I was a wildland firefighter in college.

My Time in Fire

I worked for the Washington State Department of Natural Resources for 4 seasons. I did it to pay for college and as a result I managed to graduate without taking any student loans. The trade off of course is that while everyone else is partying all summer I was tethered to town for after hours call backs. Still some of my favorite memories are from those days and I dearly miss it. With the season starting to pick up this year I thought I would share some thoughts and pictures from my time

Some of the guys from a night-shift we did. Of course this was a staged photo but how could we not with how awesome it looks.

Tomorrow is one of the busiest fire days of the year. It's almost assured that a couple schmucks will think it's fun to shoot roman candles at one another in a dry field. This year as summer festivities take off remember to be careful. Many places it's hot, dry and primed for fire, don't be an idiot with fire or fireworks.

This photo was snapped only an hour or two after that fire started. This fire would come be be one of the more costly fires in recent history.

This was another costly fire. This was started by lightning but due to it's inaccessibility much of it was fought by air. Photo taken from an earlier burn scar.

The sandy part in the far of the photo is a peat bog. It was struck by lightning some time in the winter. It burned for months and once it heated up the bog would start brush fires periodically in the surrounding vegetation.

This is a recent satellite image from Google Earth that you can actually see the fire line we constructed (the line running horizontally on the bottom of the photo. We burned off that line to prevent any uncontrolled fires for the season.

If anyone finds this interesting I can do my best to dig up more photos and write some more posts on them.

Thanks for reading!
Akuda