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[00:00:00] Michael Hawk: As you all know, I find wildfire to be fascinating. It’s complex, it’s simultaneously necessary and at times devastating and it’s also wildly misunderstood. And the landscape of fire is rapidly changing, literally and figuratively. So I hope to continue to bring a variety of voices and perspectives on wildfire to the podcast, including today. Have you ever wondered what it’s like to be on the fire lines with a wildfire crew? Or what it takes to join a crew in the first place. Or the differences between the different types of crews that you might hear in the news, like engine crews, hand crews and hot shots. And how do they actually manage active wildfires? Where does prescribed and cultural burning fit into the picture?

[00:00:40] So today’s guest Amanda Monte helps us get some answers.

[00:00:44] Amanda is a former wild land firefighter having participated in a variety of crews, including a hot shot crew. She’s now a writer and host of the life with fire podcast, where she interviews a wide variety of people involved with wildfire. And she’s also an occasional public information officer on wildfires.

[00:01:00]

[00:01:00] Michael Hawk: We discuss all of these things on today’s podcast. And Amanda also graciously shares some amazing stories from her time as a firefighter. In addition to her podcast, you can find Amanda at lwf_pod on Twitter lifewithfirepodcast on Facebook and lifewithfirepod on Instagram. I hope you enjoy today’s episode and be sure to check out the show notes on podcast.naturesarchive.com to see the video that we talked about and also to find links to everything we discussed, including Amanda’s social media accounts. So without further delay, Amanda Monthei.

[00:01:35] Amanda, thank you for taking the time to join me today.

[00:01:37] Amanda Monthei: Yeah, it’s good to be here.

[00:01:39] Michael Hawk: Since I started this podcast, I think when I was jotting down ideas of topics, I wanted to cover all things wildfire. Come to mind for me, so I am looking forward to getting your perspective today.

[00:01:53] You have a very unique perspective on wildfire. I’m just gonna jump straight in. I see in your bio that you were on a hotshot crew. So can you tell me what is a hotshot crew and how how did you find your way there?

[00:02:06] Amanda Monthei: yeah. So I was on a hotshot crew. I was there from 2018 to 2019, so two seasons on zigzag, the zigzag hotshot crew up in the Mount Hood National Forest. So about an hour gosh, southeast of Portland. And that was the result of having worked in fire for two seasons prior and wanting to move into that next level and see what I could accomplish at that level.

[00:02:32] It was the culmination of those two seasons of working in fire. On the first season I was on engine and then the second season I was on a hand crew in 2017 in central Idaho. The general trajectory for a lot of folks that get into fire are to eventually try to make it on a hotshot crew or even on a hand crew In general, this type of work is somewhat different from like your traditional engine crews.

[00:02:55] When you’re on a hand crew and hotshot crews are called type one hand crews and so they’re often tasked with more difficult, they say more difficult, but, type two hand crews can also be tasked with very difficult tasks. But generally, you think of the steepest terrain, you think of the assignments that require a significant amount of qualifications from a crew.

[00:03:15] These are qualifications that are generally required out of a hotshot crew to handle operations in the event that you need to do a burnout or you need to handle a whole section of line or something to that effect.

[00:03:28] And so you’re often put into these situations where you’re doing kind of the fun work of wildfires. Often I would say probably 30% of the time you’re doing like the fun stuff, which is performing burnouts. This is where you’re like burning out the fuel between you and the fire. And so when it hits that sort of buffered line that you’ve created by burning out the fuel, it just drops to the ground and doesn’t really have anywhere to go.

[00:03:52] Those are always fun. You’re using a drip torch. You’re also doing a lot of prep work to make those things happen. And so it’s two or three days worth of prep work to go into like maybe a couple hours of the super fun stuff. And then you’re waiting to make sure that doesn’t spot across your line whatever that might be, a road or a trail or whatever.

[00:04:08] And then you have your like hotline where you’re like digging wild or you’re digging fire line, a fire break effectively right next to the fire. So you’ve got the fire on your face. Things are really intense. It’s really exciting. That’s sort of, kind of. work that I think people expect when they get into hot shotting, but it’s not always like that.

[00:04:25] There’s a lot of non glorious work that happens to where you’re mopping up, you’re ensuring that everything is cold and wet and not gonna go anywhere, and you’re doing that to ensure a hundred percent containment on a fire usually a hundred feet or maybe even 200 feet in from the fire lines that have been established.

