#099 Brandon Dunham - The Anchor Point
Brandon Dunham is a former wildland firefighter, fly fisherman, outdoorsman, podcaster, entrepreneur, aloha shirt aficionado, Grassroots Wildland Firefighters non-profit advocacy group cofounder, and wildland firefighter advocate who has served as a steward to protect public lands for eleven years. During his wildland firefighting career, he has had the opportunity to serve on Interagency Hotshot Crews, Helitack modules, Engine companies, and as a Type 4 Incident Commander across the United States for both the Bureau of Land Management and the United States Forest Service. After his 11-year fire career, he decided to create and formalize his podcast, The Anchor Point Podcast – a long-form, unscripted, and wildland firefighter culture podcast that highlights every aspect of what wildland firefighters experience – the good, bad, indifferent, and ugly. Tune in as Brandon joins Bobby Marshall virtually and discuss wildland fires, wildland firefighting, hot shots, smoke jumpers, Helitack modules, fire mitigation, hunting, mountain life, and so much more. Please subscribe or like us on social media platforms for updates on shows, events, and episode drops.
www.themountainsidepodcast.com
www.grassrootswildlandfirefighters.com
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Brandon Dunham - The Anchor Point
Our guest for this episode is Brandon Dunham. He's a former Wildland Firefighter who has worked on multiple hotshot crews, helitack modules and engine companies. He is a Type 4 Incident Commander across the United States for the Bureau of Land Management and the US Forest Service. Brandon is also the Creator and Host of the Anchor Point Podcast.
We recorded this episode virtually from his studio in Reno, Nevada. It was a great conversation. We did a deep dive on wildland firefighters and what they go through. We talked about fire mitigation and so much more. If you live in an area that could be affected by wildland fire, I highly suggest you read this episode in its entirety. I enjoyed recording with Brandon. I hope that you enjoy our conversation.
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Thanks for joining me. I'm super excited to talk to you. I listen to your podcast all the time. First and foremost, how is it going? How's how was your day?
It's going well. I'm living the dreams and some people's nightmares sometimes but it's still a dream. You're still asleep. It has been going well.
Where are you at? You are in Reno or somewhere around that region.
I'm based out of Reno, Nevada. It's beautiful.
During this episode, I want to do a deep dive with you on wildland fire and your experience in it. That's primarily what your podcast is about.
It has evolved. It started as probably much as other podcasts start. You're like, "I'm going to do everything all at once." It morphed into its own thing and turned into pretty much a wildland firefighting culture podcast. It's firsthand accounts of people's stories and what they have experienced. It's heavy on mental health, which we will probably get into in the show, advocating and building better firefighters through shared experiences and sharing that with the world.
It's super important. My hat goes off to all the first responders out there. We will dive some more into that because I want to pay some respect to them because it's super important. Believe it or not, if I get the call, I'm going to this episode early. We've got a wildfire going right here. It's not very big at the moment but it started this afternoon. The Snow Creek is what they have dubbed it as. It's about 10 miles from here but my grandparents live close to it. If they call me, I'm going to go help them get out of the house if they get evacuated but they're safe.
How is the defensible space? Is it pretty good?
They don't have any trees near the house. The mitigation is good around the property and stuff. There is a lot of road access around them. They're in a subdivision that has 5-acre parcels. It's pretty good. Where that fire is at is super steep. It might be called Widow's Peak or something. It's a famous rock climbing route. It's at the top of that or the base. It's somewhere around there. I don't know exactly where it's at. It's a steep terrain to get to the base of that because we have hiked it a couple of times. I can't imagine what those guys are going through. Luckily, last I heard, Douglas County is in there with a helicopter dumping water on it. Hopefully, it's a couple of acres. They've got a good jump on it.
As long as the weather cooperates, the wind especially, which is going to be the primary driving factor. It's always wind and topography. The heat, the ambient temperature and the humidity play a role in that but the higher those two numbers are, the steeper terrain and the stronger the wind is, especially when it aligns with the terrain, that's when it's off to the races.
It's insane. Luckily, the weather's fairly calm but we are having some gusts. We will see what it does overnight. It always seems like, during that cool-down period at night, we start getting a little bit more wind because you have all the hot air and cold air mixing right there on the front range. That's where this fire started. I'm hoping some of those updrafts and downdrafts aren't fueling it some more.
Those diurnal winds go uphill during the day and then downhill with the cold air at night. It makes for some challenging firefighting experiences. That's for sure.
I can imagine. It's challenging for elk hunting too. You have to figure that out real quick. Elks are always in these deep and dark holes. I know firsthand being an elk hunter that your worst enemy is the wind.
Especially if you're doing archery and you have to get up close and personal with the animals. My dad is super into archery but for some reason, we both got skunked on tags. This is the third year in a row that I got skunked on everything that I put on for this hunting season.
Are you an archery hunter?
You need to have a certain level of respect for something that will sustain your life by taking its life.
I have no time for that. I'm a little lazy rifle hunter.
There's nothing wrong with that. It's all hard. It is not easy. I'll give you that. Do you hunt in Nevada?
Yeah.
What is the elk population there? There's an elk herd running around it. Can you even draw a tag? I'm an elk fanatic so we're diving down a rabbit hole.
Let's go there. The elk populations here migrate a lot. They go over the border into Idaho. They're typically found in Northern Nevada and Eastern Nevada. They don't get down too far South because the climate is not going to be right for them down there. We have a pretty big population of Rocky Mountain elk down here. Unfortunately, I have yet to draw one of those damn tags.
Is that a lifelong thing there to draw tags? To draw a bighorn sheep here because the population isn't that vast and it's a pretty sought-after big game animal to hunt is once in a lifetime here in Colorado. Some guys put in here for 30 years and they can't draw one.
We have desert bighorn and Nelson sheep over here. Those are both the cream of the crop once-in-a-lifetime hunts but as far as elk and mule deer, every three years, you will probably be successful in your draw. For elk over here, it's probably 5 to 7 years. You will be successful in your draw unless you win that Silver State Tag.
We're super fortunate here in the state of Colorado because even if you don't draw, there are so many open game units. It's open to out-of-staters too.
What are you doing this fall?
Come on up. I put in for a secondary draw. People haven't paid for their tags. Sometimes you can draw one on that but I struck out on my elk and drew a deer tag in 2022 but it's all right once you get in there. I would almost rather wait a few years and not have as many hunters to deal with. It's a double-edged sword.
It's hard though. You've got to put in the work for it. Also, it's the luck of the draw. We have tons of antelope over here but they still don't put out a lot of tags. In certain areas, they put more. NDOW has a pretty good survey program where they release numbers and tags accordingly. They're proficient with their big game management. They're damn good with their bird management too. I don't know if you're a chukar hunter by any chance.
I did a little bit of pheasant hunting and duck hunting back in the day but I haven't touched any of that. I don't think I've picked up a rifle to hunt in twenty-plus years. Archery is my jam.
It's an addiction. Once you get into archery, there's nothing else like it.
It's crazy. My entire last episode was solely on archery pretty much. I got inducted, which sounds very entitled, to a 3D archery range up here that's amazing. They have 40 pristine Rinehart targets. They range from moose to caribou. These are life-sized targets. Some shots are off of a 50-foot cliff that is straight down. There are a lot of terrains. You do a lot of hiking and stuff. If you do all 40 targets, it's close to almost 4 miles. You will find 1,200 feet in elevation in those 4 miles. It's a lot of up and down. It's fun.
The Anchor Point: Wildland firefighting is pretty much a silent professional career path. Not a lot of people talk about it.
It's good practice.
I enjoy that more than hunting. I always get bashed for that but I enjoy going out there and shooting those foam targets more than I do because after you do it, you pull your air out. The work doesn't even begin.
You don't have to sit there, quarter everything, drag it down that hill and hope you make it out of there before the sun sets where you're stumbling over shit at night. My buddy who owns Hotshot Brewery is super into 3D archery shooting. He's an archery diehard. He loves it.
I try to go at least twice a week and do all 40 targets. If I can get 80 targets in a week, I'll be smiling.
It's good for your fitness. He has been trying to get into me but I'm apprehensive about getting into the whole archery game because I'm one of those super ADHD hyperfocused brains. Once I get stuck on something, it's like, "We're going to take this to the extreme."
Do you have kids at the moment?
I've got two.
I've got three. That narrows your hobbies. I used to ride Harleys, standup paddle surf and go on vacations, have dirt bikes, golf and all that. The only thing I do is archery. It's that and work.
I used to do a lot of USPSA and 2 and 3-gun competitions. Once COVID hit, ammunition prices skyrocketed. You have two kids on top of that. I want to pick up fly fishing. Everybody is probably going to laugh at me because I said, "I picked up fly fishing," which is as expensive as 3-gun in USPSA.
It's so much fun though. That is one thing I haven't put down but I don't go religiously. I haven't even been there yet this season. That's how busy I've been. They're good problems to have. The kids are busy. I'm busy with the show. It's all-encompassing. Archery is always my focus in the summer because I'm trying to get ready for September. I start planning about thirteen months before the next hunting season. I have to start planning for 2023. That's my mentality.
A lot of people get lost in the fact, "You're going to go hunt, go out there, hike around for a little while and shoot this poor innocent animal." I'm like, "Let's pump the brakes and reel that back in for a second." There's a lot of work that goes into it. It also costs a lot of money, especially in getting your ramp up, the gear, the camo and ammunition and sighting your rifle. There's gas to scout. It takes a lot of effort. For hunters like you and I, that develops a very healthy relationship with being out in the wild, especially the animals that you're harvesting. There's that certain level of respect that you have to have for something that's going to sustain your life by you taking its life.
