Milli 0843 cs

We now have our next dispatch. To the Milli fire out of Sisters.

I wasn't able to post on the last fire because I couldn't log in. But I am in now and I will post as I can. You know signal issues. However we will be in the Sisters rodeo grounds so we should have good signal.

See you soon!

Bear Butte Fire

Our fire season has started. We received our dispatch tonight and we will be checking in in Baker City at 10am. Here is some limited information:
https://inciweb.nwcg.gov/incident/5464/

So I guess you know the Indian Pow Wow will have to wait. Our fire season has started. As always I will post updates as I can.Stay tuned

The wind down

After the burn and the mop up comes the back haul. And the aftermath. 

narrow road.

There was miles of hose spread out that needed to be picked up and hauled back to camp to be rehabbed and then put back into the fire cache.

Our job, along with a few other fire crews was to roll up the hose and haul it back to camp. So we took a number of miles worth of hose back to the supply cache at camp.

Loaded

Ready for the back haul

Truck #2 loaded and ready

As this fire and the fire season winds down there still is good things and a little history to come. A creepy experience, a bear, and a Indian Pow Wow.

Stay tuned I will try to post more in the coming days. That could  change as we wait for the 2017 fire season to begin. If it does though I will post that here.

Radioactive

As the fire slowed down we had a chance to do a bit of sight seeing. Near the fire was an abandoned Uranium mine. Below are the pictures of some of what we saw.

Storage warehouse in background

Mine

Tailings

Inside the warehouse

We teased each other that we had a twitch and a glow. But it was safe. There were other nearby mines we could see in the distance.

This is one of the cool perks about fighting fire. We do get to see a lot of neat things. We see historical things. And another cool thing we were able to do on this fire was go to an Indian pow wow. I will have a post later on it.

Interesting Sight's

Just a short post this time. Below is a few cool, interesting thing we saw on this fire while we were there.

Pirate Ship

Aggressive Tread

The sky is falling

On my next post have we gone Nuclear. The glow about us isn't just that we are happy. Stay tuned to find out.

Burn Support

One of our assignments we occasionally get is to support a burn operation. On this day this what we did. The pictures below are some of what we saw that day

Where there is smoke there is fire

Flareup 

You can see the fire bumping the road. Our job is to let it burn but keep it away from the the other side of the road.

After the burn is complete it is time to mop up and put it out.  This can be a lot of work. When there is duff the fire likes to hide. You think you knock it out and then later on patrol you see smoke and sometimes open flame. So back to work we go. It sometimes takes many days of patrol and mop up to get it all out.

Other times it is good to just let it go out by itself.

The evening cool off. Smoke laying like fog

I will have more to come in the coming days. Things are slowing down.....sort of. I should be able to post more often then I have lately. If we get a dispatch I will post it as I have in the past.

Tower and Line Time

After we were briefed we went out to the fire line. As we went out we could see what had burned and what hadn't. They saved a lot of the homes..

They took us through the fire up to the lookout. It was a nice view of the area. Plus it was cool going all the way up onto the deck. It was manned.

After a while we went on patrol. The goal was to keep the fire out of Welpinit. And I can say that would have been a real disaster. Welpinit is surrounded by a lot of timber. We caught a break as the winds died down.

That doesn't mean there wasn't trouble. We herd on the radio one of the contractors calling for help on a house he was doing structure protection. The shed next to the house was burning and he was needing help to keep it from burning the house down. Happy to say they saved the house.

On my next post our next assignment was to support a burn operation. That was pretty cool. Also something new I will include that I have never done is to include video. You will see what it is like to be on a fire.

Stay tuned.