FIRE FIRE FIREEEE

Location: San Isabel/ Pueblo/ Canon City, CO

So, Let me explain where I have been the past month or so. Immediately starting our second round, we spent a week back in Lake George, then reported to San Isabel Lake in Southern CO. It is probably one of the most beautiful places I have ever been to. We are located in a work center right across the street from the lake, where get this, wild irises grow. Meant to be? I think so. But alas, we have no phone service nor internet, so my lack of updates is kind of explained.

At San Isabel we have been put to major work massacaring trees right and left, and doing burn prep work along a road. This entails cutting 20-30 feet from the road and then dragging the trees, limbs, everything else you cut a chain length, or 66 feet from the main road. In long pants, long sleeves, hard hats, gloves, etc, this gets pretty hot especially in 80 degree weather. Which isn't awful, but the dragging gets tiring. Especially when my squad likes to be macho and try to drag entire trees 66 feet up hill. It's awesome.... Slightly sarcastic, but you do feel pretty awesome after you drag a huge tree that distance.

We have been working alongside a fuels crew from Canon City during our time here. They are amazing! Alfonso, the leader of their squad, helped us with our training during second round. He is hysterical, and every time he is around the energy instantly increases. He starts the morning with "HEYYY GUYS!!! DID YOU DREAM ABOUT ME???" over the loud speaker in their truck. The crew consists of 3-4 other guys, depending on the day, all around our age. They have been a blast to work with, and have taught us so much about fires and being a fuels crew. I know we will all miss them terribly after this week, when we have to say goodbye and head to Leadville for 3 weeks.

An exciting thing that has happened was that WE GOT TO GO ON OUR FIRST FIRE!!! YAAAY! It was sooo amazing. We worked all day, and then at 4:30, when we were wrapping up, the fire call goes off on our radios, and we were called to be a first response crew to a fire up in Fairplay (about 2-3 hours away from our location). So we piled into our trucks and started our long journey up there. We got to the site around 8 PM, then our trucks couldn't make it up the steep hills, so we had to park, put on all our gear, grab our packs and our tools and start the mile hike up the steep hills to get to the actual meeting place to hike into the fire. An hour later, we finally made it up there, and started our inital attack on the fire. Of course, we basically had no idea what was going on. All we knew was that it was dark, there were flames and smoke everywhere, and we were to follow the fire line searching for hot spots, trying to put out some of the smaller flames. It was 10 PM by the time we were done for the night, 11 before we made it to our bunk houses, and 1 AM before we got dinner and went to bed. We were up the next morning at 6, ready to go. The fire had mostly put itself out except for the top left flank, where we concentrated our efforts on digging line and cold trailing/ putting out hot spots.

The rest of the days were spent mostly like that. Cold trailing, putting out hot spots, and checking for smoke. We were there for around 4 days. It was such an incredible experience. It was exhausting, but Alfonso's humor and the exciting atmosphere that the fire provided, made it an incredible experience. And I am so grateful I got to participate in a complete fire, from First Response to Mop Up. And we got to see a heletack, which even the fuels crew hadn't even ever seen before.

It was a wonderful reminder of why I wanted to be on this team, and I am so grateful to have had that experience.

That is about all for now. I wish I could go into more detail about the craziness of my life, but my computer is about to die. But! I will try to update soon, and if you want to know more just give me a call! I love to talk about it :)

I miss you all, and hope you are doing well,

Kris

PS! I GOT THE TEAM LEADER POSITION!!! I WILL BE IN DENVER NEXT YEAR AS THE MEDIA TL! So, another full year of blogs ;), this time with more chances to update! Get excited...