The Glory Days

Since I just got into blogging I decided that I would post a couple of pictures of the glory days. From the summer of 99 to the fall of 01 I was a wild land fire fighter. I had a lot of fun and got into some dangerous situations. The picture below is a NASA photo of the Clear Creek fire. This fire was well over 100,000 acres of heavy timber. As you can see the smoke column was visible from space!This is a photo of our approach to the fire. The smoke column was nearly blackening the sky!

As we got closer the roads were closed to the public for obvious reasons. The fire was spreading faster than anyone had anticipated and shortly after this picture they had to move the road blocks back.Here is a photo of the most dangerous job in all of fire fighting. More pilots get killed every year than all other fire fighting jobs combined! More than once I was in the drop path of one of these beasts and ended up covered in purple slurry!

This is a photo of a supply delivery gone wrong. A helicopter was delivering some supplies to us and got caught in an updraft and nearly crashed on our heads. He ended up losing the load which narrowly missed us and some how killed a pine hen.

This is a photo that I found on the Internet. It is the top side of Panther Creek Canyon. This is where fire officials said we would stop the fire. We worked for three days in this canyon preparing it to stop the fire. We cleared fuels, cut line, and removed trees. We even set up several pumps through the canyon with sprinklers to create a wet zone. The day the fire got to the canyon we were in there trying to hold the line. A cold front was moving in that day and was pushing thirty mile an hour winds. As you can see from the picture the fire blew right over our lines while we were in the canyon. We were trapped in the canyon and had to use the pumps to knock the fire down enough to get out.

Here is a photo of one of our favorite sites. Most of the time we hadn't had a shower in days and this was a great opportunity to get clean!

This is a picture of another fire that started out as a controlled burn but ended up blowing by the fire breaks and blacking over fifty thousand acres.

Oops! How did this get in here! Oh well, that guy in the grey is hot!!
Here is an old, old picture of my first deer. It is also my biggest deer to date.

Here is my best attempt to be the Croc Hunter. I know its not a big snake but hey it has small pointy teeth that could almost break my skin!