The main reason why I do it is solely for the meat. I'm cooking on the grill every day sometimes for breakfast. I'll be grilling at 6:00 in the morning. She's like, "What are you doing?" I'm like, "I'm making a steak." They're man problems.
Meanwhile, you're trying to figure out your best chorizo recipe for all the pieces of meat you don't want to cook into steaks.
I try to keep the freezer stock. That's the main purpose. The whole family enjoys it too. That's a good thing. If they weren't all into it, I don't know how much I would be there.
Going down the road of life and having a family influences your decision-making. It influences what you do for fun or what you eat.
It influences your decision-making going down the road of life as much as you have kids and a wife and all that stuff. It influences what you do for fun or what you eat.
Big time. It does. Fortunately, I've influenced my son to be into the thing. He loves to fish and shoot as well. We can go out and do that stuff together. Even my daughters will shoot too and stuff.
I can't wait until my kids are old enough to be my fishing buddies. I'll go out there and teach them how to fly fish.
You're in the weeds but it will happen sooner than you think. That's a cliche thing to say. I never realized it until I had my 3rd because I wanted the first 2 to grow up so fast so I could go out, go fishing, go do archery, take them paddle boarding and do all those things. With my third one, I was like, "Don't grow up. Stay a baby as long as you possibly can."
It has made me enjoy it a little bit more because the first time, it was like, "When are they going to be out of diapers and all that stuff?" I enjoyed the third one because she came a little bit later so my daughter was 9 and my son was 6 when she was born. I realized that this goes a lot faster. There's so much fun at 3 and 2. Four is amazing. It's all good.
Do you have any life pro tips? My son Levi is going through a little bit of a culture shock because we have a newborn in the house. He's not the man of the house anymore. If you've got any life pro tips, by all means, lay them out.
Get him to help. Tell him it's his responsibility and make him change a diaper. One thing that always worked for us was like, "You're going to watch your brother and I'm going to go mow the lawn. I'll be right here." You're checking every five minutes. You're not out there mowing the lawn or getting anything done because you're a nervous wreck.
You're paranoid like the house is going to blow or some shit.
Give him some responsibility. That will make them grow up faster too. You have to be careful how much you give them because the next thing you know, it's like, "Dad, can I borrow your car? I've got to go to a liquor store." I want to spend some time. I don't know what your time limitations are but with your vast knowledge of wildland firefighting, the time that you've spent in the backcountry fighting fires, what you do with the podcast and everything else that you're doing in the community, let me start with this.
My hat goes off to all the men and women that are out there fighting a fire that's 5 or 6 miles down the road. I'm super thankful. We have been evacuated several times. Growing up in Colorado, it's a normal thing. If you live in the mountains or the foothills, it's one of those things. It's a natural disaster. At some point, you're going to have the reality of how it might be at your backdoor.
It's not a matter of if. It's more of a matter of when.
We're seeing wildfires grow. It seems like there are more. By science, there are more of them each year. They're more destructive. More homes are moving into wilderness areas so there's more to protect. We're going to dive into all that stuff. To all the first responders out there and their families, it's a community that's overlooked sometimes and underpaid from the wildland firefighters' standpoint.
Experiencing it years ago, we had a fire right here at Elephant Butte. It was the Elephant Butte Fire. It was super close to home. We got evacuated. It was close to the podcast studio. It's the force that they threw out that with helicopters, planes and different fire agencies coming from all over the state to come in and put it out because there was so much home density right around where it started. I'm pretty sure it was lightning or something that started that one. I don't think it was a human error.
I got evacuated way back when in the Hayman Fire because I was living down in that area. That was another big one that was eye-opening. It was a firsthand experience of what those guys go through, what they do and how they put their lives on the line. I want to pay some respect to them during this episode. Thank you. If you're reading this and you're a wildland firefighter, police officer or anybody that's dealing with any of that stuff that normal people don't want to deal with, I appreciate you.
The Pyrocene: How We Created an Age of Fire, and What Happens Next
Let's start with your background. You've worked on multiple hotshot crews, helitack and helicopter firefighting. You've been on engine companies. You were a Type 4 Incident Commander all across the US for the Bureau of Land Management. You have US Forest Service. Can we dive? How did you get into this? Do you come from a lineage of firefighters? Where did you grow up? Is this something that you always wanted to do? How did you end up in those seats?
I hope you got some time because I can talk forever. I hate talking about myself but I could talk forever about the fire. How about that? I was born in San Diego. I'm an East County boy. El Cajon, La Mesa represent. We moved up here to Reno probably when I was about 5 or 6 years old. I did the whole small town because Reno was a small town back then and grew up here with the Spanish Springs High School. Going out of high school, I was one of those impressionable and young eighteen-year-old kids with a bad attitude and a nose for trouble. This is a common theme among first responders.
I get into banking. I was a teller at a bank. I started saying, "This is stupid. I don't want to do that." It was unfortunately the pre-2008 crisis. I had some buyer's remorse on that dumbass decision with getting into banking at that time. I got out of that and went into the Sheet Metal Union. My dad is a contractor. I've been building shit my entire life and framing grids, drywall and stuff like that. I got into the sheet metal game because I went to VICA in high school and did the whole sheet metal and TIG welding competition down there. It was pretty cool.
Naturally, I get back into the trades because I have a background in it. I got bored of that. The consistency with the union during that time was a boom-or-bust town around here. Things are popping off. I was sick of that. I did something a little bit more consistent and threw my name in the hat with the Carson City District Bureau of Land Management, getting into wildlife firefighting.
I had no idea what wildland firefighting was. I didn't even know it was a thing. The common person sees you at the store or something like that and asks you, "What do you do?" You're in your greens and your crew shirt trying to get a salad or whatever healthy you can find at a store. They ask you, "Do you work for Cal Fire? Are you a smokejumper?" It's the quintessential response from the general public. It's naivete. A lot of people don't know what a wildland firefighter is specifically.
We have to dig. I've wanted to have a hotshot on or somebody from that community for a long time. We have been talking for a long time. We're finally able to set this up. To find out anything about it, it's kind of a secret society a little bit even though those guys are on the front lines and stuff. There's not a whole lot of publicity on it.
You look at agencies like Cal Fire. Everybody knows who Cal Fire is. I guarantee you that someone in Maine will know who Cal Fire is, "They're the wildland firefighters." They're different. They have a different set of missions. They still are all risks but they primarily protect California public lands or state lands. That's their mission. I compare Cal Fire to a PR agency that fights fire on the side because they have excellent PR.
Their equipment is incredible like those red dozers. All the shit that they have is pristine.
There are type 3-interface engines and structure trucks too. They got the gambit. They do everything. It's the same thing with your municipal departments. They still stepped foot in the black or the wildland firefighter theater. You say you're a firefighter. You instantly think of that or you see some cheesy movie from the '70s about smoke jumping, "That's a smokejumper." It's not until recent history, unfortunately, with the tragic loss of the Granite Mountain 19 that it became public knowledge what a hotshot crew is.
That put hotshots on the map. Unfortunately, it came out of tragedy but that's what put hotshotting into the public perspective. Otherwise, wildland firefighting in general is pretty much a silent professional career path. Not a lot of people talk about it. It's a hidden problem. You see smoke in the forest, crew buggies, engines, dozers and all this stuff flying around for 2 weeks, 1 month or however long it takes to fight the fire. They disappear off to the next fire. They show up and do their work.
It's all across the country and sometimes across the world.
Often people have gone to Spain and Israel. We fall under FEMA so we have the ability to go wherever for natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina. They put COVID shots in people's arms at vaccination centers. They have responded to the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster. They had hotshot crews spanning out and combing the forest down. They search and rescue. We're jacks of all trades but not a lot of people know about the utility behind a Federal wildland firefighter. It's pretty wild.
It's insane. Honestly, where I've gotten most of my knowledge is from firsthand social media like Instagram, Twitter and those types of things where guys are being a little bit more public with their selves and their careers. I know a few local guys that do wildland firefighting and stuff. You don't see them very often. They're not home often.
Especially for those eight months out of the year during the summer.
A natural disaster is not a matter of if; it's a matter of when.
It's pretty constant.
I found out about it though because my dad's best friend, Scott, is a former smokejumper. He retired but he suggested it to me. He's like, "You're a fuck up. You're athletic. You would be great at digging holes in the desert or the forest with twenty other people. You should try this." He guided me and mentored me on that career path. I've gone out of it and did it for eleven years. I started in Carson City, moved and got my apprenticeship up in Oregon Region 6 of the Rogue Siskiyou National Forest.
I went and screwed around with Redmond Hotshots. That was super fun. I taught at the Wildland Firefighter Apprenticeship Academy down in Sacramento. I was also going through that academy. It was Academy 66. I taught at Foundation Academy 2. I came full circle back down to Nevada out East in Ely Helitack and then back to Carson City. I finished out my career there.
Can you explain to me helitack? Are you picking up water and dropping it on the fire? I know that the guys repel out of helicopters and there are all kinds of different input and output extraction-type stuff. What were you doing there? Were you a pilot?
I wish. If I was a pilot, I would still be a pilot. Let's break it down. Helitack is an ambiguous term. It's an umbrella term. In helitack, you have some major platforms. You have your light helicopters like your A-Stars and Bells. You've got your medium ships. Those are your Hueys that carry a little bit more people and water. They're a little bit limited on performance. I'm biased. I like flying in my A-Stars with a four-person crew, landing out in the desert and getting to work.
