Saving Lives: Gear, Skills And Training For Worst Case Scenario Readiness With J.T. Sohr

If you happen to be a bystander as an emergency situation takes place, would you rather be the person who just stands by helpless and clueless, or the person who happens to be trained and equipped enough to save the day?

Today we’re talking about saving lives, and we have the perfect person to talk to us about the importance of having the right gear, skills, and training to respond to emergency scenarios.

A little about our guest...

JT Sohr is a 21-year veteran of the wildland fire service with the BLM, USFS, NPS and ODF... He has recently been in the news for making a swift-water rescue save of a 91-year-old man who ran off the road into the Lochsa River in Idaho...

His training, gear, and knowledge of the area proved indispensable for this rescue... He believes that these skills (and medical, technical rescue, and other skills) are great to have, and they are a valuable tool to be a master of – because you never know when you'll need them!

You can learn more about JT and stay in the loop with what he’s up to by following him on Facebook.

You know the drill...

Stay safe, stay savage...

Enjoy!

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Saving Lives: Gear, Skills And Training For Worst Case Scenario Readiness With J.T. Sohr

This episode is going to be brought to you by our friends over at Mystery Ranch, Built for the Mission. Let me tell you, they have been giving back to the Wildland Fire community for a long time and they're going to keep continuing to do so. Why do I appreciate them so much? It's because they care. They care so much that they're even throwing out thousand-dollar scholarships for you to advance your Wildland Fire career with some professional development.

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Little story. Dana Gleason, the Founder, the OG, if you will, of Mystery Ranch, went down to SoCal, tied in with a couple of South Ops shot crews and he said, “How can we make going to work a little bit better for you?” Those two Hotshot crews poured in their heart and soul and helped develop what you have on your back. They are all about giving back to the community and working with the community. If you want to find out more, go over to www.MysteryRanch.com and check it out. Make sure to check out that Backbone Series. It is awesome.

The show is also going to be brought to you by our premier coffee sponsor and that's going to be none other than Hotshot Brewery. It's kickass coffee for a kickass cause. A portion of the proceeds will always go back to The Wildland Firefighter Foundation. What else do they do? They've done quite a bit and continue to do so.

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Last but not least, the show is not sponsored by or brought to you by but it is one of those close relationships I have with Bethany over there at The American Wildfire Experience. I want to show her some love for as long as I can because I believe in her cause and mission. She's got some rad stuff going on. If you don't know what The American Wildfire Experience is, they house The Smokey Generation. I know for a fact a lot of people out there have seen that rolling around. It's pretty freaking awesome.

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There was this one dude out there who moved mountains with spoons and it's kickass. They're a Smokey Generation Grant recipient. The sky is the limit. Tell the story. It's awesome. If you want to find out more, go over to www.Wildfire-Experience.org and you can check it all out. Bethany, you have a kickass organization over there. Keep it up.

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What's going on? Welcome back. I hope everybody's doing well. I hope those folks that are returning from Canada. For the folks that are over in the soggy side of Canada, I hope your feet are dry finally. For the folks that were on the not-so-dry side of Canada, it looks like you're going to be starting to return home pretty soon. Lower 48 is starting to dry out. It looks like it's starting to pop off at least but your boots will be dry. It looks like fire season is finally starting to start. Hurry up and wait. It's not a matter of if the fuels decided to dry out but more of a matter of when.

This episode is going to be a pretty cool episode. I’ve got a gentleman who is out of the Nez Perce-Clearwater National Forests. He's got many years in fire. He's also been a former smoke jumper and worked for ODF, Forest Service, the BLM and the National Park Service. He's got a pretty dynamic and extensive background. He is a huge proponent of being prepared, having the right gear and getting the proper training because you never know when you're going to use it.

His story is one of those cases I’ve heard in the news but the gentleman we're about to interview is the gentleman who made the save on a 91-year-old patient who had his car go off the road and into practically the middle of the Lochsa River over there in Idaho. It’s pretty wild. This guy is awesome. He's got a hell of a story to tell. You should read this because you never know when you're training and prepared and the right gear having that stuff on you when that will come in handy. With that, I'd like to introduce my good friend, J.T. Sohr. Welcome to the show.

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In this episode, I’ve got my good friend J.T. Sohr. What's up? Making saves. What's going on here?

It’s another day on the river.

Tell us about yourself.

I'm the Superintendent for the Selway Type 1 Wildland Fire Module at Moose Creek Ranger District on the Nez Perce-Clearwater. I’m super stoked to be right on the Selway, right on the Lochsa and back in some of my old stomping grounds in Idaho. I’m originally from Oregon. I grew up in John Day. Both my parents were in fire for the Forest Service. I spent most of my summers on the lookout with my mom or hanging out at my dad's office, who was doing fuels and FMO stuff.

My first fire was when I was eight. We had a fire come up the hill at our house. Dad happened to be coming in from the woods at the right time. We got back from a vacation with my mom and some other friends. A firetruck rolls by our house and he's like, “It's closer to the neighbors. We got to go there first.” Mom started pulling the hose. I ran into my room and pulled on my green pants, hiking boots and yellow shirt that mom made for me.

About the time Dad rolled home, we snagged a Pulaski and a shovel and went down the hill to try to hit it. In the sweet grass, you couldn't do much with two hand tools. That was my first time going in the black. It was a crazy afternoon. I got to do some mop-up in my yard with the hill attack crew who came over, all the guys from the forest I knew at the time. That was my true introduction to getting after some fire which doomed me for the rest of my life.

That's where you caught the firebug. Your Fisher-Price yellow and greens on at eight years old. That's wild.

It was bad enough that I'd have friends over it and we'd go dig line around the house. I was warped from the beginning but what a cool way to grow up and have that background coming into a career too.

You don't hear that backstory very often. I’ve heard people doing their first IA, helping out on their property but that's a lot different than doing an IA when you're eight years old, practically. J.T., you've been in the media. You got a little bit of attention and I want to say that is some badass stuff. I’ve been following along with the story arc and what happened that day. Why don't you give a little bit of insight into why you've been in the news and all that other stuff, making saves?

I was driving back from my office back to Missoula. Strangely enough, my brother lives in Missoula. He jumps over here and we spend a lot of time on the river, early season when we can while the water's good. I had my boat, my packer and all my gear, thinking of another weekend on the river with the bro. I came around the corner and there were some trucks pulled off. My buddy, Jeff, who does develop direct for the Forest Service here in the district, I saw his truck and I had a question for him.

I had no idea what was going on. I pulled up to his truck and he had this very excited look on his face. He is like, “Do you have your boat?” I'm like, “Yeah, what's up?” He's like, “There's a car off the side. They're 50 feet out in the river. It's got one pasture. He's an older gentleman. We've been trying to flag somebody out of the boat for half an hour. He's already been out there for 30 to 40 minutes.”

This is cold water too.

This is Lochsa's runoff. It's been coming down. Thankfully, it wasn't at 18,000 or 20,000. It spikes like that.

It’s 2 feet per second. Do they go by per second or minute on the river?

It’s 2 feet per second. To set that up, the low water for the river on the rumble is less than 1,000. Medium water is 10,000. That's spicy but very doable. High water is 20,000-plus. It's raftable but no rocks are showing. Everything's crazy fast. Luckily, we're at about 5,000 that day and there were some rocks sticking out in not a sketchy place. This guy cut a corner too tight, dropped a tire into the gravel and pulled in about 20 feet down the bank, straight into the water. Luckily, there are no trees or boulders. When I first got out to him, he was like, “I was spinning circles out here a bobber floating down the river.”

His entire car was floating down the river?

Yeah, the whole car with him inside of it. Luckily, it has minimal damage. He went and hit a reflector and hit the water but he hung up on this rock under his car, facing upstream with water over the hood, headed to the windshield and was sitting there up to about his waist and water. We knew he was going to have some potential hypothermia and potential shock. Being out there for almost an hour, I was already thinking like, “What are we going to do when we get this guy out? We got to get him warmed up. First and foremost, we have to get to him.”

That's the scary thing about hypothermia though. It rapidly deteriorates. If you're hypothermic enough and you move somebody too fast, you'll throw them right into a cardiovascular event. You'll trigger their heart to go into a heart attack. I don't know if it's afib, asystole or whatever it is but I don't know. It's been a long time since I’ve done my AEMT stuff. Hypothermia is sketchy, especially in someone who's at risk and elderly.

