A Day in the Life: Revealing Visit With Our Own Sacramento Hotshots, Now Battling Ruidoso Fires
Local Hotshots talk shop: grueling work, a dangerous enemy. Life on the fire line.
As thousands evacuated Ruidoso last week, fleeing dangerous infernos, the Cloudcroft-based Sacramento Hotshots hurried towards the blaze.
They came equipped with shovels and saws.
Only four days before the South Fork and Salt Fires started, Cloudcroft Reader’s Hannah Dean spoke with four members of the Sacramento Hotshots, who at the time of this writing are still fighting the blaze.
Over dinner at the Western Bar & Cafe in Cloudcroft, Danny Chavez, Luis Soto, Riane Young, and Tirich Garner talk about their work.
FIGHTING FIRE and MORE
According to the US Forest Service, hotshot was the term given to fire crews in the 1940s, because they worked on the hottest area of wildfires.
Superintendent Danny Chavez, a Cloudcroft local who has been hotshotting for 24 years, says:
“Our specialty, the hotshots, is large fire. When it goes big, then you call the hotshot crew because there's twenty-something of us. We're pretty fit.
If you're going to be a hotshot, you've got to be ready for 16-hour days, hiking with a lot of weight on your back.”
Lead Fire Fighter Luis Soto, who has been with the “Sac” crew for 6 years, says:
“We don’t typically use water because we don't have access to water. So our job is to get cut away— so we have the sawyers go first to cut away the brush and trees that need to come down that are going to either be affected, or affect us there or later during the fire.
And then once they get all that vegetation cut away and moved away, the other rest of the crew comes in with hand tools and they scrape away at the dirt until it's down to mineral soil.
There's nothing that could burn. It's just dirt. Like two feet.”
Hotshot crews fight fire with a variety of methods, determined by their qualifications regarding equipment.
Different crews work with hand tools, saws, heavy equipment, helicopters, and more. It’s grueling work, and the stakes are high.
Chavez says, in regard to fighting fire with fire, a ‘burnout‘:
“If there's a city that's threatened, then we're really good with burning around communities and stuff and then sending our fire into the wildfire. And it's supposed to come together and collapse.”
Soto elaborates, “Yeah, basically try to burn away the fuels so when the fire gets there, it has nothing left of it.”
Hotshots respond to more than fires, though that is the bulk of their work.
Chavez says, “We’re a national resource, and then Lincoln National just hosts us.”
Soto:
“It's any national, like, emergency. So I've been on a crew where we went to Puerto Rico for hurricane relief. The crew I used to be on, I think Sac, too, they went on that shuttle recovery where they went. I know crews that went to Katrina. Basically, anywhere where they need a lot of people that could help out, we would get a call. But mainly it's fire.”
They respond to national emergencies, even international. These federal employees are given contracts with Mexico and Canada—even Australia.
The “Sac” crew fought the wildfires in Canada last year.
Today, they are still fighting the South Fork and Salt Fires near Ruidoso.
Cloudcroft Reader was able to check in with Superintendent Danny Chavez on Wednesday night, when flash flooding imperiled the area.
Chavez responded, “One disaster after another, we adapt quickly.”
THE CALLING
The Hotshots are self-described hunters, hikers, ski bums, outdoorsmen, ranchers, hippies, veterans, outcasts, and jocks—or any combination of these descriptors.
Still, each member joined the Sac crew for different reasons.
Sawyer and Crew Member Tirich Garner, who grew up in the Sacramento Mountains and has been with the Sac Hotshots for 5 years, says,
“I kind of grew up in the Forest Service because my dad was always with them. It was kind of like a last resort thing because I had taken like a semester off of college. They told me to get a job and I started working for the Forest Service and decided to stick with it.”
Chavez:
“So my friends were in Fire First in Mescalero, and they would just show me pictures of big wildfires, and I thought that it looked...fun, exciting. Just to see, like, that big ol' plume of smoke and them fighting it.
And then the pay, in the early 2000s, they paid ten dollars an hour, and it was a lot back in the days. And a buddy of mine was like, yeah, I made a thousand dollars in one week, and yeah that's what.
And then working out together with the crew, the camaraderie— that's really what drove me.”
Physical fitness is an immense part of the job.
Chavez:
“Yeah, our big thing is hiking with weight. Our packs usually weigh anywhere from 45 to 55 pounds. The saw teams, the sawyers and the swampers, they carry the most weight because they have all the extra saw parts and they're carrying around the saw, the fuel.
The guys and girls on the saw teams are, like, the badasses. They're the ones that are doing the most physical part of the job.”
Chavez grins as he gestures toward the two sawyers present, Soto and Garner.
Speaking on their physicality, Senior Fire Fighter Riane Young says, “It’s really just all mental.”
Soto agrees. “Like she said, it’s all mental. If you could push—not listening to that voice telling you to quit—anyone can do this job.”