You have your Type 1 helicopters. Those are your big Sikorskys. They're big orange or crazy-looking helicopters out there that are carrying massive amounts of water up to 2,000 gallons depending on their load calcs. You also have Black Hawks. That's a Type 1 helicopter. You have your K-MAXs. It's the thing that looks like mosquitoes. They have dual rotors. They're cool looking. It's a super high-performance aircraft. That's the basic three. Out of that light and medium platform, those are the only two you could fly people on. You have helitack, which is a smaller aerially-delivered firefighter.
They pick up their guys from helibase, fly out to the fire and make insertions. 3 to 4 dudes or people jump out of the helicopter. They hook the Bambi Bucket up to the belly hook of this helicopter. The pilot flies and finds water. You establish an anchor point with your little crew. If you have to pick up more and insert more cargo, then they fly, pick up water, come by and then drop water ahead of you. You clean up the line and chase fire with that.
On the Type 2 ships, you have your repellers, short haulers and also helitack. It's the same configuration. Your short haulers are going to be primarily medical. However, they did make history here by inserting it into a fire. That's usually the extraction method. It's this short-haul method. That's pretty cool. They're probably going to try and play with that here shortly. You have your repellers as well. They repel wildfires. You have your helitack crews, which are on Type 2 medium ships.
They do the same thing as a Type 3. All of these guys and girls do all these platforms. They do cargo, water drops, medical and a lot of stuff. It's probably my favorite platform. It's so cool orbiting a fire. I'll send you some videos. I could see if I have some in my hard drive from back when I was fighting fire with either Vegas or Ely Helitack there. It was so much fun.
You aren't getting shot at but you're flying into some pretty danger. There could be a helicopter insurgence. That sort of thing is cool. I've always been fascinated with helicopters.
It's still not as crazy as the smokejumpers though. Jumping out of a perfectly good aircraft at 3,000 or 1,500 feet depending if you're jumping a square or round is wild.
There are a lot of females that do it too. Some of those guys or girls are stuffed with 100 pounds a year or more. They're jumping in with chainsaws and all kinds of stuff. They have a bunch of gear that deploys outside of them jumping as well.
What they will do is they will jump the fire. They have the giant outfits that they wear with the padding. Their actual line gear is in there. They have the big helmets and everything like that. They will jump out and exit after they find a suitable landing spot and land. What happens next is after everybody is out the door and on the ground, engaged and trying to do their thing, size up the fire and establish command, the plane will come back over in a reconfigured state and start kicking out cargo. Those are chainsaws, tools, water and all that stuff. They will kick that stuff out the door. It's para cargo missions. They get operationally engaged in the fire.
In the last few years, I don't remember as a young kid growing up wildfires being a major issue. They are more prevalent now. There are more of them. We're encroaching on some of those wilderness areas with subdivisions and structures. There are a lot more people recreating, especially since COVID. It has driven the influx. Urban areas are moving into these un-urban areas as much as possible.
The Anchor Point: There are many misconceptions about how much money wildland firefighters make with overtime, hazard pay, etc. They’re only making overtime and hazard pay on an unplanned and uncontained wildfire, and that's only six months out of the year.
People are moving into these areas. That presents a huge challenge I'm sure for firefighters but then there's the amount of public land. There are 193 million acres of public land the wildland firefighters protect from fire. I heard somewhere around the tune that there are over 50,000 wildfires annually. Is that correct?
It fluctuates. If you go to NIFC.gov, you can pull up the situation report. That's published daily. It will show you an active list down there of 10-year trends, 5-year trends, active fires in 2022, how many fires in 2022 and acreage burned. It's pretty wild. They keep good track of it. Look for the sit rep. It should pull everything up there. There are some little tools that people can use out there to see how many acres statistically have burned over the course of X amount of years. It's trending only in one direction.
There's a good book out there that spells it out Barney-style. It's not pseudoscience. It's a scientific perspective. It's called The Pyrocene by Stephen Pyne. If anybody is out there reading and wants to see why we're getting into these more frequent, intense and catastrophic wildland fires, he spells it out. You can't deny the fact that over the course of the recent history and even of my very short career of 11 years, a big fire for me was probably 80,000 to 100,000 acres. We're seeing these giga-fires and mega-fires about upwards of 1 million acres. Think about that in square mileage. That's insane.
That is so much land. Some of those fires have happened up in Northern California and even around here like what we saw in Boulder. That was just a grassland fire. That wasn't even a forest fire but look at what that did.
Look at what time of the year it was. It's the middle of winter.
It was wild. There's no coming back from that if you're in the middle of it. It's going to destruct everything in its path. It's along the lines of a tornado or something like that. As far as natural disasters go in rankings, a wildfire is probably one of the hardest ones. It's the only one that we try to combat too if you think about it that way. There are no guys out there digging a trench so a tornado goes down it. It's to have people on the front lines. How many people are in this community? Is it growing? Are they able to keep the numbers of firefighters?
I would think that this isn't a job that everybody wants to do. It sounds super cool but I'm not out there. I've got a show, a family, other things and an established career. I don't think I'm going to reinvent myself as a wildland firefighter. If it came down to it and that was the only choice or somebody needed my help, I would volunteer my service but I'm probably not going to be the best teammate.
Not necessarily. You would probably be surprised. I know plenty of 50-year-olds out there that are still trucking along and digging line. Typically, they're in command and overhead positions at that time but they're still sitting out there crushing it, hiking up and billy-goating up the sides of mountains with the young bucks. It's pretty cool.
How big is that community? We have to have some count because people have to organize where those guys are going and what's happening.
You're roughly depending on what numbers you use. If you're using municipal departments plus states, private contractors, Federal resources and all the gambit of everybody who put a foot in the black, you're probably looking upwards of 50,000 people. That number fluctuates. Unfortunately, the Feds are going to be dwindling in numbers. There are roughly 15,000 to 20,000 wildland firefighters employed by Federal agencies. Those numbers are dwindling.
There's a reason for that, unfortunately. It wasn't until the Biden administration. He signed a minimum wage first, which the organization, Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, had a great part in and some other organizations as well like NFFE or the National Federation of Federal Employees. He made a minimum wage set for $15 an hour. You cannot make less than $15 an hour.
The way Federal wages work is to supersede state minimum wage. If you're in Washington per se, the minimum wage is $16 an hour or something like that. If you work for Uncle Sam and you're an entry-level wildland firefighter, you're a GS-3 or a GS-4. You're making $13.25 to $14.25 an hour to risk your life. It wasn't until 2021 that it was implemented. It has been that way forever. The wages have not kept up.
It shows that the men and women that are out there doing it are not doing it for the money because you could go to a trade school, pick up welding or something and make 6 to 8 times as much money probably. That's a 6-month or 7-month school or whatever it is. It might be longer than that. Still, these people are pretty dedicated to helping people and helping the cause and being around like-minded people.
They're multiple generations of professional outdoorsmen and women that love to hunt, fish and camp. They're professional stewards of the land. That was the first time that Grassroots Wildland Firefighters made the advocacy and made those voices heard because we're getting these pay bumps for the next two years with the Infrastructure bill. Grassroots had a huge part in that.
As far as natural disasters go, wildfire is probably one of the hardest ones, and it's the only one we actually try to combat.
You're one of the Cofounders of that organization.
I'm one of the founding board members of the organization. We started it years ago. We have been having our boots or faces practically to the grindstone. We're keeping our nose to the grindstone and advocating for these men and women out there that are getting their asses kicked every year for nothing. We have a saying in wildland firefighting. We don't get paid a lot of money.
There are a lot of misconceptions out there about how much money we make but we get paid in sunsets. That's our inside joke. That's the cynicism or dark humor that we use to cope with it. There are a lot of misconceptions, "You make overtime, hazard pay and stuff like that." I was like, "Let's reel it back for a second because you're only making overtime and hazard pay on unplanned and uncontained wildfires."
That's only six months out of the year. A lot of this workforce is temporary or seasonal. They don't get benefits in the off-season, pay into retirement, get any special care or anything like that. They're like, "We will see you next year." They have to save all that money that they made from the wildland fire season over the winter, not starve to death, come back and do it all over again.
Something needs to be figured out. I'm glad that you are advocating for that. We would like to help give you a platform, fundraise or whatever we can do here at the show to help your efforts in that. You have an open line to me, Brandon. Call me anytime. I'm all about supporting that and those people.
There's a bill out there. It's called Tim's Act. It's HR 5631. It's the Tim Hart Wildland Firefighter Classification and Pay Parity Act. That's going to be the linchpin in taking this infrastructure pay bump. Its cap is at $20,000. If you hit $20,000 in this pay bonus or this special pay stipend, you don't get any more but it's 50% of your base pay. It doesn't go into your retirement, annuity or any of that retirement stuff. It's a pay stipend.
In the Bipartisan Infrastructure bill, we have that 50% pay raise to $20,000, whichever is less. That has an expiration date on it. It's only good for two years. That money has a finite expiration date. Tim's Act is going to be what's carrying us for actual longevity of getting more people in the woods, out fighting the fire, managing the land and all of this stuff.
It's no surprise that people are falling off of the Federal Wildland Service in droves and going to some municipal department, Cal Fire or a state agency. It's because their quality of life and their pay are so much better. I don't know if you can make ends meet on $15 an hour but there's no way, especially when a lot of these firefighters are in communities where the cost of living is so exorbitantly high.
We have had 24% inflation over the past few years. You can't even afford to live in homelessness among Federal wildland firefighters and contractors especially. A lot of these men and women are living out of their cars. There are homeless veteran wildland firefighters out there who can't afford to live in certain areas because the cost of living is so high. They make $16 an hour.