You start talking about those long periods too. That's what we dealt with and I’ll get to it but your body stiffens up. Your body isn't what you want it to be. Being assisted, we had to deal with that. It was cool. There were already probably 8 to 12 people stopped. One guy was driving a semi and he stopped. Some people saw him go in, which was super lucky because where he floated down to was behind a bunch of trees you could not see from the highway.

Had somebody not seen him go in, there's a chance nobody would've known he was back there. Worst case scenario then. One of the truckers stopped and he drove down to the call box a couple of miles, called it in and then turned around and came back because he wanted to make sure the guy was okay and check on him.

Jeff was from the Forest Service and probably about another dozen or so. People were there. They were talking to him, keeping him calm, making sure he was okay, flagging people down, trying to find somebody with a boat. It was a Thursday afternoon. The weather was nasty so there weren't a ton of boaters out yet. Even driving up the main section of Lochsa where we usually float, there were no boats out. It was an empty Thursday.

It was one of those things where I had everything. As I'm putting my dry suit on, I'm laughing to myself because what are the chances that I am in the right place, at the right time and hoping for the right person with the right skills and training? This is something I’ve not dreamed about by any means but worst case scenario plan for as I'm making the two-hour drive to Missoula late at night and stuff. I’ve run the situation through my head.

This is the exact scenario. This is something that you've trained for. You do swift water rescue.

Part of that is we do a lot of float trips with a bunch of other fire buddies. We go international usually every winter and even stuff here in the States. Having that training to be prepared to have more of a diverse skillset and be able to step in and help if it's needed is the culmination of all that stuff. It's one thing to throw your buddy a throw bag or help your buddy get unpinned off a rock but to go full-on bystander who's not in a PFD and doesn't want to be there, did not mean to be there on the river at all and to be able to go in and assist was super cool. I’m super stoked that I was able to do that.

That's no joke. Let's be honest here though. The Lochsa is a dangerous river. People oftentimes underestimate water. The American River over here on the West Coast is right down the street. I got all 3 forks within a 2-hour drive for me. People don't realize that those are some of the very few Class 5 rapids in the United States. People get way sucked into it. They wildly underestimate their capabilities or the speed of the water or the temperature of the water and they get themselves in situations. That's people that do this stuff for fun. That's people that go in whitewater rafting.

However, somebody was looking out for the guy you made to save because if he wasn't seen going off the road and into the water, there's a good chance that no one would've said anything or even noticed. You're driving on the road and you can't look and focus on two things at once. He got lucky. You come along and make entry into the water, do your raft and everything that and you make the save. That's pretty incredible.

A lot of the news articles and stuff is like, “J.T. Sohr,” but first off, the folks that were there talking to him and got us flagged in and pulled into that situation were huge. It's a fairly remote piece of highway and the fact that it ended up being twenty-something people were stopped there helping by the time we had them loaded on the ambulance is awesome. A lot of these things you can do with a big group of people. Trying to do it myself or 2 or 3 of us is impossible. It wouldn't have worked.

Maybe it would've worked but it would've been super sketchy and putting us at risk. The teamwork that people threw into this was incredible. We had guys that were like, “Do you have ropes?” “Yes, I got ropes.” He's like, “I'm going to go set safety down the river.” That's taken care of. I can wipe that off my plate of things to think about.

Was it a safety line, something that goes across the river so you can grab onto it in case?

Sure. It's usually a throw bag. If I was to lose my footing and start floating down, I'm probably going to swim too short but somebody can hit me with that rope bag and pull me in quick too. It makes it simple. More importantly, if the driver goes down or somebody on the bank slips in, they have something. They can grab that throw bag and rope and get sucked back in.

Another dude grabbed my pack up. I tossed him my pump and he pumped it up. He had that thing pumped up, ready to go with a line tight on it before I was suited up. All these little things that eat time are being mitigated by somebody else doing it. I can focus on getting my gear on. The whole time, I haven't even seen the car. I'm running through my head like, “Am I going to going to swim out? Do I use the boat? Do I go out and then throw a line back? How are we going to do this?”

One of the tenets of swift water rescue is reach, throw, row, go. That's minimizing the risk to the responder. If you can reach out to somebody, awesome. If you can throw them something, great but there comes a point where maybe the only thing you have left as an option is to swim out to them. It's the most amount of risk.

If you can reach out to somebody, awesome. If you can throw them something, great. But there comes a point where the only thing you have left as an option is to swim out to them.

In my head, my first thought was like, “I can swim out of this car, grab the guy, hold onto him and somebody else can pull me in.” We've done it in training and for messing around. It's something I know I can do but I have a boat. The boat might create some options for us. I let somebody tie a line to the boat. I paddled out to the car and I have that connection to the shore. I have that extra option right off the bat. Mind you, this is only the third time I’ve used my packed raft. We used it twice in the spring and then we've been using my big boat a bunch. I'm not even super comfortable in the pack yet.

You're still trying to figure it out.

I sat in there and I was in my full confidence, “I’ve got this. I know what I'm doing. Let's make it happen.” That was a good feeling. At no point during the whole thing was I stressed out or felt like I was fumbling or doing anything. Everything slowed down and everything was very methodical. It's crazy how a little bit of training goes a long way for any of these high-stress, chaotic environments.

Once I got out to him, my first thing was making contact. I was able to use my river knife on my life jacket and cut the airbag out of the way so I could have a better conversation with him. I swear he looks at me and he goes, “Are you fire and rescue?” I said, “Yeah, more or less.” I swear he looks past me and at the bank. He goes, “Are you the only one?” I was like, “Yes, sir. I'm the only one for right now.” He goes, “Are there more people coming?” I'm like, “Yeah. They're an hour out. We're going to do what we can for you.”

“You're in a remote country. Next level care is at least 1 hour or 1.5 hours away.”

Jeff had gone through our dispatch and asked for our mod to come up with a raft from our boat shed from the recreation side of the office. I put four of my guys through swift water rescue because we're on the sail and the Lochsa here. It might be a good thing for people to be aware of. They're en route in the truck with a boat. We have firefighters from Powell’s office coming down and we're almost dead center between the two.

Once I was there, I started talking to him. Another guy from the bank, a younger guy, Keegan Francher, works down in White Bird as a shuttle driver for boats. He's like, “I don't have any whitewater experience but I can get out there and help you,” and he did. He was able to crawl in the back seat and we took a couple minutes trying to formulate a plan. Originally my thought was maybe we get him out the driver's door or through the driver's window but he was cold enough that that wasn't going to be an option.

He lost flexibility in his body. Was he starting to rigor up too? Hypothermia.

When I got there, he was very alert and oriented. He had a good conversation with me. He was like, “I need to get some dry clothes when I get to the bank. Can you grab my personal belongings stuff?” I was like, “I’m going to come back for those but we’ll get them.”

Your number one priority is the patient.

With Keegan in the back seat, we also looked at going out the back hatch of the vehicle. There's a little slack water that we could have used but there is stuff in the back end, hardly any room between the seat, roof and back. Side door it is. The way the car was on the rock and you can see it in the pictures, that back door has a little bit of water pushing on it. We were able to open it and put my back against it to keep it open.

You're opening it into the current from what I understand.

Keegan was in the back seat and lifted him into the back and then I was able to get his legs into the boat. The hardest part of the whole thing was probably getting the rest of his body into the boat and situated without flipping it, dropping him in the water and getting tangled in the ropes that we had. It was a little touch and go for a second there. Once we had him sitting, it was like, “We're good to go.”

We had the ropes to the shore so people had a hold of it but the boat was fumbling around in the current so we put a quick hitch in the ropes, threw a carabiner around it and threw it to the driver's side seatbelt. When I was ready and the driver was in the boat, I handed Keegan one of my spare knives. I had three knives in my life jacket for similar circumstances that you never think you're going to have to happen. You're going to drop one of them in the water.

It’s a 100% chance you're going to drop something. 2 is 1.

He reaches up, cuts the seatbelt and away we go back to the bank. It was a real quick, easy pendulum. I swam downstream from the boat thinking, “If either one of them dumps out or lets go, I can grab him and then hopefully, the guy with the throw bag can hit me and straight to the bank.”

