In the space of barely 24 hours the Clear Creek fire, as the Arrowheads called it, consumed nearly 29,000 acres of land in Idaho’s Salmon-Challis National Forest. The Arrowheads were cut off for more than a day as thick smoke made evacuation by helicopter impossible. Then they were picked up, all of them unhurt, and resumed fighting the fire from a safer spot. By late last week the Clear Creek fire had burned more than 200,000 acres, making it the biggest single blaze in the nation’s worst fire season of the past half century. In all, 6.4 million acres had burned, and 1.6 million of those acres–77 separate fires–were still ablaze, mostly in Idaho and Montana. More than 25,000 exhausted firefighters were working frantically, including thousands of soldiers and Marines. Rain was forecast for the weekend, but experts predicted that the really big fires, like the one at Clear Creek, would keep burning until the snow falls.
Some fires can be put out only by nature. Fed by dry weather, heat lightning and decades’ worth of tinder accumulated on the forest floor, the Clear Creek blaze baffled the firefighters, forcing them to switch from an offensive strategy–attacking the fire directly and trying to put it out–to defensive tactics. The aim now was to flank the fire, herding it away from populated areas but otherwise allowing it to burn. Firefighters set “burnouts,” attempting to stop or turn the advancing fire by deliberately igniting the underbrush in its path. For safety’s sake, the firefighters rarely came face to face with the flames.
Every move in this air-and-land battle was coordinated at a base camp outside the town of Salmon, 15 miles from the Clear Creek fire, in an alcohol-free tent city for 1,787 firefighters. Smoke from distant fires sat on the camp, heavy and stinging, turning the sun and moon red. After 16 hours a day in the field, the crews returned to camp coated with soot like coal miners.
The 68 federally funded Hotshot teams based around the country are a clan apart. They visit the base camp only when leaving the area. Otherwise, they live with the fire for up to 21 days at a time, sleeping at its edge, never washing, constantly breathing the smoke. The work is hard and tedious: digging trenches, cutting down dead trees, clearing away underbrush, all for $10 to $12 an hour, plus overtime pay and a 25 percent bonus for hazardous duty. Their heavy backpacks include gasoline for their chain saws, first-aid kits and fire shelters made of a thin, reflective material that is a firefighter’s last hope of survival if overrun by the flames. The Arrowhead crew fought the Clear Creek fire for 21 days in July and then returned for another three-week stint. “It is one of the last adventurous ways of making a living in the U.S.,” said Matthew Snider, 33, in his 10th season as a Hotshot.
Hotshots are the people responsible for setting burnouts. Fighting fire with fire is a tricky process and a last resort. The burnouts are started with a mixture of gasoline and diesel fuel, and they are lit only when the wind is in the right direction and the relative humidity is within a specific range. At Clear Creek, firefighters patrolled the edge of the burnout near the town of Cobalt, alert for any embers that might be carried away on a shifting wind. Sometimes they stopped for a moment to contemplate the terrible beauty of what they had done–lodgepole pines torched by a burnout, fire-whirls swirling up a hillside. “This is fun,” one of them said. “Setting fires is more fun than putting them out.”