That's insane. That's not right. We have to figure out a way to mitigate that and make it better for them. In turn, it's only going to be better for everybody. It's for the greater good because not everybody is going to step up to the plate, grab a pick, a shovel or one of your special tools like the Pulaski and run in to fight wildland fire. We were talking about going into the terrain. You don't have water. You're not using respirators.
You're going out there in some pretty common clothes working around the clock or at least 16-hour shifts or something like that, which is insane if anybody has worked a 16-hour shift. You're making as much as the guy at the fast-food place. Where's the incentive in that? The incentive is in the sunsets and being around cool and outdoors people. There's some camaraderie there, I would imagine. That's why these people are doing it but it should be a win-win. They should be getting both out of that. You should be getting paid well. It's a high-risk job.
Let's talk about their health. I want to go down the mental health road with you because you're a big advocate for that. We are here at this show as well, covering all kinds of different stuff from suicide to mental, connecting with nature and how that has helped veteran communities battling with PTSD. You deal with a lot of those same things. My first question is about physical health. There have to be injuries and deaths that happen out there. These guys are cutting down trees. Everybody knows that logging is one of the most dangerous jobs in the world.
Try logging with a raging forest fire right on your ass.
Those are right along those lines. What is happening to these guys with smoke inhalation and some of those things? There are some long-term effects to breathing smoke all the time, I would imagine.
The Anchor Point: Many of these firefighters are in communities where living costs are so exorbitantly high. These men and women are living out of their cars.
There's a researcher that works for NIOSH and the CDC. She's pretty publicly well-known for her research. Her name is Dr. Kat Navarro. Speaking of Redmond alumni, she was on Redmond Hotshots as well. She's doing pretty much the Lord's work as far as researching the health impacts that these particular matters have on the human body. If you look at it from a risk mitigation factor, you have a high risk and probability of injury, exposure and duration. We're going to put that on a scale.
When you look at a structure firefighter, they have turnouts, SCBAs, PPE, protocols for decontamination and all that stuff. It's high-risk but they're mitigating it. That risk is moderate but their exposure time is very short. How many working active structure fires does an average municipal firefighter go on per year? It's some hypertoxic shit but they're well-protected. It's not a failsafe to say that PPE is going to protect you from all this stuff.
It's a much more oiled machine when it comes to the actual protocols.
There's research on it too. We know that this shit causes cancer. If you're a structure firefighter, your occurrence of cardiovascular disease, lung disease, prostate cancer, testicular cancer or ovarian cancer for women goes through the roof over X amount of years. What they're finding out because there has never been any research with this wildland firefighting side of the house is that this shit is super toxic but it's not as toxic as a house fire, a car fire or a structure fire. However, the exposure is way up there. You're constantly socked in with smoke. You're sitting in an inversion layer where the smoke settles down into a valley and camping out there in the dirt. That's another thing too. The silicates are what's fucking us up. I don't know if you've seen a dozer line.
Would the silicates be ash and some of those particles and dust?
It would be ash and sand. Dust is a huge one.
Something to consider a lot of times in a lot of these fires is some structures are burning too. You are trying to save those structures. You're as close as a structure firefighter is, although a lot of these guys maybe on some of those engine companies have respirators and stuff like that.
Maybe there is in R5 but no one is going to wear them because we're not dedicated structure firefighters. We're wildlands. That's our mission. We protect a home before it catches on fire. That's our ideal state but you still have structured loss, especially in the wildland-urban interface like your neck of the woods. All these cities are growing and ballooning out in the woods. That's where you get that wildland-urban interface.
These health risks are becoming compounded because people are moving out into the woods. These fires start typically in remote areas or humans start right next to the road typically or an escaped campfire near a community in the forest. You have all these structures burning around you, not to mention that but you have illegal dumping and cars that have been abandoned. I fought fire in places where there's naturally-occurring asbestos in the ground.
Somebody buried it there or something.
It is a naturally-occurring mineral. You have all this stuff that's compounded and getting kicked up by the twenty people that are in front of you if you're at the ass-end of the line. A dozer comes ripping by and you're going to take the path of least resistance and hike that dozer line. Once a dozer comes through and disturbs the ground, you have this poof of dirt silicate. That's a dust storm. You're wearing this shit constantly, not to mention if you're dealing with chemicals. You're filling your saw. You've got bar oil and all these day-to-day operational chemicals on you. You're wearing the same pants for two weeks.
You're not going back to the hotel room and taking a shower.
You're stuck out there in the dirt.
You are going to a tent or maybe not even a tent.
You usually throw your sleeping pad out on top of your footprint, throw your sleeping bag on top of it and crash out until you have to wake up. You do that day in and day out. You don't shower. You have laundry services but 9 times out of 10, they're going to lose your shit at a major fire camp. In a lot of these fire camps, you're in remote places. You're in a spike camp far away from the main fire camp.
If you start wearing too many hats, you start losing your expertise. You got to pick and choose what you're going to do.
The diet is poor. You're eating total dogshit like MREs or gas station food that you can find and shovel down. It's high-stress and low-rest. It's a very poor diet. You're breathing in all these chemicals. It is a compounding factor in our health. I believe Paige Katz. We have a 73% increase in cardiovascular disease and a 53% increase in cancers. I would have to pull up the facts there but I know it was astronomically high.
The thing that sucks about wildland firefighters is you don't have presumptive coverage. We're trying to push that through Congress with Grassroots and the National Federation of Federal Employees as well. I believe it passed but up until recently, you didn't have these pay benefits and mental health coverages. OWCP sucks. I don't work for Uncle Sam anymore. I'm at liberty to say whatever my opinion is. OWCP is the Office of Workers' Comp.
Let's say you get rhabdomyolysis on the fire line. You try and prove that your occupation caused this injury, which is very common. It can be potentially deadly. You have to prove this to OWCP to cover your claim. They're like an insurance company at times. They find a reason to deny you. It sucks because these people are walking away after they have dedicated their lives to this public service. They're riddled with cancer. They are alcoholics because they're so stressed. They're self-medicated. They're going through their 1st or 2nd divorce. They might have cancer. They are indebted up to their eyeballs with medical bills. It sucks.
Something has to be done about that for sure.
This bill has lots of things about all the benefits that you are going to get like benefits having a few weeks off to do mental health and everything. It sounds like you have some good things coming your way benefit-wise. People are recognizing that.
Can you highlight some of those things? Let's go ahead and bring it up so people know what it's doing.
It says, "Provide one week of mental health leave for wildfire firefighters." It's providing housing stipends and tuition. We have benefits for temporary or seasonal employment for at least ten years of service. It's the same about the pay raise. It's at least $20 an hour. It's providing health care and mental health services and all types of great stuff. Hopefully, that will be happening soon.
That's incredible. That's what needs to happen, hands down. I have mad respect for these people. Everyone that I've talked to that's in that line of work are cool motherfuckers. They're people I want to hang out with for the most part. I'm sure that there are a few loose canons out there. There isn't everything. They put their life on the line and go into some of these situations. A lot of times, these guys are playing it safe but also they're first responders. They're running into a wildland firefighter. I'm not knocking regular firefighters by any means. I have mad respect for those guys too but they should have some of the same benefits and luxuries as those guys have.
They're both professionals. However, they are two wildly different subjects. A lot of times, you will talk to a municipal firefighter and structure firefighter. They will say that a lot of the time, they wouldn't be caught dead running into a forest fire. However, if you talk to the wildland side of that, they would be caught dead running into a structure fire. It's funny. They're two different theaters of warfare. They are very specific. The wildland firefighters know how to do it best. They have all of this training. They have a very hard-earned pedigree of what to do and not to do in the wildland realm.
It's the same thing with a structure. They've got the same thing going on for them. They're two separate different things. I don't think you should necessarily cross those. This should be separate. Let the professionals focus on what they do. Do we need structure-side assistance? We do. We need the numbers. It doesn't work the other way. What I'm getting at is if you start wearing too many hats, you start losing your expertise. It could become dangerous.
You're going to be proficient at one trade the more you practice one thing. That's why I'm an archery hunter and not a bird hunter. We were talking about it before. You've got to pick and choose what you're going to do. The more time that you spend training in those specific applications, it's only going to make you more professional. That's what pro athletes do. Pro football players don't go and practice baseball.
A gymnast is not going to be dunking two people.
It's not what they do. Maybe it's for fun unless you're Barry Bonds or something but that was an '80s publicity stunt. It's not that he wasn't an amazing athlete or anything like that but I get where you're coming with that. Diving back into wildland firefighting assets, there's so much different training for certain things and applications that we went over. In the beginning, you've worked in a bunch of those different applications.
Can we run through those quickly so people can understand how many different things? You have full-on catering companies out there at the base camps. You mentioned laundry earlier. There's a whole little city and infrastructure tent-city that gets set up, not a homeless tent city. I'm talking about firefighters camping out and the infrastructure to get guys to where they need to go to fight the fire, whether it's air support or engines. Can we run through all the people that are involved and some of the different roles? Is that too long of a list?
The Anchor Point: Wildland firefighters should have the same benefits and luxuries as regular firefighters because they are both professionals.
I could probably break it down simply. Catch me if I'm rambling. You're managing chaos. Whenever you have to manage chaos, there's a lot of shit that goes into it. We adopt a lot of our SOPs from the military. If you were to centralize it around a fire camp, let's say you've got a big gnarly fire going and you need a lot of resources. You need the infrastructure to support those resources. Back at camp, you will have your sleeping area and a supply tent or a supply area where people can get refurbished with gear, chains, fuel and MREs. You will have a food unit because you have to feed these folks.
