Monday morning John Hauck departed to visit cooler and wilder places with some different scenery. Karen was preparing for a trip to the airport to pick up Sharron, our neighbor, from a recent trip. I was trying to think of something constructive to do while everyone else was gone. Like a nap! The phone soon destroyed that idea, with a new fire and a job for the water tender that I use.
The new assignment was in Gabbs, Nevada. Apparently best known for the oldest operating mine in the US? and a Tarantula migration in the fall.
Sometimes these fires are a bit hard to find, since they tend to be off the beaten path a bit. Not this one, it was visible for quite a ways off. I was also met by some of the citizens and directed to an overhead stand pipe to fill with water. After filling I was directed to the School yard, which was designated as the camp ground for the fire team. I was the first piece of equipment to arrive. There was only a skeleton forest service crew there as well, and about the only thing they could do was to watch.
I choose the spot that I felt would be the furthest spot away from where I thought all the concentration would be. There was a ball field with a bit of sparse grass, but I was informed that the convict crews would be camping there. I wanted to be as far away from the most people that I could get, cons or not. My first night was peaceful, right up to about 12 AM when the kitchen crew arrived. It was made up of almost all women. The night quiet was then destroyed by giggling and cursing women. A little bit like a combination of nightmare and wet dream. They parked a refrigeration truck about 30 yards away. I suppose that it had a muffler on it, but I wouldn't swear that was actually on there.
As you can see the ground is actually a gravel parking lot. I had gotten a new bigger tent for my next trip, and I leveled out an area for it. Unfortunately my quest for some decent tent pegs had been foiled by the demise of the generator in my personal Dodge truck. After running all over Nampa Idaho to get it repaired and back on the road, I had little taste for shopping. The aluminum pegs supplied by all tent makers performed only a little better than a rubber crutch.
The work days on a fire start at 0600 and generally do not end before 2030, or 8:30 PM.
I arrived back at camp to find it full of people and my new tent wadded up in a ball, held by only one peg and my bag of clothes. I managed to get things somewhat straightened out in the headlights of the truck. There had been gusts on 50 MPH or more that blew through camp. My tent had fared better than a lot of the ones pitched by the kitchen crew. A lot of them had broken poles. I was only missing the new door mat that I had bought to try to keep the dirt out of my tent. I never did find it.
My job this time was to supply water for the tanker crews that were doing the actual work. Pretty light duty as I only had to be ready to refill their tanks when they came to me. The tankers are of various sizes, some of the bigger ones carry up to 900 gallons of water and the little two man crews will have from 125 gallons to 200 gallons. Most of the work is done by hand with various fire tools, so on some days I would only fill three or four tanks. If you look close you can see my chair sitting in the shade at the rear. I had expected deployment and was for the most part prepared. My bag had been packed and waiting since my earlier return from McCall. I had down loaded two kindle books and had three paperbacks in my bag as well.
My duty station was at a little clear area at the beginning of the nasty rough part of the Mountain where the fire was. I would arrive there in the morning with 4000 gallons of water and spend the day reading, napping or just enduring the passage of time. There of course was interesting weather with high winds, flare ups, dust devils and thunder and lightning storms. They do not stay on the mountain when there is lightning.
Dust devils would pop up in the burned areas.
Some would get pretty big and wide, while others were just miniature tornado's.
Then the wind would cause flare ups that would have to be taken care of.
You can see the fare up through the ash cloud that covered the Mountain.
The area where I was sitting was at about the 6500 to 7000 foot altitude, and there was really no wild life there other than Pinion Jays, and Ravens, an occasional visitor would come through.
Almost all of the work was done by hand, helped by the fact that the spread of the fire had been stopped by a wind change that blew the fire back on itself. A dozer crew from the same company that I worked for had cut a fire line on the East side of the fire. Hand crews finished what the dozer could not, and from then on it was just mop up for the crews.
Several of the days had some interesting weather, and one of which I could not explain.
I have never seen smoke rings in the sky, much less one inside of another.
This one developed over a period of an hour or so, with lenticular clouds forming and dispersing only to reform again.
They finally got enough of a handle on the fires that the crews could be reassigned to other fires. There seems to be no shortage of them in the West this year.
Time to rest and regroup for the next one. I will for sure be making some new tent pegs. Enough is enough.
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