"Fire Benders": The Hotshot Heroes Talk About Their Lifestyle, Working a Fire, and What Cloudcroft Should Know
Part Two of our Sacramento Hotshot interview.
Danny Chavez, Luis Soto, Riane Young, and Tirich Garner open up about the hotshot lifestyle, the crew’s award-winners, Lincoln National Forest, and what we can do to protect our homes in Cloudcroft.
Just four days before devastating Ruidoso and Mescalero area fires broke out, Cloudcroft Reader’s Hannah Dean talked with four members of the Sacramento Hotshots. These brave individuals are still on the front lines, battling the blaze as we speak.
Catch Part One of the candid visit here.
The South Fork and Salt Fires, which have collectively scorched 25,000 acres, are now showing progress, with containment rates of 79% and 84%.
Over 1,400 structures were affected by the burn, and as of Saturday, there are two confirmed deaths. The FBI is investigating the cause of the fires, along with an accelerant-detection dog named Wheezy.
On Tuesday, Superintendent Chavez gave Cloudcroft Reader a brief update on the crew. One member broke their thumb, others fell ill, and the group hardly slept. Still, they carry on.
Fire Season vs. “Real” Life
Other than Chavez, the ‘Sac’ Hotshots I spoke to don’t consider themselves locals—even though Sacramento is their home for the majority of the year.
Senior Fire Fighter Riane Young recently bought a home with her boyfriend in Oregon. She says her “real life” is there, but only for four months of the year.
She has yet to see their new home.
Crew Member and Sawyer Tirich Garner grew up here, but he considers Salt Lake City home. Sawyer and Lead Fire Fighter Luis Soto lives in his hometown in Arizona—when he can get there.
While Superintendent Danny Chavez calls Cloudcroft “home,” hotshot work affects the rhythm of family life.
Chavez says,
“You know what’s hard? Having to perform up here for two weeks or all summer and then coming back during the winter and trying to get back into the groove with the family.
And then coming down here, because I have a routine with the crew, we're just always doing something.
We get up at the crack of dawn; we work 16-hour days. And there's helicopters, there's radio traffic, chainsaw shit going on all day. It's just non-stop. And we do that for 14 days, and then we come home for like two or three days, and we're supposed to just, like, relax.
And it's tough. Especially right after fire season, rolling into the family life. That's pretty tough.”
Chavez’s wife, Samantha, adds,
“Technically, it's my 16th season as a hotshot wife, and I would say from a spouse and family perspective, it's kind of hard, you know. Just because he was everywhere. From March to September, you have to pretend like they're not around because their schedules are so inconsistent.
I can say It probably, for younger people that are on the crew, it's probably even harder for them because they still have to meet up with their girlfriends, boyfriends.
A lot of them are seasonal, so on their days off, they have to travel.
I am luckier because I just live here. But I can't imagine having to date and be a hot shot.”
Beyond a romantic and family life, the hotshot schedule demands being available at a moment’s notice, making it difficult to even own a pet.
Young muses that someday she would like to buy a van that would provide a mobile “pet pick up” service for hotshots, enabling them to adhere to the job's demands while allowing for a companion animal.
The group admits that the cost of living and affordable housing affects many folks in their line of work—Young shares that she even lived in her vehicle for a while.
The Sacramento Hotshots with seasonal contracts can live at the base. “Perms,” or permanent contacts, don’t.
Hotshots are contracted at the federal level, so their job placements are across the nation.
Soto describes the hiring process:
“You apply to different [specialties.] Whatever you want to apply for, like engines or hotshot hand crew.
And then once you go from there, you can pick the geographic area. Usually, they have towns listed, which I think you have to pick at least five. And then there's another option that says whether you want to be selected for areas you didn't select or just the ones that you did select.
So if you do the one where you can go anywhere, not just the ones you selected, you have a better chance of getting hired. You get picked up somewhere. But it might not be in the area you choose.”
Young has decided to remain seasonal and maintain her home life in Oregon.