You're not in the boat. You're penduling him over or you're following behind the boat in case they dump or something like that or catch a rock and they tip over. You have another system of checks right there.

It's more backups to your backup.

Little systems of redundancy, that's what I was looking for.

Saving Lives: It helps to have backups to your backup, like little systems of redundancy.

I love some redundancy. When we got to the shore, there were twenty people standing there ready to help. By this time, Idaho County Sheriffs and Idaho Highway Patrols were on the scene. While I was getting ready, I'm thinking about hypothermia and nobody else had sleeping bags. I had a sleeping bag in my truck. We had my sleeping bag and Jeff's pad. We were able to pull him out of the boat, get him straight into the sleeping bag, pulled off his wet socks and then instantly, there were ten people lifting him and dragging him through the trees up to the pavement.

Once we got him up there, there was an EMT and a paramedic already on the scene, not from an ambulance, just passersby. They're going straight into patient assessments. We've got people helping carry the boat back up. All these things are happening at once. I'm still in awe of how smoothly everything went, which was great.

The ambulance showed up within ten minutes of him getting out of the water and being up on the pavement. What an awesome timing. Those folks didn't have to go in and try to fight the current. While they were getting him on the gurney and stuff, I swam back out to the car again, grabbed the driver's personal stuff that he wanted and swam back with it. He was good to go and off went to Grand View Hospital.

I can only imagine rope rescue. Even the simplest rope rescue scenario is a complicated process. It takes an army of people that do certain things. You got to be very specific with what you're doing. It takes time. I cannot imagine trying to formulate a strategy with you arriving on scene, making entry to the water and then having a gaggle of strangers that probably have no basis in swift water rescue but it's you and your buddy telling people what to do and delegating some duties. Making the save, coming back to shore, then going back out, grabbing his bag or personal belongings and then coming back. That's pretty cool. A bunch of strangers came together, had no idea what they were doing and made it all happen. That's crazy and insane.

Huge props to everybody that showed up there to help. I could not have done it solo by any means. I happened to have the gear. Even Jeff. Jeff's a river ranger. He has lots of experience on the river too. He's like, “I don't have my stuff with me.” I was like, “I do. Let's make this happen.” I have the dispatch log because I was curious about some times. He called in at 4:55 and canceled all the incoming units exactly 30 minutes later. It was 30 minutes from me getting on the scene to canceling everything because the guy’s loaded in an ambulance.

That's super quick from my understanding of swift water. That's lightning speed, get stuff done mode. Usually, you have to stage out. I’ve seen Reno Fire do it because the Truckee River comes through here in Reno, Nevada. I’ve seen them do the training exercises and they're going to stage out areas for over 3-quarters of a mile of river. It takes a lot of time to set that stuff up. It's not a fast process. To get into the water, have resources inbound, make the grab in 30 minutes and have a continuation of care on the way or him going to the continuation of care is impressive.

It was sweet how smooth everything went. I don't know how everybody was on the same page. I'm so used to being an IC or an engine captain. I'm usually running the scene. I don't like medical stuff so I hired EMTs so they can deal with patient care. I'm like, “I’ll call in the helicopter. I’ll talk to dispatch and give updates.” This was straight up. Jeff already had that dialed and I was like, “I'm going to go do the hands-on-the-ground fun stuff.”

What got you into swift water rescue in the first place? Whitewater rafting and all that jazz. Is that one of those things that pushed your passion towards doing some swift water rescue training and all that stuff?

I was in Boy Scouts growing up. I got into Eagle Scout and did all that stuff. With that, I got a lot of cool adventures outside. I started rafting when I was thirteen. I remember my very first raft, I jump on the boat and look at the oars like, “This seems easy enough. I can probably do this.” I got a couple of awesome scoutmasters and my mom was always involved with us. They were very into letting us take the reins and have those opportunities to grow and experience things. In our three-day flow trip, I rode the whole thing except one rapid which was Class 3. Nothing crazy but I was pretty small and probably was not ready to do that anyway.

I kept that going for 1 or 2 float trips a year, maybe through high school. In college, I'd worked through the fall doing fire as late as I could. I have a little vacation for Christmas and I was going to school from January through May most of the time. One year, I took a short year. I did one term at Eastern Oregon University part-time. That spring, I took a bunch of S classes through Central Oregon Community College and was trying to bolster my career and get some of those classes thinking, “If I get these and pay out of pocket, maybe I’ll not have to be stuck in class. I can go get some IAs in June when we all go back to work.”

It was very selfish reasons but also what a good way to get some additional courses. One of the things that my mom had brought up was she stumbled onto this whitewater rescue class over in Eugene. I was like, “That seems something that would be beneficial to me.” I took that first one with Rescue 3 in Eugene back in ‘07. Those are skills that stuck with me ever since. They're usually good for about three years. It's like a red card. If you don't show that you're doing something, it's going to lapse. You have to do it again.

When I was down in the Mojave National Preserve, we would deal with flash floods every year. People try to drive across them. They get their car stuck and then try to walk back. We didn't have any fatalities or anything crazy but it's still a thing that we had to be aware of and deal with. With the right amount of justification, bringing this up and showing that we have the stats that this is something we do, I got my swift water training recertified in Missoula.

I was pretty fresh. A lot of it wasn't new but it was great to hear it from a new instructor to test my skills, get back in that the rope stuff again and know that not only do I know this stuff but taking the class the second time, I know this stuff. It's a good refresher but I'm not learning it for the first time, which is a good feeling.

I'm probably jumping to a pretty big conclusion here but I want to say it's like the fundamentals. You can't beat fundamentals. If you're an IC 5, a crew boss or something like that, sit in on a firefighter tube refresher or a Firefighter S-131 training. Sit in on that and see what's changed from the last time you went through it. It's like riding a bike but it's still fundamentals. There's something to be said about that.

You were able to justify getting retrained back into swift water rescue and you applied it to a very real-life situation. It goes to show that these little training opportunities, especially for people in a unique position yourself or anybody who's in Wildland Fire, the stuff you do for fun can also translate to real-world skills. If you're into medical stuff, rafting or medical stuff like trauma, you can make a difference and there's a lot to be said about that.

Mechanical skills, welding skills, carpentry skills, anything that's not specific to fire, those are all skills that, A) I probably don't have and, B) What makes a better team than diversity in the background? I'm so used to being at remote stations. I'm at a remote station. I was in a hole in the wall of California. If I had somebody at welds, that's something that I don't have to worry about taking the truck two hours out of town to get worked on. If we need to work on something in the shop, we need a new workbench. If I have somebody that can do carpentry, awesome.

When people come to me, they're like, “What do I need to do to get a fire job? What quals do I need?” If you can find a S-130 or S-190 on your own, you're a step ahead but I will put you through it. If you have EMT, CDL or welding, any non-fire related skill is still a skill that's going to benefit the team somehow. One of my interview questions typically is, “What do you bring to the team from the fire aspect?” The follow-up question to that is, “What do you bring to the team that's not related to fire? How are you fleshing out the team to make us better as a whole and more functional and diverse?”

Any non-fire related skill is still a skill that's going to benefit the team somehow.

At the end of the day, with wildland fire and all fire, it’s the people that keep you safe at night, the guardian community. I'm talking military or first responders of any sort like LEOs, fire, EMS and all that stuff. It's one of those professional problem solver careers. You have to constantly solve problems. Could you imagine how valuable a tire mechanic someone who worked at Tires Plus or Les Schwab for 2 or 3 years, came into fire and then could fix your stuff on the line? That is super valuable. These are tangential skills that apply in weird ways but when they apply in weird ways when you need them, they become the most valuable skill in the world.

You go to whatever tire shop that you go to and you chat with those guys. Make friends everywhere you go and talk to everybody. I’ve had guys who are like, “Fire seems super cool. I just don’t know how to get into it.” It's like, “Here's my business card. Give me a call in a couple of months. You'll have 1 month or 2 to get a heads up before you apply for a job.” I’m providing those opportunities. They don't always take it up on me but if I can offer somebody an opportunity to do something they're interested in like fire and bringing some diverse skillset, what a good deal. That's good for me, the crew and the agency. We're building from the bottom up and that's so cool.