[00:04:44] So yeah, that is the very basic explanation of a hotshot crew. And it was one of the most empowering experiences of my life. And I can talk a little bit about how I got into fire, but how I got into hot shotting was just that. I wanted to push it and see if I could get to that level and thrive at that level.

[00:05:03] And it felt like I could by the end of my first summer, starting out it was like very, it was obviously very difficult, but I. I feel like thankfully I showed up in really good shape, and so it wasn’t as physically demanding. It was more mentally and like emotionally demanding, I would say, than anything.

[00:05:20] There’s a lot you can prepare for physically. You can ensure that you can meet all of, or ex exceed all of the hotshot standards. So a certain number of pushups, a certain number of setups, a certain number of pull-ups but you cannot really prepare for crew dynamics.

[00:05:34] You can’t really prepare for like constantly doing things wrong because you’re new to this type of crew that has a very specific. Way of doing things. And you’re constantly, for the first two or three months that you’re there being told like, no, we don’t do it like that here. This is how you do it.

[00:05:49] Or if you make that mistake again, you owe me 20 pushups, or all of these things that just feel like super overwhelming when you’re first starting out and you’re like, I can’t remember all of these rules all at once. But then by the end of the summer, it’s you’re right in. And it feels like a well-oiled machine, as they say, and you’re working a lot of fire.

[00:06:07] That first season that I worked was 2018. It was a really busy fire season for almost everybody. It seemed like it was a over a thousand hours season, as we call it. So a thousand hours of overtime in a season is the threshold for a busy season for hotshot crews. And I think we got 1100 or something, or maybe just over a thousand.

[00:06:23] But nonetheless, it was a very busy first season on a hotshot crew.

[00:06:27] Michael Hawk: I’d like to learn more about how you got into fire in the first place, but sticking with this hotshot focus as our starting point. So there are so many different kinds of wildfires and different behaviors.

[00:06:38] So as you’re describing the types of things that you do, like burnouts and monitoring the fire lines and things like that I imagine that varies quite a bit depending on the behavior of a specific fire. Maybe I dunno, what’s a good way to, to get into this, but for example, if you’re going to do a burnout, you said it might take hours or days of planning to do that.

[00:06:59] So how far away from the fire line are you flanking the fire? What what does a burnout look like or burnout planning?

[00:07:06] Amanda Monthei: Oh my gosh. This is like a high level question. I almost feel like I’m unqualified to answer this. I would show up and they would be like, listen, we’re gonna cut all of the vegetation off of the road except the biggest trees. And then in two days when we’re done with that, we’re gonna light it and. I’m not joking when I say I rarely knew what was going on with the fire.

[00:07:26] I rarely knew what the bigger plan was. I would literally just sit in the back of the buggy and they would take me where I needed to go and then they’d be like, okay, time to work. And then I would go to work and I would stop when they told me to stop. And to be honest, like even to this day, I don’t know exactly how those decisions are made.

[00:07:46] Often it’s like you’re spending those two days, as far as I understand, maybe you spend those two days clearing all that ground vegetation in low limbs off the side of the road. If the fire doesn’t end up coming that direction and you don’t end up needing to use that line, which is effectively like a fuel break for the future, if you don’t end up needing to use it for your burnout, then that’s a great fuel break that the forest can be like.

[00:08:10] That section of road got cut out in that last fire, and then the wind switched and it went somewhere else. So we know that this two or three miles a road is a fuel break for the future. And we know that we cleared that vegetation out and we might need to do it again in a couple years, but for now we have that and it’s established, and then there might be other crews working, doing the same thing on other sections of line.

[00:08:33] And sometimes this is, this happens very fast, sometimes we don’t have a lot of time to do that fuel work. Maybe we know we have a certain prevailing wind that we will expect to have for the next two to three days. And so we know eventually it’s gonna hit that line. And we don’t have any other lines between where we’re at and where the fire is.

[00:08:51] So we know with a certain level of certainty that the fire is going to work its way towards this specific line or road.

[00:08:57] And maybe that road is our only fuel break potential without literally making a dozer line up and over a ridge or something in the middle. So yeah, you do your little, you do your little burnout, and then you have. This buffer that is created even stronger by putting fire into it because it removes even more of the fuel that you can’t remove by way of using chainsaws and and then like carrying the fuel across the road basically.

[00:09:23] Sometimes it’s pretty urgent, sometimes it’s not. Sometimes it’s, you know, a contingency plan. Sometimes it’s your primary plan and you’ve gotta get moving on it. And sometimes you can’t clear as much fuel as you’d like to prior to that. And the reason you’re clearing that fuel is because you don’t want it to get too hot during your burnout on your road, which is your fire line.

