Early Days in the Forest Service Volume 4

FIRE CREWS AND FIREFIGHTING IN 1941
By Berle E. Davis

The spring of 1941 found three of us college student buddies bemoaning that soon we would be parted for the summer and none of us had any prospects of a summer job. But we heard that the U.S. Forest Service had a recruitment booth on campus to sign up firefighter and blister rust crews. During the war the Forest Service was having troubles getting necessary manpower, thus the campus recruitment.

"Why not give it a try?" asked Arthur F. Anderson, an architectural student on the Bozeman campus MSC. (Yes, I know it is now MSU, but at that time "MSU" was a dirty word to us Bozeman students.)

"Maybe if we signed up together, we will be sent to the same camp, if we are lucky," thought Graeme Baker, a Chemistry student.

The seventy-five cents per hour plus board sounded good to me, and firefighting sounded exciting too, and a summer in the woods hit the spot after a stinky old Chemistry laboratory. I was game so we all filled out an application right then.

It wasn't until June, we heard we had all been accepted. Anderson and I, a little older and more experienced, were sent to the "Hot-Shot" firefighter camp at the old Nine Mile CCC camp but Baker was exiled to the heart of Idaho to a blister rust camp. Even today the mention of the word "Rib e" makes him use some colorful language.

About mid-June, Anderson and I reported to the Federal Building in Missoula. We were signed up and trucked to the old CCC camp up Nine Mile creek. Not the one next door to the Remount Depot; the one a couple miles further up the canyon. The upper camp was later abandoned and moved to the location closer to the Remount Station. The recruited students here were organized into five, twenty-five man crews with Hank [?] as a project foreman and Mel Morris as the camp boss. Morris was a professor at Missoula MSU in the winter. Each twenty-five-man crew was assigned to the Carl Simpson crew and Anderson to a different crew. Simpson's crew won the flip or toss so we were assigned as the crew to be broken up into two-man smokechasers crew, and trained specially for this.

After two or three weeks of rigorous training in firefighting-and survival in the woods we were called to Yellowstone Park on two very tough fires, Grizzly Lake fire and Heart Lake fire to cut our teeth on firefighting and to practice what we had learned. After a couple of weeks there we were returned to the Ninemile base to clean up a bit and to see who we were. Then sent on the wildest project of all. It was called the "Troy Slash Burning Project." It was all logged off, all in one piece and they wished to fall all cull and non-salable timber and to burn off these and the logging slash for a fresh start on that land.

We firefighters were quartered at the Troy Ranger Station and were broken up into two-man saw crews with crosscut saws. We got to pick, to some extent, our saw partner; so Anderson and I teamed up as a crew. We got a lot of experience at falling trees and dominoed them. You cut one almost to the falling point and aimed the second tree at it to knock it down and aimed a third tree at the second, etc. until about the fifth one you call clear down and, with luck, knock them all down like dominoes. This led to a lot of dangerous cutting down hang-ups, where it didn't go as planned. Anyway after about fifteen days the whole slash was on the ground. You could walk clear across the area on the downed trees, twelve feet above the ground. Boy! What a pile of fuel. It was now time to burn it. I was not on the lighting crews but their synchronization was poor as those boys on the head end of the burn were the last to get their areas lit with propane burners. They were trapped ahead of the burning sides, so they had to abandon their burners and slip out along a ridge on the backside. They made it to safety amid the exploding abandoned propane tanks. The rest of us were spread out along the road on one side of the slash area to watch for possible spot fires outside of the line. Also to be readily available for any escaped fire across the line.

In about thirty minutes, our smoke cloud gave the A-Bomb mushroom cloud serious competition for size and color, and noise too, as there was a terrific roar as it went on that hot and windless day before the fire. Tornado drafts in the fire area, actually rotated end for end trees that were fifty feet long and were lifted twenty feet off the ground in the burn.

By nightfall, most of the flash fuels were gone but we stayed a couple of days and nights to clean up the fire line and patrol and mop up the over-burn, where we didn't want it to burn, as some fifteen acres of good timber went up in spite of us. No mop-up of the main fire was attempted, as they wanted everything to burn in that area that would go. After a couple of days, it was turned over to a district crew to finish it and watch it, as some hot fires still burned hotly out in the center. It was considered a successful burn by the overhead and nobody was lost in it!

By morning we were all packed up and ready to truck back to the Nine Mile camp, but there was some holdup. The Troy District found they were missing twelve or fifteen blankets from the bunkhouse so we were all searched. None of us was wearing a blanket, nor had one in our pocket either. They finally found the blankets stashed in one of our trucks under the seat or in the toolbox. Six eastern boys confessed. They took the blankets as they were planning a cold trip home that fall on the roads or in railroad boxcars to save their summer money.

In the layover waiting to be searched, we got a hurry-up fire call. Many of the crews were planning to quit to return to early college or take some time off. These returned with the truck to the Nine Mile camp. But a crew was formed of those left. This crew flew to Missoula via the Ford Trimotor and trucked to Lost Horse Lake end of the road out of Hamilton. We hiked into Pettibone Ridge on the Moose Creek District now on the Nezperce Forest, (then a part of the old Selway Forest as I remember it, but not sure as I was not too hep to the various Forests then). It was just another fire to me, but it was in Idaho so was hoping to see Baker again.

They said it was just a twenty-five or thirty-mile hike in. To old short legs me, it seemed more like a hundred and thirty miles, but I made it with a full fire pack, in time to witness my first aerial drop of a camp from the Ford Trimotor again.

Never saw a thing of Baker. Guess the state of Idaho was bigger than I thought. There were many other people already on that fire when we arrived.

That was my last fire of that season as college called. On reunion with my buddies on the campus, we spent much time comparing stories. Anderson went back to camp from the Troy burn and missed the Idaho fire altogether. We all agreed it was an exciting life and wanted to return for another summer at least.

Anderson later went "permanent" Forest Service and is still in their midst today. Baker did not return at all but stayed with his chemistry career full time. Blister rust just did not have the recall power that firefighting did.

But for me, World War II intervened so did not make it back for six years, and then, as a smokejumper.

BLUE MOUNTAIN LOOKOUT Lolo National Forest from 1958 photo by J.E. Sanderson