I have a theory about that. I'm a firm believer. I'm in the camp of the best firefighters are ranchers and fuck-ups. There is something you said about that. We're all a little bit of a rebellious type but typically, if you're cut from that cloth, you have to figure out a lot of things and problem-solve. If you're a rancher, you're going to be in the same boat. You're fixing all your machinery and figuring out how stuff works. You harvest, have to fix a combine, do a branding or something like that.

It's off-road driving and fixing stuff with bailing twine. With those two skills, growing up in Oregon and hiring kids from the farm, that was very simple. I knew what I was getting and when I moved to Southern California, we were getting kids from the city. There was nothing wrong with that. That's awesome. I had kids that had never been camping before on our first fire roll. One of them is a Hotshot. He's an awesome guy. You might have nothing but after a while, you'll have everything if you have the right attitude and you have the initiative to get after it, suck it up for a little while and try those new things.

There’s a willingness to learn new skills too. That's a big one as well. If you haven't had exposure to the outdoors and you jump into fire, you're going to get a crash course into what the outdoors are real quick, especially wildlands. If you're exposed to that stuff throughout your early years, that's going to add to your skillset. Even if they're getting out of fire, I hate it when people say, “Fire's the only thing I’ve known. I don't know anything else. I don't know what I'd do.” I'm all like, “You can do pretty much anything. You can figure it out.”

If you haven't had the exposure to the outdoors and you jump into fire, you're going to get a crash course into what the outdoors are really quick.

I’ve had plenty of men and women who spent two years in fire and they were either like, “I don't want to be here long-term. I'm here for a couple of summers to pay for school or I'm here until I can go work for county. I'm here until I figure out what I want to do.” That's awesome and I’ll work with that. My job is to give you some cool skillset so you can go do anything. All we do is manage the chaos. That's all firefighters do. I should have that on my resumé because I love that.

We do so many different things, especially if you have a crew leader or overheads like, “Let's go find stuff to do. We don't need to sit. We're going to go find a project. We're going to go help the archeologist folks and the range tech put in this new fence.” Sometimes it sucks but at the same time, you're building those relationships with other people and other parts of your agency. You're also diversifying your skillset. That's all stuff that is applicable somewhere else. In the medical field or teaching, it doesn't matter. Fire will set you up for success across the board.

It's funny that you say that too because I'm in tech. I work for a tech startup and I used to be a wildfire. Granted the tech company that I work for is called BurnBot. I'm the Marketing Director. It's in the wildfire realm but if you want a crash course in how to handle the day-to-day chaos of working in a tech startup, do a year in a Hotshot crew.

My buddy Simon is the Ops Director over there and he's been on my show a couple of times. He says the same thing. He's like, “If you want some true skills that can pretty much apply to a lot of different things, fire is one of your number one teachers of those skills.” You'd be surprised. I hate it when people sell themselves short and say they can't do anything else.

It's important to remember too that most people start as the Firefighter 2, Pulaski motor and hose dragger. That's awesome. You spend 1 year or 2 there and then the opportunities are endless. If you want to go into tech stuff, there are IT positions on teams, the GIS side and the resource advisor stuff. If you dip your toe and you don't love it but you still want to be involved, there are so many cool ways to be involved with fire and the all-risk side of things as a whole that can set you up. You don't have to stay Feds. Although it's a good opportunity. Anything in fire is setting you up for whatever's going to end up being next for you, retirement or whatever else.

We have this running joke between my group that do these raft trips together. There are about 12 to 15 of us and usually about 10 go on a trip per year. Most of us are firefighters. Most of us have jumped at this point. It's hilarious because we have a couple of buddies who are not in fire. They’re awesome dudes, super dialed at rafting and get along good with the group but they always give us so much crap because they're like, “We pull up on the bank. Everybody lines out and you chain stuff to the bank. Five minutes later, everything's done.” They always call it a fire line. We're like, “It's not a fire line. It's a chain.” It's so funny to see the outside influence because we don't see it.

We step up. You're used to a crew and an engine. You grab stuff and go. People from the outside of our realm are like, “That's efficient.” You don't need to be told. You need to be asked. Somebody takes charge and everything gets done. That's why our group is so rad to go out with. We had an emergency in Argentina with a flash flood. It blocked up the river that we were on 3 hours into a 14-day trip. A lot of things are going on and we're trying to figure out like, “Do we carry our gear to the hill? Do we secure the boats to this rock beach that there's nothing to tie to?”

Even the folks that weren't in fire, they integrated in quickly and we got boats tied up. We got gear moved quickly with a chain and got everything to high ground. When the natural dam burst, they had been blocking stuff up. Our buddy hit his whistle and we knew it was time to get out and get the high ground. Within a couple of hours, things were back to normal and things had chilled out. It shows that going from a very normal standard day operation, you throw something crazy into it. We adjust and make some tweaks to our operation. Everybody's safe.

We have what we need. Our pace is already in place. We know what's going to happen if our boats go down the river without us. We're like, “We'll wait and get somebody across in a kayak. They can hike back to the camp. It's only 10 miles.” We have an SAT film and these things in place. It's not that much different from fire in a dynamic situation like that. It’s an awesome group to go with for those reasons. You can be out on a boat or out in the woods doing something to come across something. It's like being at work again. Things fall into place and you have that chaos management.

That rapid problem-solving capability that firefighters have. The most extreme scenario for a normal person or someone who's experiencing something sketchy for the first time is they get a little freaked out. You look at the fire people over there and they're like, “No, let's do this. We got this. This is nothing. It's not a big deal.” You can handle normal people's chaos. It’s mundane or routine sometimes for you. It's funny. It's one of those commonalities between Wildland folks.

Even in the Wildland side of things, you can see somebody that's been there for a long time. They're going to hopefully keep their calm and be very chill. Even take somebody that's second or third year to fourth or fifth year and you can already hear that change on their voice in the radio. You can see the wheels in their head but they're problem-solving. They're doing their risk management.

The blocks that they're putting together in their head, maybe a year before they would've done it but it would've taken a while or they wouldn't have been able to communicate it as well. Those little increments of time and experience build things pretty quickly. It's awesome to see people go from the FFT2 up to the single resource level and how much they can change and how many more inputs they can handle and manage.

It's cool to see that development cycle. It's like you're saying going from Firefighter 2 to single resource boss. It’s the amount of stuff that's laid on a single resource boss. We're not even talking beyond that division. I couldn't even imagine an IC 3 or 2 or whatever above that chain. It's a dramatic difference between the number of responsibilities you have as a Firefighter 2 versus a single resource boss or even an IC 5, arguably. It's wild.

We always talk. Down at the hole in the wall in the desert, we didn't have a ton of big fires so there were a lot of Type 5s and a few Type 4s along the freeway and stuff. We were big into sand tables. You don't have to get crazy technical with it, although you can and that makes it a little more buy-in to it. Putting people in the position above what they are, whether that's a second year being in charge of a squad or an FT1 being in charge of an engine, put them in those positions around a table where you can have a little bit of dialogue and an AR. Throw them the hard challenging things and make that the most dynamic environment you can think of.

When you go out in the field, you can watch them relax and they're like, “I have these slides. I’ve done something similar.” It's so cool to be able to see that and watch that but being on the receiving end of that too and doing sand tables and stuff, I know it's not perfect. It's not the real-time stuff but I remember one of the things I did here was like, “I didn't do this or I did do that and I shouldn't have.”

You already have some of those slides without ever having gone and done the thing on the ground. Not only that but the people that are AR-ing with you are also building the slides even though they didn't do the thing. The fire world with its ARs and some of the redundancy we have and the training opportunity is a cool culture to be in.

The cool thing about a situation training scenarios like that, especially with sand tables, is it's a safe environment to fuck up in and learn from your mistakes. That's good because you can apply all those things to the real world when you're on the line stuff. You already know what to do and what not to do. Every situation's going to be dependent on the situation. It's going to be very case-dependent. One thing that will always stick with me is we had this sand table that was outside of fire. The whole training scenario went with the idea of a small aircraft crashing and starting maybe a small fire or something like that.

Whether you’re the first person on the scene, what do you do? You have a crashed aircraft and injuries. Do you have something to say about that? How do you handle that? It's outside of the box. Keep in mind that the takeaway of that training scenario is that we're part of the ICS program. We can be at any emergency. It doesn't matter if it's a shuttle disaster, hurricane relief, wildfire or COVID vaccinations. We can go and do that stuff. That's how we train. That's something that always stuck with me.

