Fire Season 2013

It had been a pretty quiet summer for Red Lake. On July 1st we were at 12 fires. By the end of the day on July 2nd (my birthday!) we were at over 40. Probably couldn't have asked for a better birthday present than that. We were dispatched to RED013, but it was one of the lower priorities due to it's size/ fire behavior so we didn't leave until the morning of July 3rd. The plan was to drive to Bak Lake (our forward attack base) and then get flipped into the fire from there. The fire was only 3km from Bak Lake. Well, in typical MNR style we ended up waiting at Bak Lake for several hours before we were able to get into our fire. It was a VERY busy morning for helicopters because a lot of the fires were showing intense fire behavior, between putting new crews on fires and re positioning crews to safer spots they hardly set down at all. Two choppers came in to refuel while we were waiting in Bak Lake and asked us if anyone was on the fire just over the ridge because it was putting pretty good smoke. That was Red13, and we told them that we would be on it as soon as there was a free chopper.
When we finally got to the fire it was called in at 2 ha... that was short lived. The head of our fire was going pretty good when we got there and we had our helicopter stay and bucket on it while we started laying house. Eventually the buckets weren't of any help because the head was so intense, so my crew leader called air attack (water bombers) and they came and started bombing on the fire. By that time our fire now had a spot fire a couple hundred feet ahead which was the priority for the bombers. The bombers stayed on the spot fire and the head of the fire until they were out of gas and had to return back to the airport. The bombers left our fire pretty quiet, but it still had a lot of smokes on it. It ended up being about 14 ha, and the spot fire was about 2 ha. We had 3 other crews on it with us, 1 on the main fire and 2 on the spot fire.

Watching the bombers on our fire

The helipad we originally were dropped off at was a "floating" bog (I would hardly call it floating because we were up to our knees at the best places, and past our waist at the worst). After we crossed the bog to the fire we were in complete blow down, at some points over my head. And if it wasn't blow down, we were scaling the side of a rock cliff. It was a pretty crappy place for a fire, there was no easy walking and we had to do A LOT of cutting. That part I don't mind though because I love cutting- especially in blow down.

Our helipad 

The bridge we built so we didn't have to wade through the swamp to get to our helipad

Deciding what to do with all this blowdown

We stayed on fire in total for 10 days, the last 3 days my crew leader had to go to Dryden for training for her new job (resource technician position in Fort Frances) so I was left in charge of the fire. At that point the fire was pretty dead, but we had a big furry friend visit a few times. We got to our helipad one morning and a bear had eaten almost everything on it. Jerry cans of gas, 4 gallons of chainsaw bar oil, dry powder fire extinguishers, bug spray- and then all our food. The only thing it really left was a Big Turk chocolate bar... which we found funny because everyone always says how they're the worst chocolate bars but I love them- guess the bear didn't. In the midst of cleaning  up all the garbage, the bear reappeared on the ridge. We scared him away with the chainsaw but he came back 20 minutes later. The helicopter came over and scared him away for the rest of the day. He was just a little guy, probably curious about what we were doing and enticed by all the food. He came back that night and ate more bar oil and gas, we scared him away a few more times with the chainsaw and then eventually he just stopped coming back. I think the bar oil and gas may have got the best of him...
While all of this was going on we were getting more new starts and Red31 was going for multiple km runs every day. The final size of that fire was about 20 000 ha and took up most resources in the province. Bak Lake became the hub for the incident management team and logistics for the fire...