They're going through 6,000 calories a day out there on the line. We have a catering service. That's typically a third-party contractor. We usually try and hire locals. That's usually what it is. It's not a specific caterer is tied to a fire management team. It's whatever local resource is available and has the capacity to feed all these folks. We have a communications trailer out there. It's a trailer with a shit ton of spare radios, batteries, programming chords and all that stuff to get any broken radio fixed, spare repeater set up or any of that stuff because of communication.
That's key in this. It will save your life or kill you. It's one of the other.
There's one on logistics and communication. A strategy has to be made up usually on the fly. You have your communications. They handle all the comms stuff. You have your med unit as well in case somebody gets hurt or you need an ouchie boo-boo kit or some Motrin. If you need to go suck it up or talk to somebody you have that. Blisters are a thing. They oftentimes put down firefighters. I've seen people's entire feet peeled off. They're gnarly blisters.
You have your med unit. They patch people up and get them definitive care. You have your command as well. That's going to be your plans, logistics coordinator, comms unit leader, Incident Commander, deputy and all the people that are making the top-brass decisions, strategizing on how to attack this fire and also coordinating all this chaos that's going around in the camp. You need a lot of people.
There's a meteorologist that's typically on one of these two at the same time or multiple sometimes.
Sometimes there are multiple. Even sometimes these camps are broken up into what are called branches. You will have multiple huge fire camps spread out over a wide area managing one fire or a complex of fires at once. They all have to coordinate with each other. It's pretty insane. That meteorologist is called an IMET. You have a Fire Behavior Analysis team or FBAN.
They will tie in with weather, the topography and what the fuel loading is there. They will read off your ERC or your Energy Release Component. That's the potential of how much energy is going to be released from a specific area. They will tie that into the weather, the winds and the terrain. They will tell you what the fire is going to do for that operational shift probably 2 or 3 days out.
There are a lot of moving parts. We're not even getting to the actual guys going out on the line.
You've got your admin side of the house. It's the people in finance, the people that are ordering more resources and those kinds of folks. That's the central structure around a major wildfire. I'm probably forgetting a couple of things but that's the premise. When you have resources coming in, you have dozers and multiple types of engines. You have structure protection groups, hotshots and helicopters because they're going to be doing the logistics stuff.
You will have a helibase out there. They will be coordinating with the debt coordinator, logistics and all that stuff. They will get orders from the field for people at a spike camp or the people that are out in the furthest points of the fire. They're camping out there for however long it takes and getting food, supplies and stuff like that flown into them with sling load. For those who don't know what that is, it's a cargo net attached to a 100-yard or 100-foot cable to a belly hook on a helicopter.
I've got to ask this question too. You keep bringing up being in the block. Does that mean being in the burn line?
Yes.
That's where you want to be because the fire typically won't come back there.
There's nothing to burn if it's already burned. Always keep your feet in the black. That's always a good safety measure. We've got the people at a spike camp. That's typically your hotshots, helitackers and sometimes some engine crews. The list goes on. If it was jumped by smokejumpers, they will establish initial command and then they will pass that off until the next highest level of management structure. They will probably plug into a division where they're in charge of a division of a fire.
There's nothing to burn if it's already burned. Keeping your feet in the black is always a good safety measure.
I wanted to showcase how much goes into it, how many people are involved and how many moving parts. A lot of it is prediction and some hope.
There's even a national coordinating group that dictates where resources go and what fires are priority depending on what's threatened and the values at risk, unfortunately, if there's a fatality. There are a lot of moving parts. It's crazy.
I'm curious. Do you happen to know these numbers? How many hotshots or firefighters, in general, lose their lives to wildfire on average a year? I'm sure it's increasing with the increase in fires because some of these guys are gone 200 days of the year or more on fire lines and stuff.
It's hard to put a number to how many wildland firefighters perish in the line of duty every year. Every year, there is an official statistic and number put out. There are bigger years like 1994 with South Canyon. A lot of firefighters died in that fire, unfortunately. There was 2013 with Granite Mountain. In one incident or fire, nineteen people lost their lives in the line of duty but we don't see is what happens in the off-season. That was stemming back to the mental health thing. We have a very stressful, underpaid, chaotic and repetitive trauma-style career.
All these little traumas add up into what's called the complex PTSI. There's a point of injury. There's trauma based-PTSD. It's called PTSI now or Post-Traumatic Stress Injury. It's not a disorder. You can fix it. There's a single traumatic event PTSI and then there's complex. A lot of the firefighters that are out there these days are shouldering a lot of burdens. I lost one of my friends. It's hard. There are a lot of people that pass away that are not in the line of duty. Those are the numbers that I'm curious to see because there's no record of that.
That seems to be a trend, whether it's in the military or not. Whether it's through suicide, previous injuries or all that stuff, you can't put a number or a face to it. Are there some foundations out there? You also have to think that behind each one of these guys, there's typically a family.
It's a struggling one typically.
They're not making a lot of money. Is there any support for them? Are they high and dry at that point?
There are a couple of organizations out there that come to mind. You've got a lot of support. Primarily, what the Wildland Firefighter Foundation does is support the families of fallen wildland firefighters out there. It doesn't matter if they're Fed, state, municipal or private contractors. They even do international land. They're an international organization. That's what they do.
If you ever get a chance to go through Boise, Idaho, it's over by the airport. Go to the Wildland Firefighter Foundation and see all the pictures that are lining the inside of that building. You will be blown away. They're the primary go-to tragedy response group out there. There's nobody else in the game. As far as the mental health component, they do assist with the mental health component as well.
It's not necessarily their specialty but they do a shit ton of work with referrals and get people to culturally competent clinicians. They get people into alcohol and drug cessation programs. They do a lot of stuff. A lot of good comes out of that organization. They're pretty much the only game in town with wildland firefighter outreach programs and support programs.
That's not a nonprofit and volunteer-based organization. There's nothing that the Federal government is doing or the state government, Forest Service or anything like that. There's no support. That's disheartening.
The state and the municipal folks have a lot more support than the Feds and possibly the private contractor world. It's like with any crew. There are a lot of private contractors out there. Some are better than others. They provide a lot of support. Some of them are a free-for-all capitalistic setup. They don't support their wildland firefighters. Some of them don't. It's unfortunate and it sucks but that's the way big business goes.
I'm discouraged at the moment. I didn't mean to make this a jury show but I'm also glad that we're talking about this stuff.
The Anchor Point: When you have a big, gnarly fire going, you need a lot of resources.
It's the elephant in the room. All this shit needs to be talked about.
I would be glad to be a platform for any of you anytime with our audience here. If somebody is reading this and they're encouraged to try to do something or help, where would you suggest sending them? If it's a donation and maybe they want to volunteer some time, do you have some organizations that you have in mind that you would send them to? What you're doing with Grassroots is amazing from the legislative slide because that in turn is helping with a lot of this but there are some other foundations out there that you work closely with your podcast.
Where can people go to help? The problem with a lot of the veteran stuff that I've helped support is I have to vet them and see where the money is going. That's a huge thing. Before you shell your money out to some nonprofit, you can go and publicly check the books and see where the money is going. That's the point of a nonprofit. That's important too, whether we're giving you suggestions or not. Check it out, see what it's all about and figure out where that money is going before you shell it out.
There are plenty of resources out there to vet who your nonprofit of choice is. There's GuideStar and another one. GuideStar does the platinum rating. There's another nonprofit guidebook out there that gives ratings. GuideStar is always a good one. Any nonprofit that has taken in over $50,000 in donations a year has to publicly post their 990s. That's another thing too.
When you start seeing administrative fee after administrative fee, that's a red flag right there. I don't care if you're supporting Bob Barker neutering pets across the country. Every place is going to have some administrative fees.
This shit is not free. It takes money to pay people to do their jobs.
The writing is on the wall. You have common sense. I'm sure people can figure it out. From the wildland firefighters' standpoint or these men and women, where is the money going the furthest? How can they help support? Maybe people don't have money. Everybody is hurting with the way that the economy is going and stuff. Are there certain things that you can do if you're in a community and there are wildland firefighters out in your community? Can you bring them a plate of cookies?
Let's start with the nonprofit side of the house. I've got four in mind. I work closely with all four of these nonprofits. They're legit. You've got the Wildland Firefighter Foundation. They're going to be supporting your injured and fallen wildland firefighters and their families internationally. They're great people.
I've heard of them before. They do whatever it takes. I don't think that they take Federal money specifically. I remember this. They can do whatever they want. It's strictly on donations. If somebody's kid needs surgery and they were relying on the dad's money, they can turn around and pay for that or whatever it is. It's all about helping the families.
Let's put shit into perspective here. There's that Tim Hart Wildland Firefighter Classification and Pay Parity Act. The widow of Tim Hart, Michelle Hart, who is a part of Grassroots, has done amazing work for the legislative side. She was a lobbyist professionally in her actual day job. Her husband, Tim Hart, was a smokejumper.
When he passed away, the Wildland Firefighter Foundation personally flew down there and made sure shit was dialed in. They helped her with all of the paperwork and even paid for flights. They do so much. That's just one story. It's a very large high-profile story. They do that for thousands of people. They're an incredible organization.
Another nonprofit is Grassroots Wildland Firefighters. They're an advocacy group and a nonprofit technically. However, we're in the process of getting our waiting period for the IRS and our official 501(c)(3) status through the IRS. They're a legit organization. We can take donations but we're limited to what we can do. All that money is going back into building the organization, flying people to DC and helping with advocacy on Capitol Hill.
