Clay Williams has been an Assistant Scoutmaster in Troop 51 for years. He and I were the adult advisors to the crew of Scouts that hiked Philmont Scout Ranch, out in New Mexico, earlier this summer. You might think that would be enough adventuring for one season, it sure was for me. For Clay though, Philmont was just a warm up for the main event.

   Sunday, August 20, 10pm --- One hundred strong men sit in a chartered aircraft as it slices westward through hot air rising from the burning forests of Idaho. They see bright lights everywhere below, and know these to be the flames they are come to fight. The hundred will split into 5 crews of twenty and spend the next two weeks fighting the lightening struck wildfires on the mountains below. They are from Pennsylvania, Maryland and Minnesota, and are dressed all alike in green pants and yellow shirts of Nomex fabric that glows ruddy red when hot, but does not burn nor melt. The men are excited to match their equipment and training against the blazes below that are hundreds of times bigger than anything they have ever seen back home. Tomorrow the battle begins.

   Monday, August 21, 2pm --- The bus bumps and shakes along a dirt road, four hours east of Boise. The 20 men of Pennsylvania Specialized (Wildfires) Crew 10 (PA10) stare curiously out as the bus rumbles past the bones of a long-ago mining boomtown called Atlanta. A mile further on, they come to the pastures and lodge that are Green Valley Ranch, where the fire camp is to be erected. In less than 48 hours this would hold a command center, supply trailers, dining tents surrounded by tables and chairs, showers and sleeping tents enough to sustain nearly 600 men.
   As PA10 gets off the bus, the men feel the wind kick up, and know this to be a bad sign. Away to the north they see wind-driven smoke flying low around the right side of a mountain. Then, suddenly, the forest in that area silently ignites. Seventy-foot gouts of yellow-orange flash skyward as one Ponderosa Pine after another catches the fire and then passes it along down the path of the wind. In the lee of the mountain, the fire starts to climb upward to the peak, where the wind picks the flaming trees apart and sends flying embers downwind. The men of PA10 guard the meadow against these flaming probes, but many of the red-hot fire-starters fly right over their heads, to land a mile away and set a small secondary fire alight in the bone dry forest.
   PA10's leader is first in the file of firefighters that head south an hour later. After hiking over mostly open, level ground covered with pine needle tinder, the crew comes to a hillside sparsely covered with pine. Here they find the spot fire. It is about the size of a football field and spreading up a mountainside through an open forest of Ponderosa Pine. The crew splits into squads and hurries to dig a fire line around the small blaze. The men of Squad 3 start around the left side of the fire in single file. A sawyer with whining chainsaw goes ahead to choose the route and limb low branches from trees that overhang the route of the fire line. Sometimes he drops an entire high-flaming tree that is too close to the line, but he doesn't overdo it. Even in fighting a fire that threatens its short-term survival, the sawyer is careful to impact the forest as little as possible with his screaming saw.
   The rest of the squad moves along the path the sawyer marks out, tools and feet in constant motion. The first man uses a Pulaski, a kind of ax with a wide digging blade, like a mattock, attached to its backside. He takes a dig at the ground then steps forward. Behind him, a shovel man scoops up the dirt and throws it to the side. Then comes another Pulaski, another shovel, a third Pulaski and the final shovel man. Behind this last man, the line is complete --- a narrow path cut down to mineral soil that stops the fire from spreading over the surface of the mountain. In this way, the spot fire is contained.
   While part of the crew patrols the line and works inward with hand-tanks, shovels and Pulaskies, the muscle men lay inch-and-a-half fire hose from a dam others are building at a nearby rill. A piece of plastic makes the dam watertight and protects the streambed from the sucking water pump that is soon set chugging. Now the crew goes on the offensive against the small blaze, and by dark it appears to be out. They will come back each morning for the following couple of days to put out the small fires that pop up in the night, from the roots and holes where live embers still hide, but that will just be a mopping up operation. As the men eat their MREs (Meal, Ready to Eat - army field chow) that night and prepare for bed, they feel confident that they can handle this sort of small spot fire. The main blaze, however, roars on in the night, and although they can neither hear it nor see it, they somehow sense its awesome presence. Hundreds of acres in size, tens of times hotter than any spot fire, and all consuming, a different strategy will be needed when they begin to fight the main body of the blaze.