A Walk to Remember

Thursday, I made it down into the park as an employee for the first time. We spent the morning going over basic fire operations in the park, the first half of the afternoon attempting a prescirbed burn, then the final half of the afternoon conducting a PT hike on the Angels Landing Trail.



This weekend has been a pretty good one. It has also been emotional for me. Friday morning at work was spent PTing. While everyone else was doing their pack test, since I had already completed mine, I was given the option to run the 3 miles. Considering that I really didn't do much running before I started working, 3 miles was definitely a workout. Surprisingly, I'm doing too bad keeping up with the PT. I thought I was going to be miserably out of shape but asides from the altitude, nothing has really stopped me from keeping up with the group. If anything, I'm usually near the front of the pack for runs. After PT. We got ready for our weekend camping trip. Our trip was two fold. 1) Friday night's camp-out was a moment to bond with one another and go over what Saturday had in store for us. The entire reason we were in that area of Fishlake National Forest was to conduct a trial one of a staff hike of a fatality site that occurred on the Devil's Den Fire in 2006. This proved to be an excellent experience for all of us. Our manager and both of our lead firefighters knew Spencer Koyle personally which made the entire weekend really emotional and hard for them. We as firefighter hear about the type of fuel, weather, and topography that consistently kill firefighters all the time. Every year. Box canyons, chimneys, accumulations of dead and down, droughts, low RH's, Low FMC, high probabilities of ignition, etc. Not every firefighter gets to hear first hand experience from other firefighters that happened to be there when someone was killed. It was powerful to see the terrain that got Spencer in trouble. It was powerful to re-create the conditions, to see the exact spot where his body was found, to see the memorial created by people on the side of the mountain; it became very over-whelming to me to the point where I started to think about my own father's death and the death of those I knew and loved. I too broke into tears just standing on the ridge looking down into the drainage where Spencer was killed.

Overall, the past couple of days have been a blast. I'm starting to love working for Zion Helitack more and more just as I though I would. Bring on the fire season...