Speaking to the pay structure and schedules for hotshots, Soto says of Young and his own choice to become “perm”:
“Unless she accepts that 26-0, then she can take a pay grade. Which is kind of, it's well, that's not really fair. A lot of people left the Forest Service in general. They're like, I don't want to take this.
For me, it was like, well, yeah, I'm going to take [perm] because not everyone's taking it. But there are people that it's not worth it to them. They've left the organization. I know plenty of people have done that. They want a life.”
Young adds,
“And pay comes into that, too, in a big way—huge pay disparity between us and pretty much all other firefighting resources.
Yeah, our extra pay runs out in what, end of September this year? They've just been kind of piecing that together like every six to ten months where they're like, oh wait, we found another eight months of funding for your increased pay.
So all of us might take like a $20,000 pay cut.”
The Wildland Firefighter Paycheck Protection Act, Tim Hart Act, and related bills have been proposed for fair hotshot compensation. The Hotshot Wake Up recently posted that partial refunds for Forest Service employee rents are forthcoming, albeit temporary.
Four members of the Smokey Bear Hotshot crew lost their homes in the South Fork and Salt Fires. Through a GoFundMe account, hotshot crews and folks nationwide have donated over $120,000 to help them rebuild.
The Fire Women
The Sac crew boasts Squad Boss Hayley Boss. Senior Fire Fighter Riane Young is undergoing Crew Boss training.
Sac Crew Member Natalie Fyffe won Rookie of the Year in 2023, and Leilah Mojarrab was the first-ever female Rookie of the Year in 2020.
Is female leadership common in hotshotting?
Young says,
“I think it's becoming so…you're seeing it more. It's becoming more the norm.
Yeah, it's more common to see women on hotshot crews. And women in higher-up positions on hotshot groups than it used to be.
It's still not common. But you see it more often.”
Chavez adds, “Hayley’s the first female squad boss in this group. In the last three years, two women on the crew got rookie of the year—which is very difficult to get.”
Protecting our Forests
In Part One of this interview, the crew mentioned prescribed, or “RX,” fires—controlled burns for fuel reduction and fire mitigation.
On Lincoln National Forest, which land-locks Cloudcroft, Soto says,
“I mean if you look around here this forest is crowded. There's way too many trees here. But, it's not like we can go in there and just burn all these trees, because you’ve got to find that fine line.
What's too much to kill, and what's not? I mean, you look at Native Americans; they've used fire for centuries before we were here, and they managed to adapt to it.
I know I'm not going to see it in my lifetime, but for future generations to see it, that's what I want. I hate to see forests decimated when wildfires come and kill everything. I live in a place where I've seen two big wildfires do quite a bit of damage. One was 20 years ago, and it's still not recovered.”
Cloudcroft benefits from having an air tanker base nearby, the Alamogordo Interagency Dispatch Center, and Alamogordo Air Tanker Base.
The “slurry bombers” drop retardant on fires—extremely effective on ground fuels and at slowing down fires in dense forests… but at a cost.
Chavez:
“That 241-acre fire was over $300,000 because of the air show. It's like, what, $10,000 to $15,000 a drop? And for the big ones, I think it's like half a million.”
Soto: “Helped us with that last fire [Moser].”
Young: “And Timberon.”
Chavez: “It’s nice knowing that they’re right there.”
Soto:
“They’re not always fully staffed, that’s the thing. If a fire breaks down in Arizona and structures are threatened, they'll send everybody.”
Hotshot crews and slurry tankers are deployed based on various priorities, including proximity to structures, watersheds, and resources.
Soto says, “It all depends. Yeah, disrupted resources. It could be a watershed that they want to protect.”
Chavez:
“In Oregon, man, they're all about their timber. They do not want us to burn because of their timber sale. They want us to go direct on these wildfires and not burn out because every tree is worth thousands of dollars.”
Soto:
“With most fires in California, they're going to have paint on it before any resources arrive. Because there's a lot of people in California, there's a lot of resources.
Chavez explains:
“Fuels like grass, the retardant is really effective. Grass fires, they're quick. They go out quickly. Timber fires, we have to make sure that they're completely out. It takes a while to get those.