My first year with the park service in 2012 was we went to Hurricane Sandy for three weeks. It was a trash pickup on the beach. It was not near as glorified as we thought it was going to be going as a team but it was an awesome networking. Going into the ICS structure, the people that did the best and had the best operations going on were the fire folks.

Nothing against LE, maintenance and everybody else. This is a park service-centric operation that I was with. Joe is a task force. Where's the task force? He's in charge of that carpenter. That's not necessarily a task force. We saw a lot of that but then on the fireside, we had somebody acting as a division that was from Lake Mead and some task force leaders who were from Lake Mead. We had our group that was scattered from a bunch of different parks. It was very seamless.

The logistics stuff that we were doing was simple. The day-to-day like getting the safety briefing, going out and doing work, having an AR and being done for the day. It’s very productive. On day one, we showed up and they didn't even have water for us. We're like, “Where can we fill our water bottles or whatever to go out and do stuff?” “Here's some pint bottles. There's eight of them you can share.” I'm like, “That’s not going to work.” We went out and bought water. Fire is falling into the side of things that, A) We know what we're doing and, B) We have the capabilities to fill the gaps that a lot of people don't and that’s awesome.

In 2017 when Maria hit the Virgin Islands in Florida, we ended up down there again, coming off of a fire in California. I laid my crew off and went straight to the VI. I got there and they're like, “I'm thinking trail crew stuff.” I'm going to go as a division, do trail crew stuff, take boots, and be ready to organize some people running saws and cut drills.

The ops there are like, “Do you have any boat experience?” “Yeah, raft and kayaking stuff.” He's like, “How about motorboats?” I'm like, “None of that.” He's like, “We need a water operations specialist anyway. Here are 2 dive teams and 8 boats that you need to schedule and organize. Also, here's some people from the national office who are riding a plan for Congress to get funding to remove all this wreckage off the shore.”

Talk about going from what you're used to to the opposite thing that you can even imagine. It's ICS-100 and ICS-700. It’s easy. The folks working for me were the subject matter experts. I don't need to be able to dive to be able to sign their time and make sure that they're doing safe stuff because they're telling me how they're going to do it safely. That makes sense like, “Do it that way.” It was three weeks of being the muscle on the boat to hand off buoys and equipment so they could do their job. It’s a unique experience I never would've guessed I would find in the fire career.

That goes to show you the diversity. We have a lot of operational hierarchy built into our mindset eventually over time. It translates to exactly like the stuff you're talking about. You're well far removed from fire. You're on a boat so it doesn't get any farther from that. It goes to show you all of these things that you've learned over the course of your career, hobbies, passions or any of that stuff. Also, some weird thing that you learned in Eagle Scouts when you're a scout.

All that stuff translates to beyond fire 100%. Let's talk about gear. I understand you lost some gear on the save. There are a lot of people that reached out to you and I owe you a crisp high five. What is the gear that you carry for this operation or rescue? I never set foot in a swift water capacity so I have no idea. Explain it to me like I'm three.

First off, I’ll start with I lost a paddle. That's all I lost. Whitewater stuff tends to be expensive. When I got to the car, I was trying to hold on and not lose myself and have to swim back. I let go of the paddle to steady myself. I reached for it and it was already squirting out from my grass. I was like, “I'm not going to go after that. Leave the car. That's going to look bad so I'm going to stay here.” It was not a big deal.

I know that's not all the news things and it's embarrassing. I know I lost something. Stuff happens like that on me so whatever, not a big deal. The sheriffs offered to replace it so awesome. I appreciate that. I also appreciate a ton of people reaching out like, “Do you need to GoFund Me? Can I replace stuff?” Thank you to all those people that asked. Sheriff's camp stepped up right off the bat. I’m good to go.

Gear-wise, because it's Central Northern Idaho, when water's high and fun, it's cold. Building up from the base layer up, usually, you're looking at long underwear, wool socks, maybe an extra insulation layer and probably some fleece and then a dry suit. That's key. When we're out having fun on the weekends, we're dry-suited up because even if you're not flipping, you're probably going to be cold. In April, it could be 75 degrees 1 minute and then snowing 12 minutes later.

It's like Nevada with bipolar weather.

Yeah, but farther North. It's the same for sure. That is the base layer. It’s anywhere you're at, even if you don't need the dry suit gear or good water shoes. I like the toe protection so a lot of my friends do sandals in the rocks, cactus and stuff.

There's nothing I hate more than stepping on a Lego of my kids or stubbing my toe on something. Speaking of stubbing your toes, a side note to this, do you know what is an absolute war crime that no one ever mentions? Stepping on a Nylabone that's been chewed up by your dogs is the worst. It makes a Lego look like nothing.

Also, some good footwear. The main gear that you're going to see, whether it's warm or cold rivers, is a PFT, your Personal Flotation Device. There are a couple of different kinds. The ones we use are made for rescue and then they have some pockets. They have additional flotation than your standard go paddle around for the day on a lake kind of gear. It also has a quick-release buckle on it. If you were to tie yourself to a rope or tie a boat to yourself, there's a quick release so if something hangs up, you can pop it, cut away and you're out. That's what makes them more specialized than a regular jacket.

This is not something you're taking out of the lake for wakeboarding.

It’s wildly different. Inside that, almost any river runner you're going to see is going to have 1 or 2 knives. A lot of times, it'll be taped or clipped on the outside of their life jacket for easy reach, especially in the kayaking or rescue scenario. Even getting a line out to you to pull you off a rock or pull you in, if something gets caught up, the most dangerous thing in a rope rescue or any swift water rescue scenario is hanging up in ropes. That can set you up for drowning quickly.

The number two thing is foot entrapments. If you don't have something to lean on, whether it's a paddle or a boat or a rope and you're trying to walk against the current, if you step funny and your focus is caught and that current pushes you down, you're not going to be able to get back up if you're over knee deep water. People die that way regularly.

Too much force from the water rushing over them. They're like scorpions on your back and getting drowned at the same time.

The water is pushing you down so you're wedging your foot into whatever it's wedged into. When we swim to shore, swim as far in as you can. Your butt and knees are dragging. Crawl out on all fours until you're less than shin-deep. The knife is supercritical and this is something I learned in class through Swiftwater Safety Institute, which teaches an awesome class. Our instructor was like, “I have my river knife. It's on the outside of my life jacket. I only use it for emergencies. I’ve got a serrated blade inside my life jacket that I only use for rope. I’ve got another pocket knife I use for peanut butter and cutting stuff around camp.”

That was one of those a-ha moments for me. It was like, “I only have one knife.” A) What if you drop it? B) If you're using it all the time and it's dull and then when you need it, it's not ready. That's not efficient. When I doubled or tripled up on my knives, it worked out well because I was able to use one knife to cut the airbag. I was able to hand a second knife away to cut that seatbelt when we needed to. They were super sharp. It was awesome. I still had a backup.

Beyond that, the only other things that are pretty standard are a couple of carabiners locking because working around ropes, you don't want stuff getting hooked accidentally because you get hooked on something under a boat and you can't get out, you're dead potentially, especially if you don't have a knife and you can't figure out what you're caught on.

Pulleys. There's a whole slew of little items that you can use on the river in a rescue situation but the PFD, the life jacket and then a throw bag is the other key item, which is about the size of a football. It's got rope coiled up inside of it. It's made so you hold one end and you launch the other end, usually underhand or overhand out into the water and try to hit the person you're trying to rescue or get close to them.

When they grab that, once they have a good hold and that bag clumps at the end so you have a ball to hold onto, you're not holding straight to rope, as soon as that hits and it gets tight, as long as you have a good spot that's wrapped halfway around you or you got to blade off on something, that person's going to pen them right to shore easy. You don't have to pull them in. Let the water do the work. It's pretty efficient and quick. Those are the main things that you're going to see pretty much any solid river or gal out there with. If you see that they have that stuff, you're like, “They probably have some idea of what they're doing.”

We'd hope so. I'm learning from you because I’ve seen a lot of similarities between rope and climbing. I'm even making the comparison of learning some stuff about water safety from fly fishing from you. I'm a huge fly fisherman and stickler when I see somebody out there, like one of my buddies out there with their waders and no wading belt.