It's a legit organization. It is truly a grassroots measure. Hopefully, this damn 501(c)(3) status will be official through the IRS here soon. If you want to go for the advocacy route, by all means, hit up Grassroots, volunteer, donate and help them out. It's the same thing with Wildland Firefighter Foundation. For mental health, I'm going to throw out Next Rung.
They primarily specialize in the municipal instructor side of things but they are dabbling in the wildland firefighter realm. They're awesome. They do referral services. Sometimes they pay for all that stuff like mental health services, getting culturally competent clinicians, alcohol and drug cessation and suicide awareness. It's a great organization. Charlie, over there, is a solid dude. He's awesome.
No home is worth losing your life over. Homes have insurance. Your life is irreplaceable.
Last but not least is Sons of the Flag. They are a burn organization. They're great. One of my buddies got burned in a hot spring trying to rescue his dogs. Unfortunately, his dogs passed away but he was burned quite severely over 75% of his body. That dude is a stud. He risked his life to go in there and save the two dogs that he loved. Unfortunately, it didn't work out. He's severely injured. Sons of the Flag showed up at the hospital that he was at and supported him. They're great people.
That's good to hear that there are some organizations out there at least that are helping with picking up the slack on some of these things.
For the personal side if you want to interact directly with firefighters and if there's a major wildland fire in your town, we don't need socks, underwear, water, Gatorade or any of that stuff. That's all taken care of. We've got that stuff. The biggest thing is to say thank you. We don't need meals or cookies. It's a very kind gesture to buy the wildland firefighter who's standing next to you at the coffee shop a coffee but ask them how they are, say hi, introduce yourself and say thank you. That's all you have to do.
Sometimes don't be so critical. I've seen it firsthand in these communities. It's a stressful situation if you're a resident of the area. The news helicopters are there before anybody. It looks like there's not a lot going on because it's on the fricking side of a mountain. People automatically jump to the conclusion that it's not a fast enough response time and that sort of stuff. It's not being as critical on that end of things too. You are doing whatever you can to mitigate that fire as fast as you can.
Things take time. This is an organizational structure. It's a paramilitary organization but there are also rules of engagement. We can't like willy-nilly, go out and start freelancing. That's how people get hurt or killed. For the people that are out there armchair quarterbacking it from their couch or the comfort and safety of their homes, it's real easy to do that from the comfort and safety of your home. You're no different than a keyboard warrior. You want to sit there and talk shit about a job that, 1) You don't understand and, 2) You probably even couldn't physically perform. You should be picking your battles somewhere else. I'll stand by that every day of my life.
I love that. I will too. I'm right behind you. Another way that people can help too is by being conscious. If you're in a wildland fire zone, area or a potential place where it can happen, you can be in suburbia in Boulder living in a grassland. There are certain things that you can do. You're going to be putting firefighters at risk if they're trying to save your house because you have stupidly not mitigated anything.
You haven't cleaned the pine needles off your roof, cut trees that are overgrown on your property or mowed your grass. There are a lot of things. With this influx of inner city people moving into the mountains, they're starting to do things like put up fences everywhere. To me, that's a burn line straight to your house, especially if it's old or got some stain on it. That wood is typically dry. Colorado is pretty dry. I don't know about that. I'm not an expert in any of this.
It's usually the stuff that's stacked up against the side of the fence. If there's a bunch of sagebrushes, juniper, pine needles or duff stacked up against it, that's what's going to ignite it because you need a finer fuel to ignite bigger fuel and so on. It's an escalation. Clear that shit out.
That helps you be able to get in and move around in some of these mountain communities. Colorado Parks and Wildlife is working extensively with realtors here to adjust people that are moving from the inner city of Chicago or New York like, "You don't have to put up a privacy fence around your entire property here because you're on 2 acres or 1.5 acres because those are migration patterns for animals. If we do get into a wildland fire-type situation, trucks might need to drive through there. They're going to get through your fence."
We will get through it. I guarantee you that.
It's another obstruction or thing. It's more fuel. I don't mean to rely on fences but what I'm getting at here is as far as fire mitigation goes, what are some of the most common things that you run into that are huge hurdles where structures meet wilderness or even in the wilderness? People sometimes do some stupid shit out there too.
I'm going to take back what I said earlier about saying thank you to a firefighter. If you want to thank a wildland firefighter, let's take some proactive measures to be accountable for your property. That would be nice. That's a super helpful thing. If we interact with you, where's your gas shut-off? Where is your septic tank? Is this one way in or one way out? Are there any special hazards? Do you have 16,000 rounds of 5.56 in the shed up there? Do you have reloading equipment? Do you have this, that and the other? What are our hazards?
Tell us that stuff if we make interaction face-to-face with you. That's a big one. Another thing is being proactive with your defensible space. Understand what it means to be a participant in a Firewise community because that's going to be a huge thing. Clear out your pine needles and stuff. Use fire-resistant ornamental plants around your structure. Clear out your gutters of pine needles. Clear out the eaves of pine needles.
Screen your roof fence with a fireproof steel mesh. Do simple things. Clear out all the crap underneath your deck. Clear off the wood that you're using your fireplace from your deck. Clear anything that could potentially catch an ember because it only takes one. By the time your house is engulfed and we see smoke or let alone fire coming out of your house, we are not prepared and not equipped to fight a structure fire. We're there for a wildland fire.
The Anchor Point: If you want to interact directly with firefighters and if there's a major wildland fire in your town, the biggest thing is to say, “Thank you.”
Once it's 1/4 involved or probably 1/8 involved, we can't do shit. We don't have enough water and resources. We don't have the PPE. We're putting ourselves at much more hazard. Another simple thing is when the emergency broadcast system comes over the radio and tells you to evacuate, take it seriously. Get the fuck out. No home is worth losing your life over. Homes have insurance. Do you know what's irreplaceable? It's your life.
We have these great fireboxes at home too. You can lock your stuff up in a fire safe. It's not guaranteed but there's important shit in there like some family heirloom and a few photos. Some photos can’t be recreated. They can in the digital age. You can take a picture with your iPhone but it's certain stuff like that like birth certificates, those documents that are harder to replace and Social Security cards. All of that is in these fire saves. They're fairly inexpensive. It's also easy to grab. It's like a big briefcase. Pay attention to this wildfire that's going on.
I said it right before the show, "If I have to go bail my grandparents out, I'm going to jump out of here right away because they're old." I haven't heard anything yet and checked the status of this thing but I would imagine I would be getting all kinds of phone calls. I'm sure that they're okay. Preemptively, if there's a fire in your area or close to it, it's good to have some of those things packed up and have an actual plan. A lot of times, what happens in these fires as well like with Paradise California is a bunch of those people got pinned down. There's only one way in and out.
That is a dangerous place for everybody.
Have an exit plan. Maybe it's side by side or something else. Leave your shit behind.
Maybe it's in the most defensible structure in your town. Look at the Dixie Fire in 2021 with Greenville. Greenville got slicked off the map. There was nothing you could have done to stop this. You can throw in all the aviation resources at it, hotshot crews and retardant drops and do all of that but it's not going to stop. I'm sorry. Get out. Have a plan.
This is something that I've always done when we got evacuated in 2021. I have lawn mowers, a fricking snowblower, a couple of gas cans and propane bottles for the camper. What I did is I took it and put it all at the end of my driveway or the furthest away from homes and trees. If they were to combust, they're not too close to the road in case there was a truck driving by or something. What do you want people to do with that shit if you leave that in your house or garage? Luckily, my garage is detached but there's still a good chance that all that flammable shit could be a real issue, especially for you.
It could be a real issue. If we're doing structure protection on your property, it's not like we're going to be rummaging through your shit. It's not our job. We don't care what you do or if you have 10-foot-tall marijuana plants in your backyard. We don't give a shit. That's your livelihood. We're going to respect and defend it as long as it is defendable. We do structured triage. If they're indefensible, you can prep and go. You can't stay there though. There's a standalone defensible where this house has a 99% chance of survival.
As for the hazmat shit that's in your house, put it off to the side. Propane bottles have vents. They don't explode like JDAM bombs. It's not Hollywood. It doesn't work like that. What gas cans will do is they will off gas and shoot out a little bit. They don't boil or melt. They will have a river of fire going down wherever the liquid is going. That stuff doesn't concern us. If we see a hazard, we're going to move it. The biggest hazards that we encounter are going to be animals primarily.
If you have the ability to get your horses, your dogs or all that shit out, by all means, do that. That's part of your livelihood. Get them out along with your irreplaceable personal objects. The rest of the shit has insurance. Get the fuck out. We can't replace your life. As far as the hazmat stuff, you want to put it at the end of your driveway as long as it's not impeding access to your home. That's great as long as it's not going to catch fire and create more problems.
I wasn't sure if that was something you should leave put or if you should try to get it all contained into one thing. That's something that everybody needs to consider a little bit too.
Electrical hazards are going to be another one. Heavy vehicles like dozers or engines collapsing a septic tank are a big one.
A lot of those are plastic.
They're usually concrete. They're pretty discernible. You could see some telltale signs like a leach field or some growth where you wouldn't think it would be growing. It's fertile poo water feeding all these weeds and shit. You also have septic service accesses as well like the plastic vents sticking up. Usually, we can spot those but sometimes we can't.
Fire is a natural impact. It's a very natural part of our environment. The human species would not have evolved unless it was alongside the fire.
There are electrical hazards. If we have any low-lying electrical lines, typically 99% of the time, the power will be off to your structure, which poses another problem for us. If you're on a well or you have your sprinklers running, that's all fine and dandy but that's reliant on electricity. Your well is not going to pump unless you have the power to go into it. It's stuff like that. If you have a kiddie pool, an above-ground or in-ground pool, leave that fucker full. We're going to use that water.