[00:09:41] And if it were to spot across the road, During your burnout, then you have, who knows how much land between that and your next potential line. So then you’ve created a whole nother problem. And I’ve been on fires where that’s happened and we’ve had, we’ve spent two to three more days on the other side of the road cleaning up our mess.

[00:09:58] But done so effectively and it’s just you’re always hoping that the wind doesn’t shift. And sometimes you get these like acute wind shifts that are not predicted but are the result of, whatever it might be. You might be mid slope and you might get this push of cold air from the bottom or the, of this warm air from the bottom of the valley at, sunset or whatever it might be.

[00:10:19] And you’re like, we did not expect that. And that’s what ends up pushing things over lines and becoming problems.

[00:10:25] Michael Hawk: a really good point too, because there are these like large scale weather patterns, but then when you’re in the mountains and you have cool air drainages or valleys that run perpendicular to the airflow or things like, weird things happen and that probably happens a lot more than people realize, too.

[00:10:44] Amanda Monthei: Totally. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:10:46] Michael Hawk: I do want to talk more about the dynamics of a wildfire fight, but let’s back up and maybe uh, you can tell me how you got into fire in the first place.

[00:10:55] Amanda Monthei: Yeah, I was really interested in, so I had a couple girlfriends actually who fought fire in like the, like 2011 to 2014. Some of them still do work in fire, so when I saw them doing it, I was in college when they first started. There were two of them actually, and they, I think they inspired each other.

[00:11:15] Like There was one girl that got into it and I remember being like, How did you even come up with this as an idea? Because I grew up in the Midwest and so did these women, and we went to school in the Midwest, in Michigan, in northern, at Northern Michigan University. And that’s where I learned about this.

[00:11:29] And so I remember just thinking like, how did she find this job? Because she, one of them was like in Alaska, like I remember one specific photo. It was like one of her crew members was like smoking a rolly cigarette and holding like a baby deer that he had saved from the fire. I was like, what is this?

[00:11:46] This is the weirdest, like the most bizarre thing. But like super aesthetic, right? I was just like, Nobody lives like this that I know, and nobody has done this that I know, and this is just fascinating. And so after like three years or four years of watching them fighting fire all over the country, California, Alaska, Wyoming I finally was like, I could probably actually do this.

[00:12:08] I could consider doing this. It was a mindset shift that I hadn’t really experienced before where I was , oh, I’m allowed to think that I can do these things. I’m allowed to be like, oh wait, if they can do it, I can do it. And then just not only think about it, but also act on it.

[00:12:23] And it was a, that was an informative empowering experience for me was just recognizing that I despite my circumstances, I can go do this thing. So I did, and I signed up for some courses, which is not necessary. Right now, especially, there’s like a shortage of wildland firefighters, but at the time it felt like getting some classes and getting some pseudo qualifications would help me get on a crew.

[00:12:43] Considering I had almost no manual labor experience and I had no fire background. I didn’t have my E M t, I didn’t have any medical training. I was just completely green. And so I took these classes. I got on a crew that’s next summer in Northern Idaho. It was an engine. I didn’t love the the engine style of firefighting, which is that you’re attached to the engine, but oftentimes on engines you still get to go out as a hand crew.

[00:13:09] It’s like a throw together crew they call it. And they’ll put you together with 19 or 20 other people from around the district who might not be full-time firefighters, but they have their firefighter qualifications or they used to be firefighters and now they’re doing something else.

[00:13:21] And you go out on these, throw together hand crews, which gives you a taste of what it feels like to be on a 20 person crew, which is what a hot shot crew is except on a 20 person throw together, you’re often not getting those intense tasks. You’re doing a lot more of the mop up. Unless things are really running and gunning and they need crews to do burnouts and stuff, those crews rarely get to do like the sort of more fun stuff.

[00:13:41] Only because of a lack of qualifications often and a lack of crew Cohesion is really important in safety when you have a hotshot crew or a type two crew that’s worked together all season, it’s a more cohesive unit. They know how they work, they know how they communicate. And on a hot shot crews and on type two crews that are together all season, the dynamic is different. And that means that the safety standards are a little bit different. So

[00:14:03] Worked on, threw together crew for a couple roles, and then I moved to Central Idaho for a hand crew job. And that was a 10 person hand crew, a module if you will, not a full 20 person hand crew. And then I just continued on and I did the, I was really lucky to get on with zigzag. It was it was like tough going to get on a hot shot crew, they hire really early in the season, and then you have to like, call everybody and try to like schmooze your way onto the crew. So yeah it worked out and I’m really grateful it did because that was a very, that was an awesome experience.