You're trying to choke down that point to where if you do bail and go in the drink, your waders aren't filling up with water and you're getting dragged under. It's simple stuff that. It makes sense in my frame of mind because there are a lot of similarities between climbing, fly fishing, swift water, ropes rescue and all that stuff. They all play off of each other. Also, a big standout about this is that you carry your river gear with you pretty much in the back of your truck all the time.

Not necessarily but driving that section, I’ve thought about it in the past. I had been like, “What if I come around this corner and there's a car in the river? What am I going to do? How am I going to act? What actions can I take to help that person or the situation?” I’ve been boating on that side or boating back in Missoula so I keep all my stuff in my truck. Now, I'm consciously like, “My life jacket and some throw ropes at minimum stay in my truck.” That's my helmet and water shoes. I might not have my dry suit with me during the summer because it's not necessary at that point.

I do think it's worth having that other stuff with me, just like you keep a sleeping bag and a first aid kit in your car. Also, with that, we put some of my folks through swift water rescue this spring and bought a bunch of throw bags. All of our mod trucks have throw bags in them and it's something that we can train on. If we see something, it might not be that we pull up and swim to save somebody but if somebody is floating down the river because their car went in, maybe we can hit them with a throw bag and hopefully pull to the shore. It's something very simple and low risk to us but very high reward to that public person that's needs assistance.

That goes for any equipment. I used to be an EMT. That's well expired. I did not do my refresher. I still carry the simple stuff. I carry an IFAC in my truck. It's easily accessible. It's stuff for tourniquets and wound packings material. Even the hyphen, the wound dressings for a plural cavity, I carry that stuff in my truck. It’s the same thing with sleeping bags, knives, fire starters and stuff like that. It's all tucked into where I know where it's at. In case we get in a situation that's crap, then I can help self-rescue or if I get into a situation where somebody else needs help, that stuff's there. It's there for you. You can use it. You can help somebody. You can potentially even save a life like you did.

Having that backpack, that go bag, I have my ten essentials, fire starter, headlamp and multiple layers of cold weather clothes. It lives in a backpack that lives in whatever truck I'm in that day. If I jump from my Ram to Tacoma, it throws in too and it's with me. I know right where everything is. Everything's in dry bags. It's organized and waterproof, which I realize is a little anal.

You don't want your stuff to rust.

You don't want your stuff to be wet when you need to be dry and warm. There are reasons that we put things in place and everybody has those things that they do. Be prepared most importantly to save somebody else. I would be very embarrassed if I had to ask for help or I'm in this situation and I'm like, “If only I had a rain jacket but maybe somebody else can hook me up.” No, that's unacceptable.

If we're in the same situation and somebody else doesn't have one but I have two because I over prepare, I'm helping out. That's awesome. Being over-prepared, you can get crazy with it but to me, it's worth having a little excess because I do want to be prepared. I don't want to be the person that's a hindrance to somebody else because I wasn't prepared. I want to be able to help whoever it is because I was.

There's a lot to be said about carrying that stuff. I'm in the same boat as you. I'm not talking about going overboard to where you have this over-landing rig packed full of river rafting, medical gear and other survival stuff. You honestly don't need all of it. You can get away and probably make a lot of difference in somebody who's having an emergency or even if you need to self-rescue and you gash yourself on a rock while you're boating.

If you have a severe gash and you need to throw a tourniquet on, there it is. It's right there. You don't need a lot. You can get away with the bare essentials, the critical, lifesaving stuff. A boat's going to be a little bit different. The rope rescue stuff and all the swift water gear, I'm pretty sure are going to be a lot different. It's probably a little bit bigger than medical gear but especially for the location that you're in, it was essential.

Especially in the West and even parts of California, we are remote. We're at least rural if nothing else. If you're down in San Bernardino County or LA County, Cal Fire’s going to show up. You have all these agencies that are going to come to assist. They're ten minutes away. The helicopter's going to be there in two minutes. You start talking about Central Idaho, Eastern Oregon and the middle of Nevada. Who's out there? The Forest Service, the land management agencies and that's it as far as that public safety aspect of things.

Not that we should be the crutch for the state of the county but also the more gear we have that's ready to go and the more training and capabilities that we have, the more we can assist with whatever that thing is. Working for the park service in Mojave was huge to me because there were times when we'd go to a vehicle accident and that person had already been out there for an hour or more when we got to him. Law enforcement and medical were still 35 or 40 minutes out, maybe more. What are we going to do? Drive by them? That's not what we do. If we're being asked to go and assist with a county or our law enforcement partners, we're going to go and do something.

Even if that's given a good update and location, that's something that they can work with. It's like a good fire slides up. They know what they're getting when they're coming into it and can start mentally preparing instead of saying, “Surprise, here's an open door and now you know what's there.” I would way rather know what's coming 10, 20 or 60 minutes out and be able to start running the scenarios in my head, figuring out what I'm going to need and all that stuff. Anybody can do that. It's in our IRPG. You can give it a size up in any situation.

For the people that are reading, I busted out my IRPG from 2015. I don't know if they updated them. They're yellow now. That's the thing, though. You play into an interesting thing with the topic of training and seeking these educational opportunities to empower yourself to know how to do this stuff and potentially make a difference in not only your life but maybe somebody else's. The opportunities out there are endless and a lot of them are free. Take the Stop The Bleed course. It's free. What's stopping you from doing it? It takes six hours or something like that in total. That's going slow.

Saving Lives: There are a lot of educational opportunities to empower yourself to know how to potentially make the difference in not only your own life but possibly somebody else's.

You can get certified to teach it with a little bit more work. You send 1 or 2 people from your module or whatever you have. Your whole module can have that when it's handy because a couple of people went and put in some extra hours and now you have that as an option.

It's going to probably go down that ADHD route to where you're like, “I'm interested in this. I got to continue my education and keep building.” Pretty soon, you're a paramedic, an AEMT or something like that. It's cool though. You follow your passions. If you have something beneficial, whether that be primarily or secondary beneficial to what your passion is, pursue it. You never know what difference you can make.

Somebody said too about having that initiative and being able to think up a plan like, “This takes swift water rescue. This is something that I would love to be able to do for work. It would be great. Here's how I can do it. I need to present that to the right people in the right way to sell it.” To sell it and show why it's beneficial, you can't be like, “I'd love to take this but here's why it's beneficial to me, the agency and the taxpayer.” If you can hit those points, it's not necessarily going to happen but it's a lot easier for people to say, “That's a good use of our funds. We only have so much of this year for training but that's a good point.”

Training is exponential. If you have 1 or 2 people that take some classes, even if they can't teach to qualify people in that, there's still a knowledge base that can be shared within the module. It’s like first aid. If you have 1 EMT and they teach them some more advanced things, all of a sudden, you have 10 people that can throw a tourniquet on instead of 1. When the EMT goes down, somebody can put a tourniquet on that guy because it’s not just one person with all the knowledge. They've shared the critical aspects of that. It’s no different than swift water and throwing a throw bag or anything that's involved with fire.

I'd even take you a step further going back to the carpentry, the welding, whatever that is so beneficial to your career and you developing as a human. Go for it. Watch the other people do the welding, carpentry, hanging drywall or painting. I don't know about paint but it might be a stretch.

We have a detailer that's up from Arkansas. He’s a cool guy who needs some FFT-1 time on a crew. I'm like, “Come on up.” I have a second-year firefighter who had a year on trails and she's very crafty. She has this incredibly diverse and weird skillset but is super into fire, camping and being in the woods. She was teaching him and some other guys how to sew our new crew patches on their packs. Three days later, he was showing her the basics of welding. That's the exact thing that I want to see.

People are diversifying their skillsets. If you have it and you can teach it, that teaching moment of something as simple as sewing is going to make you a better teacher for other things too, whether that's in fire, medicine, teaching or whatever else you get into. That's the fundamentals of building leaders and leadership into people too. It’s giving those little options like that. I had a huge smile on my face when I walked out and saw this guy sewing with her. The next day after the briefing, she was like, “Can I come to watch you? I'd love to learn that.” That's awesome.

Teaching has a snowball effect because if you're teaching something, chances are that person that is the learner in that role is going to teach you something. There's always that adage out there. If you want to truly be a master of your subject, then teach it. There's a lot to be said about that.

