Fires are fun when they’re out of control and there’s a lot going on. I get a real kick out of scouting an active fire, working to gain situational awareness and come up with an effective strategy. Once the fire is caught, the challenge becomes staying engaged and keeping the crew engaged. Burning is fun; mopup and patrol and rehab are not.
Doing hotshot shit, like prepping and then burning and holding a piece of line, or going direct on a gnarly division, is what draws most of us into the business and keeps us there, but a good crew will still do a good job of the “deucer” work without complaint.
Hotshot crews have a reputation for always wanting to burn and not being a super useful resource when it comes to boring days of digging out stump holes or dealing with the piles of slash in the green that have to be cleaned up after the fun part is over. On a big active fire, we often get out of doing a ton of mopup or rehab because we’re sent to the next division closer to the head of the fire. I think a good test of our character and our value as a crew is how well we accept and participate in assignments we don’t enjoy or don’t feel are fully necessary.
Mopup sucks, and I’ve spent a lot of days doing it for no good reason, going deeper than we did the day before on the same piece of ground. We’d keep working deeper, stirring hot duff and spraying out stumpholes until the interior of the fire and our mopped up edge had the same amount of heat. Fires eventually burn up all the residential fuels and go out. So why mop up at all?
A few years ago I was on a fire that we caught in one shift. We mopped up and secured the edge the next day, going as deep as we felt was necessary. One of the guys on my squad noticed a big pinyon with some heat and ladder fuels under it and asked if I wanted him to go take care of it. The tree in question was three chains in and the winds were calm so I told him we’d just let it do its thing and burn up. A few hours later, the heat under the pinyon had built to the point that it was going to torch out pretty soon. My superintendent saw it from his location at the top of the hill and called me on the radio. We talked about getting in there to keep it from torching, because there was still time, but ultimately decided to just let it clean up. When it torched, the winds picked up, blew embers across the line, spotted into some big dead junipers, and ran six miles.
A Type 2 Crew (Deuce Crew) would most likely have mopped up under that big pinyon on their first pass that morning and hung on to that fire. My lesson learned that day was that sometimes our bare minimum “just do what’s necessary” mopup standards are insufficient. Sometimes the head-down “deucer” mopup standards are exactly what’s needed, and hotshot crews have to be careful to determine what amount of effort is required in each situation.
Sometimes the mopup standards are excessive and a waste of work, exposing the crew to more ash, dust, and smoke than is required. Sometimes though, we think we’re being smart by letting interior smokes take care of themselves, but are actually being elitist lazy assholes.
It’s a fucking razor’s edge man.
That is all.