[00:14:33] Michael Hawk: so in terms of qualifications, like I, it sounds like there’s some hard and fast ones, especially for a hot shot crew. And then some that are a little bit softer. Like you mentioned, there’s a certain level of physical fitness required in terms of like fire behavior is there any requirement for specific knowledge there to join any of these crews?

[00:14:54] You mentioned hand crews, hotshot crews, et cetera.

[00:14:57] Amanda Monthei: Not explicitly we sit in classes and we learn like the firing boss class, we learn about how fire is gonna interact with like certain slopes, certain just certain topography in general. How to most effectively light a certain slope that’s at a certain aspects, certain topography, certain slope types, certain fuel types, those are all gonna impact how you do firing or they’re also gonna impact just like operations, where you’re gonna be where you want to be, where you don’t want to be.

[00:15:25] Fire moves pretty fast uphill, so you don’t really wanna be above a fire that’s burning below you. There are like a number of rules, your 10 and eighteens, we call them the different things that you. That are common denominators and fatality fires are, have become part of the 10 and 18, like these standard orders that you just, you don’t do certain

[00:15:45] Michael Hawk: And what does

[00:15:45] 10, and 18 refer to?

[00:15:48] Amanda Monthei: The 10 standard firefighting orders and then the 18 watch out situations.

[00:15:52] And I remember like, Doing hikes during one of my seasons on in Fire, not my hotshot season, but I remember hiking and they would make us recite the 10 and eighteens your 10 standard firefighting orders, your 18 watch outs. One of the watch outs is don’t fight fire or don’t work with a fire below you effectively.

[00:16:09] There are a number of others, keeping an eye on the weather. You know, All of them are basically just commonalities of fatality fires from the past. So they’re like lessons learned almost.

[00:16:19] Michael Hawk: So it sounds like they teach you a lot of what you need to know to be able to understand and react and be aware of the circumstances.

[00:16:27] Amanda Monthei: Yes, absolutely. And you have like your Intro to Fire behavior class, that’s like an essential qualification or an essential certificate that you get when you first start. So you have like your intro to like wildland fire fighting, and then you have your Intro to fire behavior. And then from there your classes expand from there, whether it’s into leadership classes or.

[00:16:45] Paperwork classes operations classes, FEMA classes, all of these different things. And that builds your situational awareness a bit. But what really I think improves the qualifications of the folks that are leading hot truck crews is the experience that they have.

[00:17:02] They’re Your captains, your superintendents, your squats have been working in fire for 10 years or more, sometimes eight, but nonetheless, like they’ve seen a lot of fire. These days you can count on having very busy fire seasons, like every other year, if not every year.

[00:17:15] And we’ve had a few of these like very slow years. 2019 was one, last year was fairly slow, early on every season it seems like, it has, it’s like big, it’s, it wanes and waxes and all of that. And this year has been fairly slow as well. But we still have two months of fire season left.

[00:17:31] But yeah, so you’re seeing a lot of fire is what I’m saying. Like you’re seeing, you’re on these two week assignments, you’re on seven or eight of them a summer, on a busy summer, and you’re seeing a lot of fire behavior and that’s teaching you more than any class ever possibly could. But those classes give you the language to be able to say, oh, this is doing this on this aspect, or this is doing this in this topography.

[00:17:52] And this is what we’re watching out for and this is what I can expect from this fuel type, whether that’s timber or slash or, grass or brush or shrubs, whatever it might be.

[00:18:03] Michael Hawk: That makes a lot of sense. I can only imagine because like you hear about some of these fires on the news and you hear the, location and the metrics, how many acres and how long it’s been burning and percent containment and all this stuff. But those are just numbers.

[00:18:17] And I know for me, very often when I go out in a wildland of any type, whether it’s forest or chaparral or whatever I find myself stopping and looking around and thinking, If there was a 4,000 acre fire here, which is small in recent terms, like what would that look like and how small am I compared to the immensity of 4,000 acres or 50,000 acres or something like that.

[00:18:41] So I can only imagine that all the classwork, it, it helps, but it can’t really prepare you for when you see it. And with that in mind, do you have any particularly memorable fires or moments or scary instances or anything like that from your time on these crews? I.

[00:18:59] Amanda Monthei: Yeah, many. From hot shotting I can think of a few. I was scared shitless for the first, like three months of that season. One, one of our first fires that season resulted in two of my coworkers getting hit by a widow maker. Effectively resulting in both of them having to go to the hospital, including not only going to the hospital but getting heli evaced to the hospital that we had to carry them out of this fire.

