Traveling with Shamucas: Last Couple of Fires

Well hello,

The last few weeks have gone by quick and fire season has ended. I did a dozen or so fires in three weeks, with the first one being the best, and the last being the absolute worst. The people we work for decided to burn when everything already started turning green. The chemicals released when green burns absolutely burns my eyes and I couldn't open them.

Here we did a 400 acre burn at Peck Ranch. It felt so good to burn something that I actually prepared. However, I didn't really do too much work, I just stood there watching for spot fires for 14 hours. I did get some really cool pictures.

They let the elk biologists do more work then me. I just watched.

Love smoke in the trees

Night time fires!

Another day, we burned with Pioneer Forest and helped them do a small burn. It was only 8 acres but it took all day. It was really fun, they let us actually do something. I ran the drip torch most of the time.

One of my favorite projects so far was making a road so heavy machinery could carry material to block off a cave. The road was about a quarter of a mile long. We just fell any tree in the way and removed anything a truck couldn't drive over. We then hiked up to the cave and it was massive. I've never seen such a large cave.

Before we started working

After

After spending most of my time at Peck Ranch or in Eminence, I finally got to go to Cape Girardeau. We did a lot of burning the two weeks I was down there. The people we work for down there love to burn so we burned a lot of things. It started to get green, but they didn't care.

Back road picture.

Meth lab rv in the background

Burned down meth lab

Action pictures

We drove by this place for two weeks, and I had to make my team stop. With a name of Scoops, one must stop.

One night, the mist was incredible.

Everyone slept outside

Another burn with Cape Girardeau guys. We worked on prepping the line two days before we burned this unit. We hiked probably 25 miles that week leaf blowing, cutting snags, and then patrolling the line during and after the fire.

Bob, our contact, had to pull out the water. The fire got a little too close for comfort of jumping the line.

Chevy commerical

In a UTV. Action picture driving down the line.

One of the last days I was there, we worked on restoring a glade. We hiked in all our gear and saw this sweet post. Colorado is only 857 miles away. In those two days, I fell over 150 trees, with one day I fell 90. I was super tired.

No pan, so cookies were made in measuring cups

The last fire I did. I wanted to cry, it was so hard to keep my eyes open. We probably shouldn't have been burning.

So so green. Such a bad idea.

Marty and I went on a 48 road trip to Tennessee to get his new car. I spent a majority of that in the car, but I had way too much fun. I really really liked Tennessee.