Had a pretty good week. The day we got back from the Cascade fire we spent a day on the Johnson Fire, a county assist. Then two days later I spent a very tiring day on another county assist fire SE of town, the Grimes Creek Fire. This fire had the best fire behavior I'd seen on the district all year with active crown fire runs and 2-3' flames in the grass. We landed near a county engine with only a driver and no operator, so I jumped in with him and did some pump and roll until he ran out of water. Next I directed bucket drops and cut some line around hot spots. Later I tied in with a BLM engine and did a little burnout, then suppressed the resulting spot fire. I hiked the fire edge until I met up with another BLM engine that was preparing to do a larger burn out and convinced them to let me run the burn as a Firing Boss trainee. We had two torches going until we rounded a corner and found out that another unit was pushing fire at us from the other side of the fire. Then I grabbed a torch and lit mid-slope to try and get more fire on the ground between their fire and our line. By the time it was all tied in (bottom picture) I was just about ready to drop. The fire put up an impressive plume (top picture) then settled down and just put out a lot of smoke. It ended up being about 110 ac. The
helicopter headed back to Miles City and a couple of us stayed out and helped mop up until about 2300h. It was a really fun fire and I got to do just about everything on it. Three days later we spent a day and night on the East Fork fire on the Custer NF, a nice little 1 acre fire. All in all a busy week in an otherwise slow season!
Started my Engine Boss trainee detail this past Sunday with E-261 in Miles City. We got sent to a small fire in the Cave Hills of South Dakota on Tuesday afternoon. It was pretty well under control by the time we got there but we got to help out with a little night burn. Our second day on the fire we mopped up a little and let the interior burn itself out. As a result we had plenty of time to put together some log furniture. I was pretty proud of myself for ripping those boards for the table top reasonably straight! The second night on the fire we got a lot of rain, which pretty much put the rest of the fire to bed. We stayed through the burning period on the third day then headed back to Miles City. A nice little fire that kept us out on our days off! The best kind.