[00:19:22] With the fire still occurring, we had to carry them up this hill and get them out via helicopter and it was really freaking spooky. I remember Now I’m an E M T. At that time I was like a woofer, a wilderness first responder. But I remember my, I was working directly with the E M T on the crew at the time that it happened, and we got this radio call and the patient one of the sort of standard protocols when we’re on fires is if you have a patient then you need to say like, are they a red patient, a green patient, a yellow patient, a black patient?

[00:19:51] And these are all, these all are just triage terms. And and it came across as a red patient at first, which basically means like, this person will die if we don’t immediately get them out of here. And that’s really spooky when it’s somebody on your crew, not only spooky, it was like terrifying. And so my, the E M T that I was working directly with, like we were standing across from each other, like digging out this stump hole, trying to find how it was still smoking.

[00:20:13] And he just took off and ran. And then I ran behind him and came up as he was beginning to deliver aid. And thankfully by that point our co our coworker had regained consciousness, which was the reason that they had declared him a red patient, was that he had lost consciousness and he had not yet regained it.

[00:20:31] But that moment where I thought, I’m gonna watch one of my coworkers I die today, was like absolutely terrifying because that happens a lot. And it happens almost like way too often from trees very frequently, from trees very infrequently from burn overs.

[00:20:47] A lot of people think burn overs are more dangerous. Sure. They are very dangerous, absolutely. But they’re not as dangerous as trees. Kind of time and time again. Trees are what kill people on the line. Are these situations where it’s like a tree that you’re removing or that the crew is removing to remove fuel? Or is it, the wind is blowing an old tree down, or what’s the circumstance where

[00:21:07] Yeah. Usually it’s fire weakened.

[00:21:10] Michael Hawk: Okay.

[00:21:10] Amanda Monthei: Usually it’s fire weakened trees that have been weakened at the base and maybe they’re trying to cut it out and the top falls out. Or in this case, a helicopter had dropped water in the area where they were working and it had, without them realizing it loosened up a tree branch above them of a dead tree, like a dead snag.

[00:21:28] Green trees can usually withstand burning and like helicopter drops pretty well. But dead standing snags or trees that have been weakened by fire, which is a lot of what we’re working with those are pretty weak. And so they can fall over very easily. They can lose their tops very easily. They can lose branches very easily, and you just don’t know when that’s gonna happen.

[00:21:48] Every year we lose people to trees. And I really thought that day that we were gonna lose one of my coworkers to a tree. And then we very gratefully didn’t. But that sort of set the stage for that summer because that was May, we were in New Mexico. We had just started the season.

[00:22:03] You go to the southwest at the beginning of the season. There’s a general timeline for a hot shot season, especially, you start out the season with prescribed burning in your region. So usually for us, that was Oregon or Washington. And then you go to the Southwest for a couple weeks and then you go to Utah for a couple weeks and then you go back up to the northwest for a couple weeks and then maybe you go to California.

[00:22:24] There’s a very clear timeline for when places burn.

[00:22:27] so we were only in the southwest. We were at the very beginning of the season.

[00:22:31] Michael Hawk: And I guess that makes sense too, ’cause I’m just thinking about weather patterns and, the beginning of the year it gets very dry, very hot, quickly in the southwest. And then hopefully at some point the monsoon season kicks in and you might have some lightning strikes at first, but then it gets wet.

[00:22:44] And then about that time, as you move further northwest, it’s dry, it’s been dry for longer and yeah the fire behavior starts to creep its way up

[00:22:53] You mentioned you had a couple different, or several, anyway, different stories.

[00:22:57] So What else comes to mind as a, as particularly memorable moments?

[00:23:02] Amanda Monthei: Yeah, one in terms of like ecology and not in terms of being afraid or or anything to that effect from an ecological standpoint. I remember being in Wyoming in 2018, again, that busy season. And we were there in October and I believe it was like October 8th or ninth, we were on this like little fire that had been started by some hunters because it was hunting season and in, in October you can expect that like you’re gonna be getting snow or sleet or some sort of precipitation up high.

[00:23:33] And we were in the high country. We were like at eight or 9,000 feet in this canyon in Wyoming. And I just remember we were working on this fire and we ended up. Doing like a pretty, pretty wild little burnout in order to keep it from continue progressing further down the ridge line that we were working on.

[00:23:50] And that was like, that was exciting and fun and we succeeded, whatever. But then the next day the fire started moving in the other direction and the, there was this wind that got on it and it just picked up and moved like you would not believe, like this thing that had been smoldering, kinda like fiddle, farting around for a couple of days.

