Life at the Redmond Air Center

For about a month now I (Brian) have been living at the Redmond Air Center as a member of the Redmond Hotshot Crew.  There are dozens of hotshot crews across the nation, but what's special about this one is that it's a training crew, so the emphasis is not simply production, but also fire behavior, leadership, and career development.  Basically this means that every day a different person is in charge of the entire crew and the two squads.  It sounds great, but it's actually pretty difficult to go from bossing people around on Monday to taking orders from those same people on Tuesday.  However, this crew is highlyso those transitions should be pretty easy.  Here are a few pics of the Air Center, people and some projects we've been working on.

Our Logo, which is on everything we wear for uniforms.  It was first created in the 60s, when we became the first nationally available hand crew.  I'm not sure why we're the road runners...maybe something to do with travelling across the nation for incidents.

These are our offices, which is literally across the parking lot from the Redmond Smokejumpers and their paralofts.  Across a different parking lot is the Air Tanker base.  Between the three of us, we're the main hub for wildfire fighting in the Northwest.

These are the "buggies" that we travel in.  I know...I now ride a short bus.  This definitely fits the hotshot persona, which loves to throw around sayings like "Shut up and dig,"  "Professional ditch diggers" or "All I want to see are asses and elbows."

These are the barracks.  There's twelve of us in this one...so it reminds me a lot of college.
They're actually pretty nice, though the kitchen is a little small.

My room, which faces Mt. Hood, the cascades, Smith Rock State Park where I like to rock climb, and on a clear day, Mount St. Helens.

Our first major trip was to Northern Washington, where a forest requested the crew to help with some prescribed burning.  We were working about 10 miles from Canada.  On the way we passed through the Columbia Gorge, which has some of the most constant wind in the nation.  And they take advantage of it...

These things are huge!

If you never make it to central or eastern Washington, it mostly looks like this with a little bit of Kansas and Colorado:

We burned one unit mostly with aerial ignitions, so our job was to secure the edge.  You can't tell, but the helicopter is dropping ping-pong balls with basically napalm inside them.

Our next major unit was old fashioned hand ignition.  We still held the lines, but we also applied strips of fire into the forest.  We had a wind shift and things got pretty smoky.  This picture is of James, whose originally from outside of Boston, but currently working in Utah.  The crew has people from all four corners of the country, and plenty in between.

That and a lot of push ups, running, and time on the phone pretty much sums up my life now.  We become available for wildfire suppression at the end of May, and then it's crossing our fingers hoping for natural disasters!