The Smokechasing job description is exactly what the title says it is, smoke chasing.
I spent the last week mopping up a 167-acre wildfire in the Chengwatana Forest. It was my first project fire since I started this seasonal job last Spring, and it was absolutely the best work experience I've had in a long time.
Early starts each day leaving our base in Cambridge at 6am and driving to the briefing location in Pine County where we listened to the incident management team go through the action plan and relaying tactics for containing the fire. Grateful they fed us breakfasts and supplied lunches for the long days in front of us.
We were on a J5 track machine so our mission, they said, was to mill through the woods, seek and destroy!
And that's what we did. We worked alongside the Suni Hotshots (all the way from New Mexico) for the first few days. They chopped down trees, dug up burning logs, tree stumps, roots and smouldering soil. We provided the cooling water when necessary.
The J5 is fricking awesome! No tree too stubborn to move, no rock too big to stop us in our tracks. We ploughed through those woods with ease, albeit it was like being on a bucking bronco!
There's a distinct difference in the scent of the smoke that we were chasing. By the end of day one, I knew that scent and how to find a hotspot. Like a sniffer dog, I'd say to my Fire Lead as we drove through the woods, "I can smell smoke", even though we were surrounded by smoky air, burnt trees, white ash and black soot.
We'd stop the J5, scan the woods, and within minutes, sometimes seconds, we would spot tiny wisps of white smoke away in the distance and make our way to the hotspot. Dragging the fire hose, multi tool or pulaski, we would steadily begin to dig up the smouldering soil, spray water and mash it all into a soggy, muddy puddle until it smoked no more. And so it continued, day after day.
Chasing smoke. Smoke chasing. Where there's smoke....
No fire. Now.
Awesome, thanks for sharing