[00:24:08] Like we had done some good work on it, like the day or two prior, but we were like, okay, cool. We did our big burnout and like things are settling down and then the next day some wind got on it. And so what had been smoldering became like trees torching insane fire behavior like I have never seen before.

[00:24:25] Like just watching entire acres burn in like minutes. And watching it right in front of me and being like a quarter mile away and still feeling really intense heat. So much so that I like had to turn, I mean I should have been turned around anyway. Like people in fire would be like, why were you watching the fire?

[00:24:40] Because in that case I should have been watching what they call the green to make sure that nothing was igniting on the side of the line that you didn’t want it to be igniting on. But this thing was like such a force of nature. I couldn’t help but be looking at it ’cause it was just something that you just can’t help but watch because it was just nuking off acres of land, of sub alpine fir in minutes and it was incr, it was.

[00:25:04] Just the hottest fire I’d ever been on. Like I said, I was like pretty far away and I was feeling the heat on my face to the point where I needed to turn around and cover up my neck. So I wasn’t like feeling it burning. And and yeah, that was wild. And it settled right down with, it was like an hour where we had this crazy wind come in.

[00:25:24] We didn’t even expect a cold front or anything. It just I don’t remember, but I think it came kind of outta nowhere. And I have some video from it actually. I like was just like taking video of of the fire burning. But then it started crossing the line as I was taking video and I was like and it became super smoky and there were embers falling all around us.

[00:25:44] And I turned the video off pretty quickly, obviously, and we started chasing all these embers. But I did get This like seven second video where like you could see the wind shift and suddenly like we were engulfed in smoke and there was like literally embers flying around us and it happened so fast.

[00:26:01] Not only was the wind on it, but then the wind was swirly. The wind was like swirling around and like it was like, okay, everything’s pulling in, everything’s doing exactly what we want it to do. Like it’s burning pretty intense, but we’re like seeing it moving in towards itself.

[00:26:13] Like the smoke isn’t coming at us, that’s always a good sign. And then the smoke suddenly shifted and it was coming directly at us and we were like, that’s not what you want.

[00:26:22] Michael Hawk: that, that video, is that something I could link to in the show notes?

[00:26:26] Amanda Monthei: Nowhere online. And it’s like a chaotic, as you can imagine. I like didn’t even realize I was continuing to record and so you can tell that ’cause my phone is doing like this. But yeah, I can send that over.

[00:26:38] Michael Hawk: I, yeah, might help give a little perspective. I can only imagine too, ’cause you’re talking like you set the scene your sub alpine in Wyoming in October. You’re feeling like, okay, this is. Season is winding down. We did our part all’s good here, and then suddenly it’s like nature has another idea in mind.

[00:26:56] Amanda Monthei: You’re exactly right, like that part of the season. Sorry to interrupt you, but in that part of the season, you’re expecting we call it snap timber because not only does the weather usually snap in September where you’re like, okay, cool, we’re getting rain. But also people start to snap a little bit.

[00:27:09] Everyone’s like pretty annoyed with everybody. So usually snap temper is your standard. And then in the last two, three, the last five seasons, I would say that has not been the case. I would say like people are still actively doing the kind of firefighting that you would expect out of August in September.

[00:27:24] And so to have that intensive fire behavior in October. And not only that, but we had gotten like hailed on that week. Like I remember everybody was sleeping outside of their tents because we don’t usually send tents up unless it’s gonna be. Like raining or it’s really buggy or something. So everybody was like, eh, we’re not gonna set tense up.

[00:27:41] And then we all got hailed on one night and we kept waking up with the frosties boots. Like it was cold at night and it was like precipitating, but not quite in the ways that we needed. Like hail not super effective, but then we were getting like this insane fire behavior from two to six every day.

[00:27:58] It was wild.

[00:27:58] Michael Hawk: You’re talking a little bit about fire behavior changing and, snap timber not really being a thing in recent years. I hear this commentary a lot wildfire behavior’s changing rapidly and for lots of different reasons.

[00:28:11] And I’m curious, do you have other perspectives on that, like being around people who have been doing this for years and years in your own personal experience? Is it accurate to say that? Yeah, like fire, weather, fire behavior is just totally different than it was say a decade ago.

[00:28:26] Amanda Monthei: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I mean you it’s apt that you say a decade ago because I think a lot of people are like 30, 40 years ago. Like it was way different back then, and that is true. But you can go all only back to like 2012, 2013 and see how much things have changed even since then. Things are, yeah, things are changing really rapidly for a number of reasons.

