Along the California-Oregon border, photojournalist Aaron Colussi was on his first ride-along as a guest of the Roosevelt Hotshots, who had been called away from their usual base at Fort Collins, Colorado. Their objective was to drive around the edges of the fire, close enough to feel the heat prickling the hairs on their arms, to formulate a plan for fighting back against this apocalyptic force of nature.
The fir trees native to the US west coast are highly combustible. A flame licking at a fir’s roots will engulf the entire tree in seconds. As his first experience of what these firefighters face, it was, says Colussi, “intense” – even if the crew seemed curiously unrattled. “I read [the situation] from the crew’s facial expressions,” he says. “If they looked nervous, I became nervous. If they weren’t, I’d assume things were fine. If we were 10m away from a 35m fire and no one was nervous, I’d have to accept it. It’s just something that happens in the world of firefighting.”
That ride-along was in 2014. Since then, Colussi has watched the situation deteriorate. Last year, 8.8 million acres of forest burned across the US, devastating woodland, homes and lives and resulting in at least 85 recorded deaths, along with $3.5bn of damage. One of the blazes, dubbed the “Camp Fire”, was declared the most destructive in California’s history, burning up a football-pitch-sized area of land every second. In Los Angeles, the Woolsey Fire destroyed 96,949 acres, including a number of celebrity homes. (Photos from this time show exhausted service members, their clothes stained with soot, resting on the floor of a luxe garden patio in Westlake Village.) It was a reckoning of biblical proportions.
This year threatens more of the same. Climate change has intensified California’s droughts, causing “fire season” to extend outside of its usual confines of late summer and autumn. But it’s a nationwide problem. Across the US, the number of men and women fighting the flames is estimated at 25,000.
Colussi’s interest in the Hotshot Crews began when he moved from New York City to Colorado. As his plane approached Denver International Airport, he and his fellow passengers gazed in stunned silence at the red and black landscape below: the burning ridges of the Rocky Mountain National Park. As he settled into his new home, Colussi witnessed the near-continual destruction of the surrounding woodland. After watching the same firefighters riding up the trails to battle the flames, day after day, Colussi decided their story should be told and petitioned the US Forest Service for permission to accompany the elite Roosevelt Hotshots.
A Test of Mettle
The Hotshot Crews are not your run-of-the-mill fire brigade. These are the most highly trained members of the US fire service, so named because they work at the hottest sites in the wildfires, often with minimal logistical support. Members must meet strict physical fitness standards and demonstrate leadership and organisational skills – all while keeping a cool head under pressure.
This courage sometimes comes at a cost. In 2013, the Granite Mountain Hotshot crew lost 19 of its 20 members while fighting a blaze in Arizona. It was the single largest loss of US service personnel since 9/11.
While all US firefighters undergo stringent tests, riding with the Hotshots – even as an observer – requires elite-level fitness. “I live in Colorado, and I’m in the mountains a lot,” says Colussi. “I hike and do mountain-trail running at an elevation of 1.5km. But a lot of the fires are at 3km.” That’s enough to induce altitude sickness and shortness of breath, particularly in those who haven’t had time to acclimatise.
“Each Hotshot Crew sets its own training programme,” says Colussi. “Usually, it’s a bootcamp, lasting about two weeks. For me, the training was CrossFit style: lots of pull-ups, kettlebell swings and things like that.”
Many would-be firefighters also have to undergo a protocol known as “the pack test”, which requires entrants to hike for three miles with a 20kg rucksack in 45 minutes or less. And not for nothing: 46-year-old Kale Casey, an emergency medical technician and Hotshots Crew member, speaks of firefighters having to carry their “food, water, sleeping bag, warm layers, reflective tarp and heavy Stihl TS400 chainsaws” on their backs. On steep terrain and in remote locations, there are no bulldozers; Hotshots must make do with hand-held equipment.
Of course, more is required than physical aptitude. It’s one thing to be strong enough to haul your equipment up a burning mountainside, and quite another to bear the mental burden of undertaking such a dangerous mission. “Often, Hotshots do two weeks straight on a fire, camping out and carrying everything they need,” Colussi explains. “You can’t create a training regimen that accurately depicts being out on a fire line.”
At The Coal Face
While standard procedures are drilled, each fire is unique in its ferocity, shape and hunger. “The work [that crews] do varies according to fire activity and what stage it’s at,” Colussi explains. “At first, the team will be pretty far away from the fire line. It’ll be digging trenches and hoping that, when the fire gets there, it’ll stop. The team will also be working with helicopters and planes to spread a retardant line. If it’s safe enough to get close to it, the crew might set fires to create buffers.”
This process is known as a “burn”: firefighters intentionally set an area of ground alight ahead of the fire line. The controlled fire cuts off the source of new fuel, supposedly stopping the wildfire in its tracks. This can be back-breaking work, and it takes little more than for the wind to blow an ember beyond the scorched ground to create a new conflagration behind the firefighters – potentially trapping them between two walls of flame.
Casey found himself in such a situation early in his career as a Hotshot, during the Murphy Complex Fire in Nevada. “The division supervisor drove through a wall of burning sagebrush and into the black,” he recalls, referring to the patch of previously burned earth behind the fire line. “I followed behind in my rental SUV. I was very inexperienced and had no idea whether he was making the right move by getting us on the other side of the flame front or not,” he says. “It wasn’t a decision we were able to talk about. It was a ‘Jump in your rig and let’s go!’ kind of thing.”
Spending weeks fighting fires or waiting to be called out takes its toll. As firefighters acclimatise to this surreal world, they develop their own way of communicating how they feel about their experiences. Unpleasant mental images are referred to as “slides”, says Casey. It’s a way of disassociating from what’s happening on the fire line – of compartmentalising.
The toughest part, Casey says, is “being 100% prepared to respond at a moment’s notice. Ten days might go by before anyone calls on you.” Before their eventual deployment, firefighters remain close to the fire in a staging area. “You have to stay hyper-vigilant, listen for your name and be aware of all escape routes, helicopter medevac sites, forest roads, crew names…” In short, it’s no camping trip.
During his time shadowing the Roosevelt Hotshots, Colussi was on the front line of several fires across northern California, including in the Klamath National Forest and the Soberanes Fire, which became the most expensive in US history – it cost more than $210m to suppress and required the attention of 5,000 firefighters.
“I’m still in touch with most of those guys,” says Colussi, who has continued to work alongside fire crews since his first ride-along. “The season is becoming longer. I don’t think it’s becoming more difficult – just longer. Last year, we were out on a fire and it snowed, which is crazy. A lot of these guys used to work seasonally, from May to September. Now, they’re doing April to November, which is almost full-time work. That’s the biggest challenge.”
Casey acknowledges that, even as conditions become harsher, support for fire crews is being compromised. In late 2018, Donald Trump threatened to cut funds for California’s wildfires, accusing the responsible agencies of ineffectiveness. “Trump is stoking fears that fire managers are responsible for mismanaging fatal and destructive fires,” Casey says. “This feeds a narrative of incompetence, waste and indifference, even as fire managers are faced with record fire seasons, more explosive fire growth and impossibly dry fuels stoked by intense winds.”
Before we end our conversation, Casey shares something he wrote on Facebook in response to Trump’s statement. It paints a bleak, yet admirably stoic, picture of the future of the Hotshot Crews. “For those responders who, in the face of hotter, drier and more vicious wildfires, desperately try to balance saving property while keeping Life First,” he wrote, “I’m focusing on my family and my love and am praying for all of you who are serving on the front lines… We need each other more than ever. We need to truly see what the consequences of our collective decisions are… Like it or not, this is the new normal.”
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