A Day in the Life of a USFS Firefighter

For those of you who don't know, I worked for the United States Forest Service this past summer as a firefighter. The Bighorn National Forest has several fire crews, and I was on the Burgess Junction Engine Crew. That means that there were six of us who lived up on the mountain the entire summer and were ready to respond to a fire at essentially anytime. All the crews have a five day work week and they are staggered such that there are always at least two crews working. Our crew is very lucky in that we had Fridays and Saturdays off. Most of the crews were off during the normal work week.

I love the mountains and hate the heat of the plains, so living up in the USFS cabin was great for me. Also, there is no phone, internet or TV. We did have basic utilities and a full kitchen (even a microwave!). It is definitely a departure from many modern conveniences however. While I was mostly glad to be away from technology, it was hard for Ashlee and I to keep in touch. We agree that one summer was enough and that I should get jobs in the future which allow us to stay in better touch, and better yet, see each other every day!

Most of the time the forest is not on fire, and we have to do work to fill the hours. There are usually projects that the office people develop (in terms of forest management) that firefighters can work on. For instance we might go to a certain area and cut down all trees that are under five inches in diameter for thinning purposes. But at anytime we could get a call to respond to a fire or smoke report.

One such day we had gone to check on a smoke report. We drove across the forest to see if we could find something. The guy who reported it met with us and we watched the area for a while. As we never saw anything, and it was getting close to quiting time, we decided it was a false alarm and headed back to the station. Along the way we heard on the radio about a cow that was stuck in a mud bog. We decided to stop by and see if we could help the cowboy who was going to try to free the bovine. This is what we saw:

This particular meadow was essentially a sponge. This cow found her way into a nice void in the sponge. She could get her front legs up on the grass, but couldn't pull out with her front legs or push out with her back legs. We tried filling the hole with rocks to create better footing, or rather better hoofing. It was no good. We tried digging out around the hole some, but again, we still had a bogged down bovine. As she struggled the hole just got deeper and deeper:

Eventually the combination of digging out a trough toward the downhill, pulling on her with a four wheeler, and lifting her with a fallen tree, we liberated the cow from her mud path gone wrong. This is something like how we got her out, but we were also lifting her hind end with the tree:

When things were all said and done, something like seven people were there for four hours working to free the cow. Padlock (the ranch that owns the cow) was lucky to not lose that head!

While that wasn't the most intense or exciting experience I had with the Forest Service, it was the most bizarre. I hope you all aren't too discruntled knowing I was on the clock getting paid with taxpayer money!