During the recent wave of unseasonably warm temperatures in late February, I found myself thinking about wildfire when I should have been out fishing. There might have been a time when mid-winter thoughts about wildfires was considered a bit paranoid, but with a warming climate and increasing numbers of people living in the critical urban/wildland interface it looks like wildfire —especially along Colorado’s Front Range — is in our future.

When I was a young man working as a U.S. Forest Service seasonal employee part of the job was wildland fire fighting. I wasn’t on a designated wildfire crew, but I could depend on being detailed to California in the autumn when the Santa Ana winds kicked up and turned manageable wildfires into gigantic, project fires that required additional firefighters to suppress.

In those times the Forest Service put together 20-man fire crews from the western states to help on wildfires whose size in terms of acreage was hard to believe. We received Interagency Fire crew training to fill in for hot shot crews that disbanded when their members went back to college or were laid off when fire danger was mistakenly considered to be low.

Fighting fire in California was a lot different then hiking into a lightning strike in Colorado’s backcountry and containing it before the sun went down. Wildfire in California was a big deal. Fire camps were established to feed and provide safe places for firefighters to sleep and get a shower. And most of the time they were just that, although I remember having to evacuate one camp before the wildfire, whose direction had changed due to a wind shift, was headed toward us.

There are other “stories” that stick in my mind, too, like securing fire hoses on top of a ridge and going hand-over-hand down them to safety when once again a wind change pushed the fire toward four 20-man wildfire crews that were staged on the ridge.

You learn other interesting wildfire facts like the red slurry you see being dropped on a wildfire on the evening news may contain fertilizer which burns when it comes in contact with your skin, especially if you’re sweating. There are all kinds of gallows humor associated with the single-man fire shelters that have saved many lives when fire overtakes a crew. In our time we called them “shake and bakes.” I never had to deploy my fire shelter, but only because I ran down the fire line away from fire that was charging up a gully and overtook the line. Others on the crew successfully deployed their shelters. There were, in fact, California crews that regularly deployed their fire shelters. I wondered if it was a strategy or if the firefighters had gotten caught in a tight spot. Let’s just say at the time California crews fought fire more aggressively than Coloradoans did.

During my California wildfire years, I worked one stretch of 25 straight 12-hour long night shifts where a few of the firefighters on our crew called their congressmen to get them off the fire line. For the most part on that wildfire, we worked on structure protection where we were tasked with trying to save homes, and helped evacuate neighborhoods when wildfire was headed their way.

If someone had told me we’d have California-like wildfires here in Colorado back then in the 1970s, I would have laughed. Then the Hayman wildfire happened.

I was out of the Forest Service seasonal employee game by then and was guiding anglers on the South Platte River “Dream Stream” section in South Park when I spotted the smoke plume. I told my anglers they were witness to a catastrophic wildfire smoke plume when they asked what it was. There’s been a lot more of them since then.

Now, I’m way past my firefighter days, and have even been evacuated myself from the path of wildfires a few times. They didn’t have to tell me twice, either. Even now I have a go bag by the door.

If there’s a lesson in any of my stories it would be it can happen to any of us and it can happen any time of year. Nonetheless, I wouldn’t live anywhere else, but I still have my go bag near the door.