So, it's easier to pick up wildfires if they run into burn scars because all of the ground fuels are gone and they're not as intense. So, by us doing prescribed fire, if we were to burn around, say, Cloudcroft, and if a wildfire were to come up and hit our prescribed burn area, it would go from crown fire to low ground fire.
It would be easier for us to get in there. That's what causes the crown fires: all the fuels on the ground, the fine fuels, and I mean grass, pine needles— hit the reprod, little trees.
The little trees, and then once it gets into the crown of the trees, then it's game on. Then there's nothing stopping it until it hits something — a ridge top or city or village —so that's the purpose of prescribed fire.”
When asked about other ways to deal with a crowded forest, Chavez says, “There’s mechanical thinning.”
Soto elaborates,
“Logging, mastication, opening up certain areas to wood permits. That's a big one where in a lot of places, the Forest Service has that. Essentially, people go in, get their firewood, but they're paying the forest service still.
But they're getting their money, but everyone kind of gets a deal out of it. They're cleaning up the forest.”
You can find out more about the Lincoln National Forest Firewood Permits, available for $20 for up to 10 cords of wood.
What entities besides the Forest Service are part of forest management?
Soto says, “Oh, everyone.”
Chavez adds, “State, BIA, BLM, contractors, Park Service, CAL FIRE, there’s more.”
Chavez:
“We had a thinning project out in Lewis Canyon by SAC, and the whole crew was pretty much teaming up. They teamed up with the sawyers. They had ten or twelve saws running.
We all spread out and went down the canyon and cut little trees or trees that were four inches [gestures a four-inch circumference] and lower. We usually pile them up, and then during the winter, we burn the piles.
So it's nice and open and beautiful.”
Soto:
“So yeah, a big thing, too, is when that stuff gets burned, and it burns hot enough, it turns into that white ash. That white ash is a mineral that acts as a nutrient for everything else.
So that, it kind of rejuvenates the forest when we do that. A lot of people don't understand that. That puts nutrients back in the ground when we do burn it.”
Soto continues about the forest that directly surrounds the village:
“It's crowded. Fuel loading. If we look at that fire that just happened, the Moser, I think it's a wake-up call to people. This place hasn't seen fire in a really long time. I've been here for three years, and I know…looking around, I know this place hasn't seen fire in a long time.”
Chavez:
“Yeah, if you were to go just on the Mescalero Reservation border, their forest is open because they thin the shit out of it. They're always burning, you know. And then right when you cross into the forest service, it's just thick.”
It’s a long process, too. The wildlife [employees] have to go out and make sure that there are no spotted owls and jumping mice. You gotta go through a bunch of hoops.”
Soto:
“Even with prescribed burns. But even on wildfires, we're kind of limited to stuff we can do.
I mean, on this last fire [Moser], we were bordering the wilderness, and you can't run chainsaws at all in the wilderness. You either gotta do manual hand saws and cross-cut stuff.”
Young: “To keep it wild.”
Chavez:
“We're not allowed to take UTVs in there. They don't want any gas leak of any kind, any oil leak…[in the] wilderness.”
Soto:
“There are always special considerations to everything. There's some fires where you have to get your truck sprayed every time you go out of the fire. It just depends where you're at.”
Chavez: “They don’t want us taking weeds from like the Santa Fe to the Lincoln.”
Can hotshots safely treat a wildfire like an RX burn? Apparently, if conditions allow.
Chavez:
“If there's an opportunity to manage a fire, if it's in the right area, and there's a lot of down and dead.
Like, all those trees that got torched are all falling down now. So you see an opportunity to let it burn but manage it.
They bring in all these resources to keep it from jumping a highway and burning down houses.
You're seeing what it does to the land. You know it's cleaning it up; it's doing good.”
Young:
“If you were describing that fire scar and it sounds like there's a bunch of snags that are going to try and kill all the firefighters that are trying to come in there and put it out.
And that can sometimes play a big part in it, too, the safety. Can we even put people in here with a relatively high degree of certainty that they're going to walk out at the end of the day?”
Soto:
“Injuries happen. And yeah, especially a lot of those fires and those old fire scars, they got a lot of dead and down and dead standing, and it's not safe.”
