picture.

August 26. North Fork Complex/Rattle Fire. On the Umqua N.F.
Our mission is to construct indirect contingency line around a 600 acre fire. No one is willing to enter the fire area because lies in a old burn from 1996. Left over are hundreds of snags many of which are burning away what little wood is holding them up.

Mt. Shasta on our way to the Rattle Fire.

Anyone seen the movie Super Troopers? Or maybe the TV show Reno 911?

We staged at a river with some ancient lava flow tunnels for a few hours.

The finished products.

Notice the attention to detail Bubba uses while detailing Alex's new upper lip hair style.

August 25. Hendricks getting a mustache. He held out and got 50 bucks for doing his...

August 25th. Lonesome Complex. Rogue River N.F. The fires are out here for the most part. We mopped up and kept busy while waiting for a re-assignment.
"Nevada Bob" getting mustached

August 22-24. Today we left Negrito for Oregon. It took us three solid days of travel and an O ring off one of the carriers diesel turbo. But we made it. This shot is the sun setting in Nevada from our mobile home.

Brian up graded his goatee

Brian, Squad 1 minus Ian and Jeff

You have to let Jeff throw some too!

Cleaning up a green pocket of fuel with some incendiary grenades.

Graham caught a scorpian. Mean little guys.

July 8-13. We got into a routine for the rest of the dispatch. Prep the road in the mornings. Rush into burning as the main fire makes a push. Then grid for spot fires. One thing note worthy was the steepness of the area. When we needed to get to the road from griding up on the mountain side all you had to do was sit down and slide 200 ft to the road. It was like a water slide without the water. weeeeee!

Using fuses to burn off some indirect line on one of the spot fires.

July 7. Iron Complex - Eagle fire. Today we got dispatched to the Iron Complex where the H-44 crash was. When we arrived we started preparing the road to burn off of. As the day progressed we had to start burning to stop a run coming up the hill at us. The wind was not in our favor. As we held up the main fire with our burn we got spot fires over the road. Well into the night, I think 1 am, we chased spot fires.

This picture is from our escape route which was Olie and I driving the buggies along with the burnout.

July 6. A-2 Fire. Today we got demobbed and headed to a new fire. The Lassen N.F. a few hours away got hit by a lighting storm and Gila IHC is going to catch new starts. The fire they put us on was 6 acres with dozer line around most of it. Mostly brush cutting and mop-up. Today we found out about a helicopter crash on the Iron Complex that killed 9 people on the 4th.

This tree was to dangerous to cut so we helped it burn down.

July 3-5. We found a creek to stick our heads into on our hike to one of the spot fires we needed to mop. Felt a little guilty about it because the rest of the crew was working else where. They would have done the same thing...

July 3-5. Mop-up and fall hazard trees. For the next several days we used a hose lay to mop-up the fire 300ft into the black. Us sawyers got a chance to fall hazard trees with Dave who is our saw boss. He just got back from a detail with the Reserve Helitack crew.

July 2. View once the spots got caught and the smoke settled.

July 2. Susan giving out gummy bears while we fill our empty canteens.

July 2. Picture of a spot 1/4 mile off the line. The farthest of the long range spotting we got.

July 2. View of the spot fire from the fire line. The crew holding with us some how didn't spot this or maybe thought someone was on it, we never found out. At any rate it was moving up at them fairly fast. A heavy helicopter knocked the fire down so the 4 of us could get around it with line. It took us the rest of the day. While that was going on for me the crew found several more spot fires. Long day for all of us. I was surprised we didn't lose the ridge we were on.

July 2. The spot fires begin! The first spots started up the line and growing fast. Another crew was on them and several of us went up the hill to help. On our way we spotted another spot ripping up the side of a drainage in some brush. We diverted to this new spot while the rest of the crew started a grid in the green looking for more fires.

July 2. Rich Fire. We continued the burnout today. Due to much thicker fuels the burn started getting hot. Small dime size spots started showing up in the green side of the burn. Around noon a burning snag tree fell over the line narrowly missing 5 gallans of burn fuel (a mix of gas and diesel). As soon as it fell the green side exploded in fire. After the fire set down we went in and caught the slop over at about a 1/4 acre. Almost as soon as we finished another small slop over started. Which we caught quickly. At this time the burn has been passed to the next crew. As soon as I thought things would calm down and I could catch my breath a column of smoke from the other side of the burn set down over our line sending long range embers deep into the green.

Formen Jeff and Superintendent Dewey waiting for the crew to meet up where we stopped the burn for the day.

Some pictures of the line getting burned. You can see the smoke is blowing in. Which is a really good thing.

Aug 1st. Burnout begins. In the a.m. we finished preping. There were not enough hours in the day to complete our part of the burn so we hung up the fire about halfway into our chunk of line.

July 30. Rich Fire. We are on the Plumas N.F. where a spark from a train set off a large fire. Today we put in a large chunk of indirect fire line along with two other crews. The plan is to finish the prep tomorrow and burn off the fire line.

July 29-30. Dispatched. Off to Northern California it took us two full days of driving to reach the Plumas N.F.