And the madness sets in...

Fire is generally a feast or famine profession and we are currently starving. I have now been on for a month and have only gotten on one fire. It has been raining almost every day now for the past two weeks and the grass is green as can be. This phenomenon is not limited to Eastern Montana either. If you check out the Situation Report put out by the National Interagency Fire Center, you'll see that there are hardly any fires going on anywhere in the country. Even the shot crews are sitting around without fires to go to. Which is little consolation for us. Even when fires do start to break out, every resource in the country is going to want to head that way and we'll have to fight for a chance to go.

Other tools used to predict where wildfires might occur are the Fire Danger Rating maps and the U.S. Drought Monitor maps, which both show the same dismal picture. While some potential exists in the Southwest, there ain't much going on. And there in lies the problem. When firefighters desperately want to fight fire and there aren't any fires to fight, boredom, depression and low morality set in. And this is where our crew is quickly heading. While its almost a given that the fire season will pick up in Eastern Montana in late July and August when all this lush green grass cures out, that is still several months out and doesn't help our current situation. Bum seasons are the last thing you want to think about when you've left the rest of your life behind to go fight fire for the summer. After all, cash moves everything around me!