[00:28:45] Climate change absolutely is a contributing factor. Land management policies over the last 130 years are obviously a factor. But yeah, I mean like the fires that, the veteran folks who are maybe retired now, but they are still on like Facebook talking about the fires that they fought in the seventies and eighties.

[00:29:03] Those folks were seeing like one or two of the types of fires that I saw in 2018 all summer. So they’re seeing one or two of these big fires and they’re may be amazed by a 50,000 acre fire or maybe. Super amazed by a 100,000 acre fire. The Yellowstone fires in 1988 were like an unprecedented event.

[00:29:22] And I don’t remember the acreage on that fire, but we’re getting fires like that, that are burning at that severity and at that size and at that previously unprecedented level. We’re getting those many times a summer now. And the intensity is increased not only because.

[00:29:39] We have more rapid drying of fuels. We have a propensity towards drought or towards really extreme weather patterns because of climate change. There’s a number of contributing factors there, but then also we have the really high quality suppression work that folks were doing in the sixties through the nineties and earlier than that.

[00:29:57] And later than that obviously too. But, we’re really good at suppression for a really long time. And that has resulted in fuel buildup that is almost impossible to manage beyond burning it at this point. And and people have long recognized that the only way we’re gonna manage the land at a landscape level is by burning it.

[00:30:16] But now with that fuel loading, it’s a lot more likely for those fires to burn at a severity that maybe wasn’t historically. What they wouldn’t have expected historically in those

[00:30:27] areas.

[00:30:28] Michael Hawk: so what you’re describing is you have more fuel and now you’re amplifying that with more intense weather, hotter, a little bit windier, and and then yeah it’s a recipe for much more challenging problem to dig ourselves out of.

[00:30:43] Amanda Monthei: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, because our traditional tools for this were thinning and prescribed burns. They still are, those are still our traditional tools. What we’re using, what we can use. But it’s much harder to prescribe, to use prescribed fire in places that have that intense fuel loading. And it’s pretty hard to get in there and thin all that stuff out when you’re talking.

[00:31:04] However many trees per acre, 80, 90, a hundred trees per acre super dense woods, forests. And getting in there and mechanically thinning that, or thinning that by hand is a lot of work. And then burning it without thinning, it is a recipe for just burning it really intensely and maybe losing all of your mature trees.

[00:31:21] And you don’t want that either, really. And so there’s this bind that a lot of land managers are in where they’re like, yes, we recognize the need for better management. But who wants to go into these densely vegetate these dense fuel loads and put fire in them? And also who has the resources to go in and thin all of these acres that we need to burn?

[00:31:42] I mean, We have millions and millions and millions of acres that need this management. And there’s just not a lot of resources and not a lot of money that’s going towards burning at the landscape or managing at that landscape

[00:31:55] Michael Hawk: you start to do the math on that too, and you figure like, I’ll have to see if I can find this reporting. I saw it a couple years ago during one of the really intense California seasons, and it was looking at what would it take to go manually thin California’s forests that haven’t, it basically, they reduced it to like forests that hadn’t seen fire in the last 20 years or something like that.

[00:32:15] So they were already reducing it to not recently burned, and then the number of acres and then trying to take into account the topography and the terrain and the difficulties there, and then how many people and how much time and yeah would it take. And it was just phenomenal numbers.

[00:32:29] Like it was an army of people working for years to, to be able to get there. It’s is just, it’s mind-boggling. It’s easy to say, yeah, just go thin it, but it’s mind-boggling when you actually consider the numbers.

[00:32:42] Amanda Monthei: Absolutely. And then once you finish thinning it that one year, yeah, you may might be get, be able to get some fire in there, but that area is gonna need to be managed again. If it doesn’t see fire in its traditional fire regime, so that might be 10, 15, 20, 50. A hundred years, whatever it might be. But you’re gonna need to go back in there and do that work again, because you’re gonna have more fuel grow, you’re gonna have more trees fall, you’re gonna have, all this additional fuel stacking up over those as soon as you’re done managing it, as soon as you’re done.

[00:33:10] And getting in there and thinning it, it’s gonna keep growing. So it’s like not it’s a cyclical problem that like we can put all this money towards it right now, but then in 10, 15, 20 years we’re gonna have to do it again in certain areas. And so it’s not insurmountable. That’s, it’s like maybe a little naive to say.

