MY FIRST FOREST FIRE

It was after 6 pm, our quitting time and four of us were gathered in the cook house finishing up our dinner.   There were seven of us, including the foreman assigned to the Hilton Spike Camp Guard Station on the Big Valley Ranger District of the Modoc National Forest in the summer of 1969.    Our days off were rotated in order to have at least four people always on duty during fire season.   Five of us, including the assistant foreman were seasonal employees.  The foreman, by the name of  Jack was a full-time employee at the GS-6 grade, who lived in a single wide trailer outside of Adin, where the District Ranger station was located.   Adin was a small community of 150 people, with a store, post office, church,  tavern and a saw mill.   The District Fire Control Officer (don't remember his name) always had a hand held radio set with him and would take it home after work hours or wherever he went, usually the tavern.  The tavern was the most popular place at the end of the work day where local ranchers, saw mill workers, loggers and Forest Service employees gathered.  

As we were cleaning up our dinner dishes the land line crank phone rang.   This phone line only went to one place, the Manzanita Mountain Lookout.    The lady on the lookout told us of a smoke she detected about two miles northeast of our location.   She also called in the smoke over the two-way radio to the Forest Dispatcher in Alturas, the Forest Supervisor's Headquarters.     The four of us got our hard hats, fire packs and headed out in the two fire trucks assigned to the station.   We made our way in the direction the lookout had given us, but we could not see any smoke due to the flat terrain, plus there was a maize of old logging roads everywhere.   As both fire trucks stopped to look at the map, I got out and stood on the top of the water tank on the bigger truck where I could see a column of smoke 400 or 500 feet from where we were parked.    The assistant foreman told two of us to take hand tools and walk up to the smoke as he and the other driver would try to find the nearest road to the smoke.    When the two of us found the smoke it was a ground fire burning through pine needles about a tenth of an acres in size and we easily got a hand line constructed around it.    We could see it started from a lightning strike to a pine tree in the center of the fire.  

When the fire trucks arrived on a nearby road the assistant foreman called in the fire situation to the District Fire Control Officer.   We could all hear the radio conversation over the truck load speaker as the Fire Control office yelled out, "hey Jack, your crew is on a fire."  From all the background noise we could tell all the overhead was at the tavern.   With the water from the trucks we were able to completely extinguish the fire before returning to the station.   The next day we returned to the fire to make sure is was out and Jack was with us.