I am A wildland firefighter

"Success is having to worry about every damn thing in the world, except money" Johnny Cash

First Off (as the title of this post suggests) I am now a certified wildland firefighter! Pretty sweet huh? I spent this past week in a windowless classroom about 8 hours a day. I took classes on Wildland fire behavior, basic firefighter training, emergency routines, dealing with hazardous chemicals and Fire line tools 101. We basically had a stream of wildland firefighters coming in to teach us how to read the weather and how the weather will effect fires, the different terms in firefighting and so much more. Each firefighter had a whole slew of interesting and scarey stories.

I had to take to written exams, one on weather and fire behavior and one on basic firefighting tactics. Then the final day of the course was a field day. We all drove out to the Tahoe BML, were split into groups of about 15 and then hiked out onto a helipad on top of a mountains. Then were given a scenario.

The Helipad was our anchor and the three teams were in charge of digging 30in fire lines around the 'fire'. The lines had to be down to mineral soil so that the fire couldn't cross it and large fuel items (branches, logs, saplings) had to be cleared three feet on either side of our line. If the hills inclination was too steep then our line would have to become a trench so that flaming debris would get caught in the trench rather than rolling across the line and starting a fire on the other side of our line.

We worked quickly especially because our Crew Leaders (the firefighters that were with us leading us) kept getting radio calls updating us on the changing and worsening conditions of the 'fire'.

We are required to wear a yellow long sleeve nomex (flame retardant) shirt, and green nomex pants along with flame retardant leather boots, flame retardant helmets, leather gloves and goggles. On our backs we are required to carry a pack. Mine was only about 25 pounds but that gets pretty heavy when your constantly hiking up and down ridiculously steep mountain sides and also swinging an ax (0r whatever line digging tool) non-stop for a couple hours. The contained extra gloves, extra nomex clothing, three water bottles, food, headlamp, fusees, firefighting emergency handbook and a 7 pound emergency shelter that I would have to deploy if I were not able to escape to safety and a fire was closing in.

So a couple hours into the drill we were told to work faster because the fire conditions were worsening; the relative humidity was down and the win

d had picked up. About 5 minutes after that order was issued we were told to ROT (reverse tool order, basically to turn around) and MOVE. We started to hike back up this mountain (I'm talking wicked steep) when the orders came to drop our backs and RUN!!!! packs went down, tools went down our emergency shelters got pulled out of our pack and we started to run. It was hot out, we had just worked about 5 hours digging trenches through the forest and we were running our to save our asses (because you need to train like you are doing it for real). I don't know how long we booked it up the embankment but it was long enough for my lungs to be burning, my nose to be running and for a lot of people to be dropping behind or dropping down. The hill was slippery, we were jumping over other peoples dropped gear and then finally we saw an area that our crew leaders yelled at us to deploy in, we grab

bed practice emergency shelters (because the real ones are one time us eonly and cast almost $200) and at a full run we ripped the shelters out of their brick sized containers shook them open and went down inside of them.

We were faced down on the ground inside a metallic burrito throat burning from running so hard and our safety glasses fogging up from how hot it was inside the shelter. It was really exciting and also scary. I started yelling to see who if anyone had their shelter near me ( I had been so focused on getting in my shelter I hadn't even looked around me when

I went down) I shouted and shouted "HELLO, HELLO WHOSE THERE" but over the sirens, wind machines and other yelling no one heard me till finally I heard Christina asking if it was me. We shouted at each other for the next few minutes and then finally they told us we could come out. We were all shaking and I was pumped.

I can't wait to start going into the field... but hopefully I am never in an emergency situation like that haha