Our house is specifically on a well. If the power goes out, we have a generator but it's still a pain in the ass because there's a whole pressure tank. You might only have pressure for ten minutes. As soon as that pressure tank is out, there's no water pressure. You can't do shit without water.
That's pretty much the basics of it. I'm sorry if you have a rotten deck that hasn't been sanded down and refinished in ages. If it's got splinters and shit coming up, that's prime ember-catching material. I have this thing called a chainsaw. We're going to cut your deck off of your house. That's to save the rest of the structure because the rest of the structure might be asphalt shingles.
There's another thing too. If a homeowner out there has wood shingles, for God's sake, get rid of those damn things and put either asphalt shingles or a steel roof on there because those things are poisonous. Clear the brush away. Be proactive about what you're doing with your defensible space. That's how you thank a firefighter.
Let's also dive into the legislative side, stuff like that and some forest management. That's another big reason why we're having some of these catastrophic record-setting fires. It's a culmination of a lot of different things. One is the environment. It's getting warmer. We're in a drought. You have an insect problem. There are invasive species that are killing trees. We saw that happen up here in Grand Lake. It's a beautiful and incredible natural lake that is the headwater of the Colorado River. The entire mountainside was dead. It burned years ago. It's fuel for the fire.
Locally, here where I'm at, because of the population, we have some full-time wildland guys. When they're not fighting a fire, they're cutting down trees, cleaning up undergrowth and all that stuff. You either see them running around with their truck going to fight a fire or typically there's a woodchipper tied to the back of it, which is pretty cool. They're taking some of those steps. What are your thoughts on that and some better ways to manage that or do it from a personal standpoint?
Let's take it back to that conversation about The Pyrocene by Stephen Pyne. He spells it out in that as well as far as trending fire environments. We're getting more frequent, bigger, hotter, drier and all that stuff. This is a very politicized subject but if you look at the data, fire behavior is only trending in one direction. That's fucking up. There is a multitude of reasons for that.
For those folks that are out there reading that don't believe in climate change, I respect your view but from a firsthand account, it's bullshit. Love to hate me. Hate to love me. I don't care. It's my opinion. I'm entitled to it. You're entitled to yours. If you don't believe in climate change, that's fine. Let's take that hot-button topic out of the equation and start on the neutral ground here sans the climate change dilemma.
We have had a history of the 10:00 AM policy with the Forest Service and most land management agencies. That has been around for a long time right far before you and I were even born and probably even put together. The whole premise behind that was the Forest Service created a policy where if they initially attack an emerging wildfire, the object of the game back then was to put this fire out by 10:00 AM the next day. Fire is a very natural part of our environment. The human species would not have evolved unless it was alongside the fire. A lot of ecosystems are fire-dependent. A lot of species out there have become fire-dependent as well if you look at the hunting realm.
You fight fire with fire. Sometimes it's prescribed burns and stuff to get rid of some of these fuels. Sometimes it's lighting a back line. Is that what you call it?
It's a burn operation. That's what it is. That's the thing though. We have set ourselves up for failure as far as removing that natural component of naturally caused good fire from the environment. If you look at it from a hunting perspective, where is one of the best places to hunt? It's on the edge of a burn scar. You've got all this new growth.
There's a bunch of fresh vegetation in there and nutrients. They don't have to dig to get to it. Typically, on that line, there are a bunch of deadfalls.
Shelter and food are right next doors to each other. Probably water is not too far away. If you think of it that way, that's a good fire. When you see these decimated landscapes where the fire has raged so intensely that it sterilizes the soil and takes away and burns away all those nutrients in the soil, it kills the mycelium layer, which goes 6 or 7 feet deep in some areas.
I didn't even think about that. That's all great.
It's a catastrophic event. Usually, if you were to go to a healthy and planned or prescribed burn where it was properly managed, you have new growth the next year. If you were to drive through the Hog Fire over in Susanville or one of my favorite fishing places on Hat Creek, it's a nuked-out death zone. It has been years.
That's what the Hayman Fire looks like here. That area looks like a moonscape. There's no growth in there.
It's done. It has burned so intensely that it's sterilized land. You and I will not see substantial regrowth in those areas even with reforestation methods like BAER teams or Burned Area Emergency Response teams.
We're talking about thousands of years.
It's a generational thing or catastrophe because you and I will never see or be able to use those public lands like we once did before it burned. That's a tragedy. I love our public lands. I use them all the time. You and I own those public lands. We're all public land owners. You have the natural fire being removed from the ecosystems when it could be a beneficial thing.
Furthermore, on the land management side of things, you're talking about deadfall, beetle kill and all this stuff. What does a disease typically follow? It's population density. You have conks, shallow-root fungi that are fucking up these trees, stump beetles and all these pine bark beetles that are typically bad in your area. It's because of population density. You have overstock or overabundance of all of this stuff. That population density gets driven up.
We're using less lumber. There's not even an industry to go and get some of that stuff because beetle kill is beautiful in some of the log homes with the blues, grays and all these colors you get out of it. It looks like a tie-dyed log almost or something.
It's natural. It's not even stained. You don't even have to finish that. Some of it is beautiful but these pine beetles and bark beetles are proliferating because of increased temperatures. I was going to not bring the climate change thing into this but the warmer temperatures typically drive up the population and breeding cycle of these animals and bugs that are killing our forests.
You have the population density to where they can proliferate and spread easily. It's no big surprise that all these trees are dying off due to beetle kill. There's another problem. What happens to these dead trees? They fall. One wind event comes through, especially in the front country of Colorado. You get some gnarly ass winds up there.
It's insane. There are some wildlife areas that I go back to yearly. They're only open a few months out of the year so the elk can calve there. Every time you go in, there are new trees. Some of those storms that go through there are insane. They're 80-miles-an-hour gusts. You will see a tree that you couldn't wrap your arms around but it snaps in half.
They're usually mid-bole halfway up the tree.
There's nothing. They're pulled out from the roots. Can you imagine the force?
It takes a lot of force but they're already weakened. All these little tendrils coming off of their stumps are dried back. They're dead and disconnected from the primary roots.
You've got pickup sticks kindling.
The indigenous people were excellent land managers. For thousands and thousands of years, they have managed the land better than Western folk could ever do who play God by removing fire from the ecosystem.
It's going to shatter and break all that stuff. The fungus is going to attack that even more. You've got a compounding factor of the pine beetles. You've got the fungus, the dryness and the heat. These wind storms will come through and blow these trees over. You have deadfall in combination with an overstocked forest and all this new ladder fuel. Ladder fuels are stuff that leads fire from a healthy ground level where it's cleaning it up into the canopies. That's where you have raging crown fires ripping across.
I've seen some crazy shit firsthand probably because I was in some areas I wasn't supposed to be. They call them firenadoes and all this crazy shit. That's more wind-driven. There are some of those California fires. Watching the flames, it's a 200 or 300-foot wall. That's what it looks like from your perspective. On television, it's hard to tell but it is insane how high a fire can get with the fuel.
There was the August Complex and the Mendocino Complex. Unfortunately, a dozer operator perished in the Mendocino Complex. There was an EF2 tornado made out of the fire that went through the center of town. Unfortunately, it killed somebody on the Mendocino. On the August Complex, I believe it was an EF3. The heat and the energy from the fire created a tornado.
It showed up on the National Weather Service's radar as a tornado. They issue tornado warnings on fires because the energy coming off of these fires is so insanely powerful. That's a result of what I was talking about earlier. You have all this deadfall and impressive fuel loading. This is all because we have removed fire from its natural state. It's supposed to be there.
That's a great point. I'm got big into native American culture. I've always been big into it. They still do some prescribed burns. I'm probably going to screw this up. If you read into some of these tribes, there was a Northwestern tribe. They migrated through Northern Montana up into Canada. They even came down as far as Colorado and Wyoming in some of the summer months a little bit further East.
The fire was their most important sacred thing. They still try to carry on this tradition. They can't because they're living on reservations or maybe in an area where you can do what they did. At one point when they were nomads, they had a fire burning for thousands of years. It was the same fire. They never burned it out. What they would do is build these cone things. There are also a few books that describe this.
I'm sorry that I'm not shouting out where I've gotten this information. It's the Piikani tribe. The whole thing was about fire. They would build these things out of buffalo horns. They would wrap clay around it and all this different stuff so they could carry their fire with them. The most sacred dudes in the tribe were ultra-marathon runners, which is fascinating as well. These guys would run 100 miles and scout to where they were going to camp. They would be running with this fire team.
They had multiple tubes that they could change it from so the fire never went out. One of their traditions is before they left an area, they would burn it so when they came back, there was this new vegetation and new life. That was their whole thing. If they were leaving an area, they were burning that fucker down and going into the next place. That was the circle and their whole method. It's fascinating to me. They never had any problems. We were talking about where are the best places to hunt. It's on the burn scar. It's pretty incredible.
It's incredible too because that same story is repeated across indigenous cultures across the entire world. They were excellent land managers. These indigenous peoples for thousands of years have managed the land better than us dumbass Western folks thinking we could ever do playing God by removing fire from the ecosystem. They knew what they were doing. They saw what it was. They were very connected to nature. They held it in such high sacred regard that they kept using it for thousands of years before even written history. Fire is nature's garbage disposal. That's what it is. It is a very cleansing thing. Look at the indigenous cultures across the world, sweat lodges, smoke ceremonies or the act of even smoking something. It's held in high regard as a cleansing and bringing people together practice.
