A cigarette is tossed out of a car and smolders in the dry brush and weeds lining the highway.
Between the wind from passing cars and the dried-out brush, the fire spreads, well, like wildfire.
At a campsite in the forest, a campfire not fully extinguished creeps back to life, crawling towards the pine needles and dead plants littering the site.
What starts as a small spark grows to create a larger blaze which, in its hunger, starts to consume the forest.
Children play with fireworks, anticipating the Fourth of July, but a firework lands in the top of a tree.
During a thunderstorm, after weeks of record heat, a lightning bolt hits a dried-out tree stump just right and starts a blaze.
Wildfires have a variety of starting points and cause varying degrees of damage. But wildfires are also a key part of keeping many forests healthy.
During the 2019 fire season, the National Interagency Fire Center reported over 260,000 acres of Idaho forest burned in wildfires.
These fires cost millions in damage when they reach homes or communities.
Fire by numbers
Penelope Morgan, a retired University of Idaho professor, said fire is part of the land’s personality.
Before the 1900’s, fires in the United States burned about five to eight times more land than they do now, meaning 1 to 2 million acres of Idaho burned on average, Morgan said.
Fire season in Idaho today is longer, Morgan said, having increased by 32 days since 1984.
But fire as Morgan said, is part of the land’s personality — it is neither good nor bad.
“Fires consume fuels, rejuvenate vegetation, release soil nutrients and provide landscape diversity and habitat for birds, mammals and plants. But they also create smoke, threaten people and property, can cause erosion and can kill some trees,” Morgan said.
When fires enter the wildland-urban interface (WUI), the zone where wildland gives way to human development, is when fire becomes a problem, Morgan said — and this area is growing.
From 1990 to 2010, a 20-year span, the WUI increased in area by 72% in Idaho. And based on the 2010 census, around 170,000 Idaho homes are considered at a high risk for attracting wildfire.
Homeowners in these areas can do a variety of things to protect their homes, from thinning the trees in their yard to practicing fire-wise landscaping.
But these fires sometimes get too close to cities and need to be stopped — and that’s where wildland firefighters come in.
Summer of fires
Jessie Faulkner, a UI junior, said she got into firefighting one summer because a boss recommended it.
“I actually worked for the Forest Service right after I graduated high school, and my boss from the Forest Service suggested that I fight fire the next year so I could pay for my school, and I fought fire for the Bureau of Land Management (BLM),” Faulkner said.
Throughout the summer of 2018, Faulkner said she was on 15 to 20 fires.
“The first fire was like ‘oh my gosh, I have no idea what to do,’ even though I had training,” Faulkner said. “You learn throughout the summer and you just get more comfortable with it. They never put you in a situation where you were in harm’s way or anything.”
The beginning of Faulkner’s summer went slow, she said, so she went to Colorado for two weeks with the engine she was on.
It wasn’t until July that her fire season picked up. But the downtime at the beginning of that summer was spent doing other jobs like cutting juniper.
Fires can range from small to large, with varying needs for crews. Some firefighters will dig to bare soil by hand, while others use machinery.
Bare soil is necessary to help stop fires from spreading because when the fuel the fire consumes is gone, it’s harder for it to spread.
To reach the bare soil, some wildland firefighters will take tools and manually dig to reach the bare soil. Others like Faulkner, used machines.
After the flames die down
But what happens after the fire is under control? For many firefighters, the job is far from over.
“Once you kind of got the fire under control and there wasn’t flames, it would take about three to five more days sometimes for the flames to go completely out,” Faulkner said.
As the fire season and the summer wrapped up, Faulkner looked back at her time with the BLM.
“Now I can say I did it,” Faulkner said. “It really added to my life in general, all in all, I do not regret the experience at all. It really taught me a lot about myself and taught me about what I want to do moving forward.”
Story by Kali Nelson
Photos by Dakota Brown
Design by Taylor Lund