What It’s Like to Work as a Hotshot

Over the next two months, the crew fights everything from small wilderness fires near Redding to a 315,000-acre monster called the Rush Fire near the Nevada state line. They see fire whirls in the Great Basin and thunderstorms in the Southwest, and they camp out for a week on an isolated ridgeline in California’s Klamath National Forest. By late August, seven million acres have burned nationwide, and the hotshots have seen more fire than any Tahoe crew in a decade. They’re living the adrenaline-filled, all-consuming life every wildland firefighter dreams of: 112 hours a week, with hazard, holiday, and overtime pay. The crew members make $3,000 every two weeks, but they have nowhere to spend it. Hotshots measure time in days off, and by late summer they’ve had just ten of them. “This is the best year we’ve had in a long, long time,” says Cowell.

It takes a toll, though. Every time Guerrero, the hotshot who once worked on an inmate crew, comes home, his two-year-old daughter can say a new word. Cowell is also feeling the pressure. At the end of August, Janet gets sick. While the crew fights the Rush, he spends ten days at home.

Nineteen of 20 members of the Granite Mountain Hotshots died on Sunday fighting a wilderness fire in Arizona. Outside magazine’s July issue has a story about what it’s like to work as a hotshot. The story is written by Kyle Dickman, Outside’s associate editor who used to work as a hotshot full-time and embedded with a crew last summer. There is a lot of working out (“60 pull-ups, 240 push-ups, 390 sit-ups, and an afternoon spent cutting line”) a lot of dangerous work (“around 7:30 P.M., a gust sends the fire down toward the line, blowing burning leaves over the engine crews”) and not a lot of work-life balance (“Her husband, Mike Kelly, a full-time crew member, had left for a smoke-jumping job in Idaho a month earlier, and she hadn’t seen him since.”)

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