[00:33:30] I, I would say like one of the things we or like the forest Service land managers in general have been talking about more is managing fire for ecosystem benefit or using fire for ecosystem benefit. And that is effectively allowing some fires to burn a certain amount of acreage.

[00:33:51] Certain amounts or certain times of the year when you have precipitation coming or you maybe just had a big rainstorm. And so the fuels are significantly less dry. So when you have like access and resource availability and temperature and weather that all align and you have a natural ignition of a wildfire, I think more managers are considering like, okay, maybe this can be a way that we can gain some of that acreage.

[00:34:18] We can maybe allow this thing to have a small footprint on the landscape. We can have resources assigned to it in the event that it gets into in the areas that we don’t want it to get into. I have worked on fires like this where we were effectively tasked with protecting a few campsites a few archeological sites and a lookout.

[00:34:38] We were like in the middle of nowhere, but those were the things that we were tasked with protecting. So we were like letting this thing burn. I don’t like to use that language because we had the resources in place to stop it at any moment that we needed to. We had a helicopter assigned to the fire.

[00:34:54] We had a crew, I think we had 30 or 40 people assigned to this thousand acre fire. Pretty small in the grand scheme of things, and especially so it was in grass and like very sparse timber. So nonetheless, we lit burnouts above the campgrounds. When the fire would creep into the drainages above them, we would just light below them and like light burn out all that fuel so it didn’t have a way to get down to the campsite.

[00:35:17] And then same thing would happen on the next drainage. And it was like fairly straightforward. Didn’t take a lot of resources, didn’t get outta control at any point. We just watched it and made sure that it wasn’t going anywhere that we didn’t want it to go. So these types of fires can be our, one of the answers to increasing our ability to get acreage of fire on the ground.

[00:35:36] Because getting a 200 acre prescribed fire initiated and implemented is incredibly difficult with the amount of procedures that you have to go through. Processes, permitting air quality standards, burn plants getting the resources, making sure you have the right weather window, ensuring that weather window stays in place as you plan it and you get your resources on their way.

[00:35:58] There’s a lot of logistics that go into creating a prescribed burn, and that is, that can only be 200 acres or maybe a thousand acres,

[00:36:06] or maybe 2000 if you’re very, very lucky.

[00:36:08] Michael Hawk: For people who have not actually witnessed wildfire, wildland fire, and we always have the challenge that, as we alluded to at different points here in our discussion, all fires are different and all landscapes are different.

[00:36:22] And if you’re burning in chaparral or oak woodland or coniferous forest or whatever the case might be, things are gonna be different. So I’m just gonna throw that out as a huge caveat to to what we talk about. But there’s this concept that I hear a lot of pyro diversity, Can you tell me what is pyro diversity and like how do you, what does it look like to somebody on the ground?

[00:36:45] Amanda Monthei: . Pirate diversity is this idea where, You’re, you need a certain amount of heterogeneity on a landscape. And that heterogeneity a lot of the time is encouraged by the way that fire burns differently in certain areas of a landscape. So some slopes might not see as intensifier effects as other slopes, and that creates a mosaic pattern on the landscape, they call it.

[00:37:08] You have some areas that burned at a really high severity. You have some areas that burned almost at no severity whatsoever, maybe didn’t burn at all. Maybe that fire only burned the ground fuels. And maybe a little bit of the, of a, the tree limbs. And then in some areas you’re gonna have fires that burn off the crowns of trees.

[00:37:26] They’re gonna maybe burn trees to a crisp. And traditionally, historically that has all been pretty standard, pretty commonplace. And you wanna see that kind of pyro diversity because it encourages these different age classes of different types of trees and different tree species.

[00:37:42] You don’t wanna, you don’t want a landscape that looks like one tree species of the same exact age as far as the eye can see. And I was actually in a landscape like that last week where a fire had burned at a very high intensity across this entire watershed. Almost like we were at the headwaters of this watershed.

[00:38:02] And for as far as the eye could see, it was just a blanket of lodgepole thicket. And there’s a lot of history in that area. There was a history of logging prior to this fire. The fire had burned in 1996 and what it had left were standing snags these big, huge standing snags in a sea of thicket, a sea of lodgepole that was the same age class.

[00:38:21] So that’s not what you wanna see. It looks like a tree farm. What you wanna see are varying age classes. You wanna see some of that old growth. You wanna see maybe a little bit of that new growth. You also wanna see areas that were, impacted by high severity fire so that you get a little bit a few spaces where new trees can come in and new species maybe can come in.

[00:38:39] Yeah.

[00:38:39] Michael Hawk: makes sense. So yeah, you want to have these kind of refug