His pack can weigh around 75 pounds with the saw, water, and more.
Soto adds, “so yeah hiking that and then the saws always hike up in front. We're hiking it so it'll be Danny leading us in, then the squaddies then the saws.”
Chavez elaborates,
“And then Riane’s in the back. Any stragglers, like, she makes sure that they get up there...she's our Senior in the back. Making sure that everything is good behind us. We can't go forward if our back door isn't good, you know. Like, even when we're digging line and burnouts, she's really important in the back.”
Crews can be driven in as far as is passable. They are also flown, even boated in to remote areas.
The Sac Crew knows the Lincoln National Forest pretty well, due to the nature of their work.
Chavez:
“We got a pretty good idea. Especially, like, JD [Captain JD Vigil.] JD’s a hunter…So he's always in the woods. When I get off of work, I don't want to go in the fucking woods. I just want to chill, you know?, But he’s like I know exactly where that is! Like, cool, dude. Nice. Take us there.”
Soto:
“But...we do get sent to the roughest, most inaccessible parts because we are expected to be able to make it up to wherever it's at and get the work done for a whole day.”
Young:
“Sometimes it is like in 2022 when we were in Oregon we had to walk to these little fires. It was a five-mile hike in and five-mile hike out at the end of the day. You're just used to it. It’s efficiency in getting there as fast as we can, but also having people to work when you get there.”
The work is demanding, and shifts can be lengthy.
“Yeah,” says Chavez, “we don’t shower for 14 days sometimes.”
A DANGEROUS ENEMY
When asked to share fire stories, the group’s tone shifts.
Soto says, “So, fire scares me.”
“Think about people that go to war, they know they have an enemy. Fire, it's something that doesn't judge, it's going to do whatever it wants to do.
It's having people like Danny that have the experience that we can look up to, and he can make judgments to keep all of us safe.
I know one of the big reasons why I got into hotshotting is after the Granite Mountain incident, after everyone passed. I didn't want someone to have to go through that, have to lose to someone like they love. I'm going to get into it. I'm going to prevent that, any fatalities.
It's scary because it does not judge. It's going to do, but it's also...a beautiful thing it does help the forest and I think that's what a lot of people are uninformed about—the benefits that fire does bring to the landscape if it's done correctly, I mean with prescribed fires.”
Nineteen Granite Mountain Hotshots were killed in the line of duty while fighting the Yarnell Hill Fire in Arizona, in 2013.
Loss has united hotshot crews within the area, who share camaraderie.
Chavez says,
“Back in the days…Every hotshot crew thought they were the best. Yeah, just trying to outdo each other, but now…I can see men not doing that because the whole region went to the memorial.
And then, for me, being a part of the Lolo fatality, like, seeing somebody getting medevac-ed, you know. He was hanging, long-lined out of there. It took an hour and 45 minutes to get him out. He got hit by a tree.
So, us and Lolo will always forever be bonded. That just made me drop any kind of, like, bad juju with the [Smokey] Bears, you know. You just never know.
It’s somebody on your crew.”
Soto mentioned the Dude Fire, a 1990 wildland blaze in Arizona where 6 fire fighters perished, and 5 more were injured.
With such perilous work, it’s surprising to find that Hotshots do not consistently receive hazard pay.
When working controlled prescription fires, they receive no hazard pay at all; in an uncontrolled fire, they receive 25% additional pay (from their base-pay rate.)
Chavez says,
“We’re not considered fire fighters. We’re ‘forestry technicians.’ We’re only considered firefighters when we die. We get the big old funeral, the flags, all that stuff. But to pay us? We’re forestry technicians.
Even with the prescribed burns. It's controlled. It's considered a controlled burn. But we still deal with the same hazards. We're still breathing in all the smoke. There's still snags that are coming down.”
The Sac crew asked if I knew about the Tim Hart Act.
The Tim Hart Wildland Firefighter Classification and Pay Parity Act aims to solve issues of fair compensation for hotshots.
Hart was a smokejumper who died from injuries sustained while parachuting into the Eicks Fire in southern New Mexico. His widow, Michelle, publicly joined the Grassroots Wildland Firefighters’ call for the current federal administration to “immediately enact meaningful reforms.”
No action was taken on the bill, save for a referral to the Subcommittee on Conservation and Forestry, two months after its introduction in 2021.
In May of 2023, a related bill, Tim’s Act, was “Read twice and referred to the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.”
No further action is reported on the Library of Congress website.
In Part Two of our conversation with Chavez, Soto, Young, and Garner, they discuss the Hotshot lifestyle, fire mitigation, Cloudcroft’s unique circumstances, and how to protect your home.
Read our Sunday update for the South Fork and Salt Fires, here.
Our grandson Patrick Button is fighting fires with the Sacramento Hotshots Crew. He is the first Aussie (he was born in the USA!) to join the Hotshots! Go Patrick & the Hotshots!!!
Suzanne & Matt
Sydney
Australia