If you really want to truly be a master of your subject, then teach it.

Even the sand tables. One of the things I’ll do is we'll do sand tables all summer and then at the end of the season, I’ll let the crew give me a sand table and see what weird stuff they throw at me. It gets bizarre. I like it because I like a challenge. It's good because the tables are turned and they have the opportunity to get creative with things that they want to see how I might address and hopefully, it's a learning opportunity.

In the end, when we AR, I'm like, “You guys threw this thing at me. I had no idea how to handle that but that's something I need to work on. I'm going to figure out what I would do in that scenario if that were to happen to me in real life.” That's providing that opportunity for them to teach and start getting good at sand tables, which several years down the line when they're running a crew, they'll be able to put on a quality sand table.

That's another thing too. Going into it with an open mind and trying to be open and receptive to that learning process, that's going to be one of those things that's going to take your education further. It doesn't matter what it is, being open-minded about stuff. I hate it because firefighters, in general, typically hate two things and that's the way things are and change.

Have that open-mindedness and get out of that old-school thought like, “This is dumb. This has nothing to do with fire.” Pull your head out of your ass. You never know. It might apply to fire somewhere or it could even apply to your personal life. What's down the road for you? What's the future hold for you? Got any plans for where you're going with your career? I know you guys are getting dispatched here pretty soon.

Hopefully, head up to Minnesota on Monday, which will be my first time in the Midwest for fire. Talking to folks back there. The mosquitoes are real bad like Alaska bad potentially. We'll see how that goes. They're dry so we're happy to go and help out. Hopefully, we get some canoeing in. As much as I'd rather have swift water, I will take flat water too. I’m super stoked to get on the board and hopefully get the mod out a bunch. The mod life is sweet. I came in mid-season and rolled straight into it and had a phenomenal summer. The WFM is such a diverse tool.

It can be anything that the crew wants it to be. I love that about it. You can be a little more diversified into the fuel side, suppression or burning. The thing I love the most about it is that it is almost a perfect cross between smoke jumping and a raft trip because you're set up camp, you go out and do your thing for the day, whatever that task happens. It is very single-resource oriented. We can go out as 2 squads, 3 squads or a 10-person mod.

When it works the best is when you can break out 1s and 2s to go gather situational awareness and intel, do the mapping, get the fuels and all those things and then reconvene at the end of the evening. Somebody's cooking dinner and we're talking about whatever map we made, where the fire's going to go and what the critical things that we need to relay to the district or the team are. You're getting paid to camp and fight fire. How could it be any better? Even more so than any other fire job.

That's the thing too. Wildland Fire Mods. They've changed the terminology. I did an episode with Jon Freeman. He's the superintendent of a Wildland Fire Mod. It's a very underrated career path because you get to do all the cool secret squirrel stuff and a lot of people don't realize that you're setting up mobile repeaters.

You're setting up weather observation like raw stations and stuff that. You're identifying critical resources and formulating a plan for point protection. You get to burn. You get to put fire on the ground. You could do a lot of stuff. It's more of a Swiss Army life, whereas a crew, whether it be a Hotshot crew or Type 2 crew. You're doing one thing and putting in line that's your mission. You have a lot of opportunities to do outside-the-box stuff.

I was learning and I have exceptional mid-level leadership in my crew so I would go to them and be like, “What do we need to do? What makes sense here?” You go and talk to a division or a duty officer and they're like, “What can you do?” “What do you want? Whatever you want us to do, I will figure out how to do it. We probably have the tools for it and we have the people and the drive to figure out how to get it done for you.” I hope that people will continue to use that. You don't have to shove us in the back corner of a fire and take fuel samples and document rates of spread all day. We have sea followers. The forest blaster is my assistant.

The skillsets that we have packing. We are not the number one most dialed people because they don't do it all the time but it's a skill, crosscut. If you can imagine it, it's probably something that we can either figure out how to do or we know somebody we can get ahold of through the forest or one of the jump bases and probably make it happen.

That's what I never understood, though. There's always that chest-pounding stuff that goes on between different types. “You're a smoke jumper. F that crew.” There's the Hotshots. “We're the best.” Everybody's got that hoorah thing. I understand it to some degree about the crew pride and being prideful about your crew and what you're doing, the mission you accomplished and all that stuff.

For some reason, what is with WFMs and getting hate? I’ve never understood it. It’s like another tool in the toolbox. They walk to the fire and take their Subarus just like you. However, they have a different skillset and they're smaller than a typical Type 2 or Type 1 hand crew that's not rocking twenty people. It's usually 10 to 12 people or 8 to 12 people.

We don't have the same requirements for the amount of returning people and not having first years and stuff. I don't think the module’s a great place for a first-year firefighter because, similar to jumping or probably rappelling, you're going to be expected to go out into your thing and know what you're doing. We have some of those people. We have the depth to take them under their wing, get them good training and set them up for success. I don't know exactly where I was going with that. I swear I had a good point.

The biggest thing is we are essentially half of a Hotshot crew. We're Type 1. We should be able to do exactly 50% of their line production in an hour. With that comes a bunch of quals that sometimes you won't find on a shot crew. I'm IC-3 division task force. The requirement is task force RSP 2. To be able to take over a Type 3 fire in the wilderness and have the command and people that can run the logistics and keep people that can do the FMO and the fobs and people that are hams and scatter out and do those single resource type things with ten of us, it fills a lot of gaps fast. That's a slick thing to have. I love that about it.

It's like having a plane full of smoke jumpers that's a flying IC 3 team. It's that but on the ground. It's a different tool. It's a Swiss Army knife but what’s with the hate? There are a specific few people out there I know personally who are like, “F-ing WFMs.” They're all pounding their chest about it. It's widely because of the lack of knowledge of what a WFM does and what its mission is. That's what it is.

Education. It changes. Every two years, they're like, “It's not a fire-use module. Now it's a WFM and whatever else.” That's fine because it’s not being like, “You're a Type 1 Hotshot crew.” If you get a shot crew, you know what you're getting. If you get a WFM, there's some diversity in that and that's awesome. That's good. Each crew or mod should have their personality and the things they're good at.

We're probably not going to have a drone anytime soon. That's fine with me. There are other mods that have that capability and that's rad that they have that because they can do a ton with it and they still have some other folks that go out and do the other things that need to be done. There are those skillsets. If you want to go do point protection on bridges and cabins in the middle of any wilderness, Selway's going to be pretty good at it. That's the bread and butter being on the Nez-Clear and the wilderness, setting up sprinkler kits on bridges.

That kind of thing is what the crew is experienced with and they're good at. Taking an engine from SoCal and throwing them in a helicopter in Alaska, if you take us way out of our helmet, it's going to take us 1 day or 2 to figure out what's going on. I think that the mod, with the diversity in the background and the training that we're able to get does help us integrate a little bit faster. With only ten people, that's something that's a benefit. If we show up in your forest or your district and you're not sure what to do with us, give us a good in-brief and tell us what you want. We'll figure it out.

With that lack of awareness and education, people don't know what it is. Tell me what a fire specialist out of AK does.

Whatever they want.

A fire specialist is a Swiss Army life, much as is a WFM. Granted, a fire specialist is a single person but I digress. I'm pumped to hear your story and get some background knowledge about you and what happened that day. I'm stoked that you made the save. That's a hell of a job. Kudos to you. I like the message that you're talking about here with continuing ed and not underselling yourself with your skills and then developing those skills off of each other, being the observer. You’re implementing the things that you learned from your folks and your network around you into real-life stuff with fire or even outside of fireman. I'm all about that message.

It's important too. You've got to advocate for yourself. You can't just be on the crew, sit in the back seat every day and expect, “I'm going to get training and my FFT 1 done. I'm going to be an IC 4 someday. Not by any fault of anybody's supervisor or anything but you need to remind them like, “This summer, I'd like to work on my IC 5.” Maybe get a couple and there's somebody else's getting some training back. “If we get a chance, I would love to get an opportunity to step up and try that this year.” Even if you don't have a task book open like, “Could I step into a sand table at some point and consider starting my task book later this summer,” if you think it's a good time.

