2020 AG M
Living with Fire A PERSONA L REFLECTION
Dr. Stephen Pyne presented at the IAWF Annual General Meeting in December. Visit the IAWF Webpage to view the entire presentation.
Thank you for the invitation to speak – I’m truly honored. Since by training and temperament I’m a historian, let me indulge my instincts and reflect on how the fire world has changed over the past half century. My life with fire began in 1967 when I was hired as a smokechaser with the North Rim Longshots at Grand Canyon National Park. I spent 15 seasons in all, 12 as crew boss. Everything I’ve done since dates back to those seasons. I even met and married my wife on the Rim. Our oldest child spent her first two summers there. In 1967 the National Park Service, like all federal agencies, operated under a 10 am policy – suppression only and everywhere. On the Rim this meant a lookout, two slip-on units as pumpers, abundant snag fires, and lots of hiking and compassing since roads were few and surface water was rare. We lived where we worked. Nationally, the US Forest Service was a hegemon that oversaw virtually every aspect of wildland fire. It dominated both hardware and software. It set policy, funded nearly all research, and provided an institutional matrix for other federal agencies and those of the states. The only fire-specific periodical was Fire Control Notes. Mutual aid agreements fashioned a national system with 12
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JANUARY - MARCH 2021
the Forest Service as a keystone agency. Only the BLM in Alaska had a fire program independent of it. The Park Service had two dedicated fire officers for its entire system. International connections meant FAO-sponsored exchanges. That year the major fires were in the Northern Rockies. Two burned to national publicity in Glacier National Park, and two big fires blew up in the Selkirk Mountains. The Glacier fires gained notoriety because a grizzly bear attack killed two hikers at the same time. The Sundance fire was the largest in the region since 1934; two firefighters died. In 15 seasons on the North Rim our largest fire was 300 acres, on a mesa within the Canyon. The largest regional fire was 1,000 acres. We were remarkably isolated from knowledge about the outside world. We lived in housing and worked in buildings erected 30 years earlier by the Civilian Conservation Corps. Radio reception was erratic; there were no personal phones and no TV. Once a month the Coconino County bookmobile would roll in. I learned about Apollo 11’s lunar landing when Time magazine arrived in the mail a week later. But fire was equally isolated within the larger culture.
