Season opens for area wildland firefighters

Mount Taylor hot shot Clybert Peyketewa handles a chain saw Monday while squad boss and certifier Christopher Moore gives him some tips while felling a tree during training with chain saws on the slopes of Mt. Taylor as they prepare for the coming fire season. [photo by Jeff Jones / Independent]

By Helen Davis
Cibola County Bureau

GRANTS — Timing is everything, even in the U.S. Forest Service. Fire season opened Monday in Cibola County with a brush fire on the Acoma reservation, and the elite hotshot fire fighting teams’ season opened Tuesday.

Between New Mexico and Arizona, 20 hotshot crews stay on call all spring and summer, ready to pick up their kits and take off to a forest fire or other disaster, like Hurricane Katrina, at the ring of a cell phone.

The United States has hotshot crews in 11 geographic districts, covering the entire country, but the Southwest has the most. And, if you ask Chuck Hagerdon, District Ranger for the Mount Taylor Ranger District, the best.

“They’re better than stellar,” he said, “They’re the Mount Taylor Hotshots!” The ranger district is host for the interagency hotshot firefighting team.

No one becomes a hotshot without some firefighting experience or passing the screening “pack test,” where hopefuls cover a 3-mile trail carrying 45 pound packs in 45 minutes or less, said Mount Taylor Hotshot superintendent Brian Drinville. He added that only 10 percent wash out in the pack test.

Trainees and returning crew members who pass go on to the two-week session on Mount Taylor, starting each day at 7 a.m. with physical training before moving on to class work. High points in the class are fire line exercises like the sawyer certification session, where crews learn to take down trees in a safe and effective fashion, and the shelter deployment class, where crew members practice setting up a tube-like fire shelter and learn to stay in it until a fire threat passes. Other training includes ethics, aspects of first aid and safety, right-to-know information and vehicle operation.

Hagerdon said instructors make the shelter session as difficult as possible for crews, imitating high winds and trying to cause panic. In this year’s exercise, the crew had some problems getting set up in their first attempt. After a feedback and team building session, they worked as an oiled team, the instructor said.

“They get together to develop bonds, to make them a crew,” he commented. The training and discussion creates a positive self-assessment and gets the firefighters thinking “we need” instead of “I need,” Hagerdon explained.

The crew lives and works together during the fire season, Drinville said. The biggest risk to crews is getting on each other’s nerves being closed up together. That is what causes most of the hotshots who do leave to leave.

Hotshots join for different reasons, though.

Kimberly Clark, 20, has been a firefighter for three years and joined the Hotshots in her fourth. She said she started in firefighting because she came from a ranch and likes the hard outdoor work. Fire is fascinating for her, as well, and she gets to see something different every time. Clark said that she does not think about physical fear in a fire line, just the work to be done, but found the worst part of the demanding critical training to be breaking in her boots.

David Garcia, 32, is in his 13th year as a firefighter and his seventh year in the Mount Taylor Hotshots. He started firefighting because it is in his blood; Garcia said his father and his brothers are firefighters.

Garcia, half Navajo and half Pueblo, is from the Santa Domingo Pueblo south of Santa Fe. He said much of the income in the tribe is from firefighting and recruiters are active in the area, which includes the Santa Fe National Forest. Most of the firefighters signing on start on fire line construction or in Type II units, he said.

Hotshot crews are Type I units, fully self sufficient in terms of equipment, skills and supervision. Type II crews receive equipment from firefighting agencies and take direction from units they work with, Garcia explained.

People in Grants will see the Hotshots around town for a while, and then they will be gone, deployed for 14 days wherever needed in the country. The crew can come “home” for a few days then they can be off again, leaving a light crew at Smokey Circle to run the engine unit and maintain the headquarters.