Hotshot crews are sent to the front lines of some of the largest wildfires in the country.
“We get to be places and see things that maybe I wouldn't go see otherwise,” said Kyle Miller, captain of Wyoming’s hotshot crew.
Miller has been capturing the bravery behind the job with his camera for more than 20 years and also ways it’s becoming more challenging.
“We've had years where fires have just burned more active. They've done things that we haven't expected,” he said.
Miller’s photos are part of an exhibition on wildland firefighting opening on Saturday at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody. Wyoming Public Radio’s Olivia Weitz got a preview.
Editor's Note: This story has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Miller began by sharing a story and describing a photo from the Pine Gulch Fire in Colorado, which he said “at the time was the largest in Colorado's history.”
Kyle Miller: We'd been rolling into what we call swing shifts, where we start in the afternoon and we might be working through the night. This picture is of one of our squad leaders, Anna [Cressler], and I think her face pretty well is showing exactly how we all felt at this point in the night.
This is right before sunup, and we're all extremely tired. We've been burning all night. And at this point, you can see the embers starting to wash over the line. All we could think of is, we're so close to having this tied in here. Are we going to lose it right now?
Olivia Weitz: And so what happened? Did you lose it or were you able to contain it?
KM: We got lucky. The relative humidities happened to be high enough right there that nothing ended up taking and [we] ended up containing it and being able to be done with the shift sometime just after sunrise.
OW: And that worry that you might just have to keep going, stay up all night, that it might get away from you, and also the fear part of just being so close to these flames. How do you deal with that part?
KM: The actual fire, honestly, it's just one of those things that – and it probably always sounds funny – but there's not a fear aspect to it. You become very acclimatized to the environment. The fire aspect really isn't something that is overly worrisome most of the time. The real actual danger in fire typically [is] being struck by a tree.
It's not the fire itself. It's the burned out trees and the people that are having to fell them to make the line safe that are really actually the dangerous aspects.
Miller describes a photo he took of a sawyer at Lassen Volcanic National Park during the Dixie Fire. The Dixie Fire burned close to 1 million acres in California.
KM: He's carrying his saw hiking down the road, and he's basically hiking into the sunset and the sun streaming through the smoke and the flames. The fire is moving up through the trees, and being in Northern California, the tree height is pretty tall. He's walking next to probably 200 foot flames on some of these trees as they're coming off the tops of them. It's just one of those things that you get to see that is a unique experience. It’s hard to really put into words.
OW: We hear a lot about how fires are getting more intense, longer with climate change, and you've been working and fighting fires for more than 20 years. I'm curious what you've seen over that time period.
KM: I'm not a climate scientist by any means, so I really don't feel like I'm somebody that can really speak to its impacts. But what I have seen on the ground is, I remember when going to a 100,000 acre fire, I thought that was huge. Now that's just becoming more and more common.
I've been to one in California that was just shy of a million acres. The scale of the fires [is] definitely increasing. The challenge of containing them is increasing. There’s a lot of variables that come into play. There's just more and more people moving into that [wildland] urban interface. There's more structures that we have to work around.
We actively try and do prescribed fire. But the reality of being able to actually keep up with the fire load, and get the forest back into that healthy state, and get fires back in what's called your fire regime, where fires [are] occurring at a healthy interval – It's a huge challenge.
We're seeing more fires behaving in ways that we don't necessarily expect them to. Some of the predictions that we've made, based on past fire behavior that we've observed, it's changed. It’s not true of every fire that we go to by any means, but the likelihood that it's going to happen has been slowly increasing over the course of my career.
OW: What do you think that means for hotshot crews?
KM: It means longer summers. Fires are burning longer. They're burning hotter. The demand on the hotshot crews is becoming more and more. We're starting to see more of that firefighter burnout in the wildland community, where the demand is high enough that most people don't want to be actively engaged working 16 hours a day all summer with very few days off and extending those seasons out, adding a month here.
We're seeing that this year, where the fire season just doesn't want to turn off. Normally by the first of October, things have really mellowed out. There's some fires burning and usually it's [in] California. But as far as the rest of the country, usually the rest of the country has shut off.
If we continue on this trend of more active fires and higher demand, we're going to start to see the repercussions of that on the number of people that are applying to hotshot crews and to fire in general. We see it in our hiring numbers. The number of applicants that we get is slowly decreasing every year. And at a certain point, we just won't have the people to deal with the load that we're expected to deal with.
KM: This has been one of my favorite photos. It's part of the crew gathered around a campfire. This is a late season fire in Wyoming, and it was cold.
What keeps most of us coming back is the level of camaraderie that you have with the people that you work with. These are all the same people that I work with year in, year out, every day. We get up, we eat together, we work together, we come have dinner together, and then we all camp together for most of the season.
This is one of those more relaxing times that we get to unwind a little bit after a shift on a fire and actually just kind of enjoy ourselves. And this is really what being on a hotshot crew is about: It’s about the camaraderie and the people that you work with. You have a lot of really good people that you get to surround yourself with.
