Page 21 - Flathead Beacon // 4.27.16

The Flathead Hotshots are entering their 50th re season.
GREG LINDSTROM | FLATHEAD BEACON
The hotshot crew from Hungry Horse pressed into the deep forest as smoke cloaked the skies above central Idaho. The group of men and women, coated in dirt and sweat after several long days and nights entrenched in the Rocky Mountains, were hell-bent on corralling a 500-acre blaze chewing through the Sawtooth National Forest.
On this fateful day in August, the Flathead Hotshots were preparing to light a burnout when the radios echoed with a startling message. The team had assigned a person to serve as lookout. While hiking a steep, rocky ridge, the experienced crewmember dislodged a 200-pound boulder that pinned him against a rockslide. The boulder crushed his leg and sheared his femur.
Faced with a sudden emergency, the hotshots initiated a “rapid extraction process” and hustled up the mountain to nd their injured colleague. Some members began cutting down trees and clearing brush to create an evacuation site for a helicopter while others treated the victim, removing the boulder and addressing the serious wound, which was bleeding heavily.
Within an hour, a helicopter arrived to transport the victim. But after landing, the aircraft tipped backward, breaking its internal fantail rotor, rendering it useless atop a high ridge.
Now, faced with a new emergency as an active re burned around them, the local hotshots, with the help of other crews, safely moved the victim a few hundred yards uphill, secured the broken helicopter and began cutting another evacuation point. Within two hours, a National Guard helicopter responded and successfully hoisted the victim from the ridgeline and transported him to the hos- pital, where he was treated and cleared days later with his leg intact.
The remaining hotshots turned their attention to the broken-down helicopter, lassoing a line around several
trees and pulling the large aircraft from the ridge before it tumbled downhill.
Overcoming the high-stress situation with calm e - ciency six years ago garnered the local team national rec- ognition and accolades.
Immediately after the incident, the crew resumed its regular routine: attacking the most volatile sections of large res, regularly in 16-hour shifts, living, working and sleeping in dirt, ash and soot under punishing conditions in sweltering heat for 14 days at a time all summer.
“What I like about this crew is we su er,” says Jim Dalen, a White sh native in his eighth year with the hot-
respected crews in the nation, dating back 50 years
this summer.
The country’s rst hotshot teams were formed in South-
ern California in the late 1940s as a rugged, multi-skilled group that got its name for attacking the hottest parts of wild res.
As restorms increasingly emerged on the nation’s landscape, the U.S. Forest Service and other federal agen- cies formed the Interagency Hotshot Program and estab- lished nine national crews in the early 1960s, including the Lolo Hotshots south of Missoula. The Bitterroot and Nez Perce national forests formed two separate teams in 1962, and in 1966, the Nez Perce crew, called the Slate Creek IR Crew, was moved to the Flathead National Forest, where the hotshot team was based at the Big Creek Ranger Station up the North Fork.
The local crew worked out of Big Creek until 1982, when its duty station was moved to the Glacier View Ranger Sta- tion. In the fall of 1993, the team moved to the newly estab- lished compound at the Hungry Horse Ranger District, where it remains today.
In this era of violent wild res burning larger and more often than anytime in the nation’s history, there are now
he Flathead Hotshots are among the oldest and most sT
hots. “And on this crew, we laugh while su ering.”
APRIL 27, 2016 // FLATHEADBEACON.COM
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