Chavez:
“That's one of our big things. This is the objective: to put this fire out.
If something were to happen, how could we get somebody out of it? Like, what's the nearest hospital? What's the nearest road? Can we get an ambulance up here?
If we're in the middle of nowhere, and there are high winds—we can't fly anybody out. We would have to literally pack them out to the nearest road, which could be [on] fire.
So sometimes we don't engage just for our safety.”
Protecting our Homes
When asked about the difficulties of the job, Young says, “Seeing people’s houses burn.”
Soto: “You’re never ready for that.”
Chavez: “It’s heartbreaking. And thinking about what the pets were in the house and stuff like that.”
When asked if Cloudcroft was unique in being land-locked by public lands, Young says,
“I feel like a lot of the West, the Western half of the United States has towns and villages that kind of butt right up into the forest.”
Soto:
”The Forest Service released this map where they kind of incorporated—and you can look this up online—they came up with these new ‘high fire risk management areas,’ and they specifically are sending money to those forests to help them do this, mechanical and RX.
And yeah, ours is in one of those areas, and they just updated it this year to include several other areas where they're like, some areas have not had work or fire, and these are going to be problem areas.”
Young elaborated on what individuals can do for fire mitigation efforts.
“I would say, like, fire-wise, your house. Give us a defensible space to work with if something ever, you know, came through here. Pine needles in your gutter…Tire piles, all sorts of things. I've moved like 50 tires from a property once right before we burned it.”
Chavez:
“And not having a big old stack of wood on your deck. Like, if we're trying to keep your house from burning, we have to take all that wood and toss it so your house doesn't burn down.
lf there's a bunch of pine needles on top of your roof, and sometimes when shit's hitting the fan, we'll be like nope you can't you can't save this house onto the next.
Put a flagging on it like an X on it— onto the next. And that's just because it is going to take too much time.”
Soto:
“We will do what we can do. One of the big things I learned in this last part, if the juice isn't worth the squeeze, we aren't going to do it. As much as we'd like to.”
Young:
“If we don't have the time or the resources, you know. And that's where the homeowners can really play a part and give us something to work with, especially in those fires where it's blowing up and it's, like, you need to start burning right now, or you need to, like, move on right now.
You don't have time.”
For the Love of the Job
When her months “off” end and fire season begins, Young says, “Like ’NO!’ I want one more week! But you get to be with this high-functioning group of yahoos, and it’s awesome.”
Soto says,
“I think a big thing is we're not always here [in Lincoln National]. I mean, people see us around every now and then, but we're not always here, so it's not always us responding.
Right now, Tatanka's here, another hotshot crew from South Dakota. We could be on fire, and something happens, like on this Moser fire. We were headed to another fire. (The Sac Crew was headed to the 11,000-acre Indios Fire near Coyote, NM.) We're not always around, but when we are here, we want to help the community.”
When the Sacramento Hotshots are “in town,” they reside at a base between Weed and Sacramento, NM. The office was remodeled last year, and the bunkhouses date back to the 1980s.
Soto says of the base, “It's us. A post office and some church camps.”
Young: “Yeah, some church camps. Some horses.”
“Despite all the negatives, it's the best job in the world. That's why we keep coming back,” Young says.
Soto: “Sleeping on the ground does have its perks sometimes.”
Young:
“It does, so many shooting stars. So many bats. So many cool things…I take a picture of every time we get out on a fire— you know, walk off, get a good view. I take a picture of that. Most people don't get to see that.”
As we watch videos together, crowded around Chavez’s phone, witnessing something “most people don’t get to see,” the group acknowledges that they deal with the elements: earth, wind, water, and fire.
“We’re fire benders,” says Young.
Soto says, “I want to say, on the record, Danny's a great boss.”
Chavez laughs, “Despite all the bitching, we still love it.”
In Part One, “A Day in the Life: Revealing Visit With Our Own Sacramento Hotshots, Now Battling Ruidoso Fires,” the crew discusses their grueling work and dangerous enemy.
Video of a 2020 wildland fire provided by Danny Chavez.
Such an informative story about the Hotshots! Thank you.