I'm taking a naive approach about what I've seen or interpreted but I'm pretty sure there are hundreds of people out there that can correct me otherwise. For an overwhelming majority of these cultures, it is very sacred. Smoke is cleansing. That's a common thing across all these indigenous cultures. They're onto something but they're able to manage that land. Look at where you have these overstocked, deadfall-ridden and disease-ridden nasty forests that we have not managed.
Not to mention people plan on living where they live for a long period. These people were nomadic. It was like, "Burn it down. We're out. It's onto the next spot."
Humanity as a species has turned from this species that were hunter-gatherers and very connected.
It's a shelter-type mentality. It blows me away. In a short amount of time, we can get soft, dumb and naive. You only see what's in front of your face. That's one thing that's the most intriguing about studying those different cultures or history in general. It's all luck and learning lessons. These people did it for thousands of years and never had a problem. All of a sudden, look at us with all of our technology, resources and everything that we try to do.
We're still fucking it up. It's funny though because those cultures were very connected with Mother Nature and the Earth. They were one. They were codependent on each other in some strange fashion but if you look at the human species, we're a parasite. We stick in like a tick to one area and then we destroy it until the resources have gone and then move off to the next place to fuck up.
The point of this whole diatribe that I've gone on my soapbox about is that we don't have the people numbers-wise to manage wildlands, forests and lands at scale. What's the next convenient place or tool that we could look to manage things at scale? The answer is a well-managed and good fire. If anybody is reading this, I hope that I can push this idea of suffering for a little bit with drift smoke some prescribed fires some pile burning or some land management noise with chainsaws ripping in the forest for a couple of months. Burn that shit off because it's going to prevent situations we get all the time.
Turn it back into an industry thing.
We need them too. We need all of it. That's the whole thing.
You don't have to cut the whole thing.
You select sustainably-managed timber harvesting. It's effective. We have proven that this works. They come in, cut all the repro, let their big trees grow and be like, "I want that one. Let's take 1 in 6 trees."
I'm going to bag on California here. It's the telltale sign of somebody that decided to leave nature alone and not manage it from a wildlife standpoint and a forestry standpoint. Look at what they have. Cal Fire is the biggest state-run state agency. God knows how many tax dollars are going to all that infrastructure. You probably wouldn't need as much if you would have stuck with some forest management.
The thing though is we need all of the stuff. We need the prescribed fire, loggers, land managers and hunters too.
Look at what they're doing with mountain lions. The state officials are killing way more mountain lions than they ever did during a hunting season trying to manage it so little kids and pets don't get eaten.
Keep the wildlands wild. To manage all this shit at scale, I don't have a one-size-fits-all solution or a magic-wand solution for all this because it's so complex and nuanced. It's too late.
It's out of control. We have let it go too far. The prescribed burns are something that anybody should be able to put up with.
That's the thing though. Prescribed fire is under a lot of attacks. The Forest Services suspended its prescribed fire program pending further investigation. The reasoning behind that is because of these overstocked forests, climate change and whether or not you choose to believe in it, these mismanaged forests, the lack of personnel, the litigation against logging, the litigation against the Forest Service and these land management agencies.
The US Forest Service is one of the most litigated agencies out there. It's usually over land management disputes. You have all these factors playing into it. You have an incident that is very high-profile like the Hermits Peak Fire in New Mexico. It was started as a holdover from a prescribed fire in January. Shit does happen. Prescribed fires, unfortunately, escape.
Wasn't there one in Yellowstone in the '80s or '90s?
It was the Big Burn. These high-profile-prescribed fires escape. It's killing the prescribed fire. Logging is getting litigated against and all of these things that we could use at scale. There are a lot. How many millions of public lands do we have?
Fire is nature's garbage disposal. It’s like a cleansing thing.
There are 193 million acres.
A hotshot crew doing lop and scatter in thinning deadfall are not going to do shit. They might be able to treat an acre depending on how thick it is. We need private entities and all of this stuff. We need to throw the world at it. That's why Tim's Act is so important because it provides provisions for prescribed fire and getting more people out there in the woods to do this hard work that no one wants to do and paying them for it. Make them professionals and give them protection like structured apartments. This needs to happen.
We have to wrap this thing up, Brandon. It has been super awesome. I want to have you back on again. Before we do, I want to talk to you. If you enjoyed reading this conversation, you have to check out and subscribe to Anchor Point. You cover a lot of this stuff. I enjoy listening to you when I can. Let's tell everybody where you can find Anchor Point. You are on all platforms.
I listen to you on Spotify. You have a YouTube channel and a website. You're on social as well. I love seeing your posts. It's super cool. You're showcasing a lot of these men and women that are out there on the front lines and that sort of stuff. Let's go ahead and share all those. I wanted to dive into a little bit of the history of the Anchor Point and why you started it before we jump off.
It's www.AnchorPointPodcast.com. You can find the podcast itself on iTunes, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, YouTube and pretty much any library or aggregator out there. It's on Podbean. It's everywhere. Let's try and get it out to as many resources or aggregators as possible. As far as the website, there are going to be some pages down.
I'm working on a pretty big project that I can't talk about but if there happens to be anybody out there that's looking to partner with that specifically in the culturally competent mental health clinician or organizations, I want to talk to you. Shoot me an email. You can get a Contact Us page on the website or shoot us an email at Info@AnchorPointPodcast.com. I'm not going to give out my phone number because the last time I did that, people were beating down my door and I practically had to change my number but we will connect.
The whole start of the Anchor Point Podcast was back when I was teaching in the academy. Do you know how one of those good ideas comes over a couple of beers and your buddies at a bar? That was one of those. We were solving world problems over a couple of beers. If you couldn't tell by this episode, I'm very passionate about land management, stewardship, being an outdoorsman and woman, managing the land and firefighting.
Those are my passions. It has made me who I am. If I didn't ever get into fighting the fire, I would not be the same person that I am. This conversation over a couple of beers during the academy was like, "How come no one started a wildland firefighting podcast before?" I'm like, "Hold my beer. Watch this." It took me until about 2019 to do that. I was still actively employed with the Federal agencies and the Bureau of Land Management. It was growing into a conflict of interest. I had that going for me also.
As an assistant captain, an engineer or the fill-in captain of my module that year, I was realizing I was taking on and assuming a lot of risk for not a lot of pay. Unfortunately, I had to make that hard decision to give up something that I love to get out of the game, get a big-boy job and leave never-never land. There were family reasons and mental health reasons. I've struggled with mental health issues as well. That's a result of my fire career, the finances and the glaring conflict of interest with Uncle Sam.
I got out of the fire and got full-time into my podcast. It's not my full-time job. I wish it was but I still have a day job. I try and make this thing bigger, better, faster and stronger every day. I put a lot of time, energy and resources into it. My wife still doesn't know the ultimate bill about how much this whole thing costs a year to run a podcast. She would be astonished if she found out the true numbers.
It's a platform for people to build better firefighters through sharing experiences and also preserving the legacies of those people in the field and what they have experienced. It gives a true reality and a personal one-on-one experience and insight into the wildland firefighting career. Hopefully, people will learn from that, not make the same mistakes twice, build on that foundation that our mentors and trainers have laid before us to build a better firefighting force and advocate for better pay, mental health and all that stuff.
It's super rad. I'm glad that you're doing it. We align well because we have a lot of the same values on this show, what it's about, the whole stewardship thing, the outdoors and all that stuff. We want to help support your community as well. You're welcome back here anytime. This has been a lot of fun. It was a great time. I enjoyed hanging out with you. The next time, we've got to do this one in person. We were trying to set it up for so long in person but we will try to get a little bit ahead of it and get you out here to Colorado. Maybe it will be during one of those elk hunt seasons or something. The next time I'm in Reno, I'll stop by.
Get on a truck to the river. We will go get some lines in the water.
That sounds awesome. I'm all about that.
Before I go, do you mind if I make a couple of shout-outs to some homies?
Not at all. This is your time. Take as much as you want.
I would like to thank Joe Neguse out of your neck of the woods. He's a representative out of Colorado. He's one of the frontrunners of the Tim Hart Wildland Firefighter Classification and Pay Parity Act. He introduced that to Congress. If you want to thank a firefighter, jump on board and start supporting that. I also want to thank Joe Bronson, one of my captains. He's a good mentor. Scott Salisbury is the one that got me into fighting the fire. Chris Byrne taught me how to run an engine. That dude was solid.
I've got to give a little bit of love to the Redmond Hotshots community. Bubby and Neil, you guys are rad. For Grassroots, we've got Kelly, Riva, Luke and a couple of people I can't mention because they're still employed. They're doing the Fight Club, "Don't talk about Fight Club," advocacy behind the scenes. It's pretty cool. I thank everybody who has helped me along the way, mentored me or taken a chance on me. Here's a special shout-out to my wife and my boys.
That's super cool. A lot of people skip that part. I'm glad that we got all those people in. We're here to support you too anytime. Thanks again. Before we go, check out Anchor Point Podcast. Give them a follow. Check out the foundation Grassroots Wildland Firefighters. We will talk to you soon.
I appreciate it. Hopefully, no one does any dumb shit out there in the woods. Don't start fires for fuck's sake. Don't park your truck on top of dry grass. Put out your goddamn fires. Don't shoot rocks under grass. It's common sense.
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About Brandon Dunham
My fire background includes 11 years of firefighting experience with engine modules, helitack crews, and hotshot crews.
I have had the opportunity to complete Wildland Firefighting Apprenticeship Academy 66, participate in unique leadership development education with the Duncan Leadership Institute and Redmond Hotshots, and become an assistant crewboss at Wildland Firefighter Apprenticeship Foundation Academy 2. I believe that my background and experience will bring a positive, productive, and quality product to the fire program