Oregon Dispatch, Part III

9/27/08 7:42 AM
After the spots yesterday, JT suspects that the fire won’t be downsized and transitioned to a Type 3 tomorrow, it may take a bit longer. We’ll see.

-9:13 PM
We went up to the same point as yesterday. We didn’t have to haul the rest of the hose, thank goodness. Our performance yesterday may have earned us some brownie points with Butch, our task force leader for our division. Instead, we dug some line around the spots from last night and mopped up a little in the black. Slow day, good day.

Camp is moving tomorrow, we’re packing up after breakfast. For the rest of the role, we’ll either be driving to breakfast and dinner or MREs for breakfast and drive to dinner. Hopefully it’ll be real food all the way.

We got done work early, so I got to shower. Yay! I now know that I can go at least a week.

9/28/09 7:27 AM
So we broke down camp this morning and circled up to find out that we’re actually getting demobed today, but we’re going to another fire that’s about 3 hours away.

Fire info:
Rattle Fire – 18,078 acres, 60% contained
Kitson Fire – 1000 acres, 25% contained

-8:55 PM
We got to the new fire camp, checked in and waited around for a bit. We found out that we were working that day, so we headed over to our division and mopped up for a bit. Tomorrow may be staging for IA (initial attack) stuff, who knows.
This fire seems better organized but there are more creepy-looking contractors, it seems.

We’re sleeping under the starts tonight because camp would take took long to break down, should we get called to some IA stuff. Never done it before, hopefully I won’t get a ton of bug bites out of the experience.

I have a cell signal! Woo!

-9:14 PM
Almost forgot … while mopping up today, Kira and I came up with a t-shirt idea for this role. On the front, it’ll say "Northern Colorado Mop Shots" (instead of Hot Shots) and on the back it’ll say, "I’ll grid your hot spot." Heh.

Also, there’s oak here. Ack! I haven’t seen any yet, but I feel itchy thinking about it. JT says the patches that have appeared on my hips are pack rash, but I dunno. Then again, it could be psychosomatic.