Have those conversations with your supervisor and remind them as you go, “I have a task book open. I can jump in there and do that. I see you don't have a trainee.” That's got me a long way. If I'm seeing something and it's going up the hill, my thoughts are to go wherever they're going. It's not necessarily who the IC 4 trainee is on the other truck that showed up. If they come up like, “I’ve got an IC 4 trainee, could we throw them in?” I'm going to say yeah because we got to build that program. What's beneficial for them is beneficial for me in the long run.

Don't be afraid to come up and ask, “Can I step in and be your trainee?” I like that. That shows the initiative. It shows that you're interested in and you're here for the right reasons and you're not like, “I’ll get it when I get it.” That's cool. There are people who are happy with that and that's good for them too. If you want to get those opportunities, remind folks that you're looking for them and then also work your ass off doing them. You can't just step in and be like, “This is cool but I'm going to go back to sit in the back seat.” Own it. Do what you need to do and be good at it. Aim to be as good as you can be. People will recognize that and they'll appreciate it.

Aim to be as good as you can be and people will recognize that and they'll appreciate it.

You alluded to it there but there's something to be said about someone willing to operate outside of their comfort zone and push to see where their boundaries are because that's where you learn.

From the trainer standpoint, I was down in Florida one year and my friend was at IC 4 under me. I was like, “You have this. I'm going to go over here, observe and dig some line.” You've got it. Do your thing and I'm here if you need me. I'm not going to let you hang yourself out. I’ll be listening but you do your thing. The joke became like, “J.T. is going to throw you to the wolves.” It's like, “You're right. You're not wrong here. I want to see that you can do it because if I'm going to sign you off, I need to know that the next time you're doing it and I'm not there that you're going to be capable of doing it.”

Remember, I'm still in your back pocket. I'm right here. I need to see that confidence that you have the confidence in yourself to do the thing that you're training for. I have a lot of stories where people were like, “Do you want me to do that? I'm going to be a division.” I'm like, “Yes, you are. Here are 4 or 5 engines. Good luck. Hit me with what you need and I’ll be in touch.”

People usually excel. They might not be the best task force leader of all time when you throw them into that but you don't have to be. You're a trainee. What it's there for is to learn to get better so that when you're qualified, you can do that thing safely. Being qualified doesn't mean you're the best. It means you can do it safely and take care of the folks that you're supervising.

Being qualified doesn't mean you're the best ever. It means you can do it safely and take care of the folks that you're supervising. 

There's something to be said about the trainers that are micromanaging the crap out of you, holding your hand and directing every little thing you do out of fear of them making them look bad. It doesn't matter the reasoning but there's nothing worse than that kind of person for the person that is the trainee. You don't learn anything about being micromanaged to death.

You're probably going to get frustrated and be like, “This is dumb. Why am I here?” I’ve seen it and it sucks. The other side of that is having good feedback from the trainer at the end of that assignment and saying, “The task book needs one more assignment.” That's not feedback. That's the cop-out that people want to take the easy way on a personal eval. Give good feedback to that person. If they’re not ready to get signed off, you need to explain why.

If they are all ready to get signed off, even if their first assignment, explain why they're ready to be signed off, knowing they're probably going to have to have some more assignments. It’s like, “This is a tricky assignment and it was very complex.” Here are all the things that they did well and here's one thing they can work on. They're ready but they'll more will make them better. This person is tactically sound but their communication's awful. They need to work on communication by radio and communication face to face. Give them something they can work with and not be like, “They did pretty good. Get more assignments.” That drives me nuts.

No feedback is almost a criticism in itself and a negative criticism too. That's another thing too. A lot of people get freshly signed off on their task books, even Firefighter 1. You get punched off on this. When you're punching somebody off on their Firefighter 1, do you ever have people be like, “I'm not ready for this,” and you're like, “Too bad. Here you go?”

To a certain extent. There are conversations that get had during that. We had somebody do a similar thing with firing the boss. It's because you have all the skills and you've shown us multiple times that you know what you're doing. You did it safely and very efficiently. You're ready. It's that confidence in themselves that they may not have but what better way to show them and build them than to say, “My confidence is in you. The other people that signed you off have confidence in you. We want you to be signed off because we know that we can walk away and you can run something.” The fire community is so rad because if you don't know something, you can ask.

Even if you don't ask, somebody might see something and they'll bring it up. If you have a question about something, you can always hit me up. You can hit up another single resource boss. There are people that have potentially more experience, maybe even less experience but have knowledge in that thing that you have a question on.

It's a tiny little blip in that day's operation that's reasonable. We all have those and that's fine. Being qualified, especially when you have 4 or 5 assignments and 3 or 4 people are like, “They're ready. Here are the evals,” have that confidence in yourself to know like, “As long as I keep people safe and I do stuff by policy, I'm good to go and I can build on that to be an expert.”

That's another thing too that's underrated because a lot of people don't know, especially when they're freshly signed off on their new task book and they're into a new role. They got their new qual on the red card. A lot of people don't realize that sometimes people sign you off when you're ready but you're not an expert because you still got to develop that stuff. You got to say, “I'm a peacock, captain. You got to let me fly.” You still got to develop those things. You're not punching them off early per se but you still got some work to do to become that subject matter expert, that true professional of that qual. It's something that's not said.

What's a good way to work on that? Teaching it. If you're qualified as a boss, go do some engine boss or 232 classes and learn. “I know that I can be the engine boss but how can I make somebody else an engine boss too?” You'll start finding those nuance things and then you are well on your way to being an expert when you can teach pumps and some of that other stuff that's so critical. You know it's muscle memory for you probably at that point. Conversely, if you've been a captain for 6, 8 or 10 years, you might be rusty on some of that stuff because you got an FEO that's doing it.

If you can refresh yourself every once in a while with that, it keeps you that much sharper. The things that you've experienced by communicating those to the newer folks, they're getting those slides. If you're in a class or you're working on whatever call it is, having good discussions and asking questions is huge. A lot of the PowerPoints that we put out for training are great. It's a good tool. We get more out of having those open discussions and less out of reading the PowerPoint because the experience that I have, you have and everybody else has are all going to be different enough that the PowerPoint sets up, “Here's the thing that you need to think about.”

Our experience is like, “Yes, but also and here's how that doesn't work and here's how it does work. The first time I went out as fully qualified, this is what happened and I was not ready for it.” Hopefully, It builds some confidence but it builds those slides, and in turn, that creates some confidence and the ability to deal with those maybe not chaotic situations, maybe low chaos but the things that you're not expecting, even if it's minor. That's awesome.

That's the whole thing too. You explained that a lot better than I did because it sounds probably with what I was saying about being punched off like, “You’re qualified but it seems you’re not all the way qualified.” What I'm talking about is what you're saying there. It's like, “You are proficient, skilled and safe. You are capable of doing this job but you might need some ass kickers of assignments and you got to build your slides without somebody else providing overwatch.”

You got to figure that stuff out and that's what makes an expert. Conversely, if you're not necessarily retired in place but if you're a captain for those 6 to 8 years in a row and you're losing skills, you need to refresh those. The day you stop learning something about a subject is the day you should probably quit because if you've learned everything, what's the point of doing it anymore?

The day you stop learning something about a subject is the day you should probably quit.

There are ways to stay engaged. In my ten years at Mojave, it was rinse, repeat a lot of the summers with single bushes by the freeway out when we get there, going to burn to sand. It's another one. It's the 35th one. We know what it's going to look like and where it's at because there are three more down the road. With the training opportunities, I got out to do a battalion chief detail in NorCal one summer and that was awesome.

It made me learn that being a captain is awesome and being anything above that has the ability to not be near as fun because you don't see much fire and way less IA. I got to go jump for a year and that was phenomenal. It was back to the basics of rookie get a saw and dig or cut and/or dig and make coffee while you're at it. That was refreshing.

My third jump was as an IC 3. As a rookie, that was a pretty cool thing to have. I could put my full depth of skillsets into this new thing that I was doing but the other days, it was like, “I get to go in line again,” which was very refreshing after a decade as a captain. Even getting down the details, going to the Southeast for the winter, I had so much fun in Southwest Florida burning with the parks down there and Fish and Wildlife. In my first RXB2 trainee assignment, we did 10,000 acres in an afternoon.

You'll never do that out West. No matter where you are, that will not happen. What an exceptional experience for me to be like, “This is a lot different than I’m used to.” You can build a lot of slides out of something like that. That kept things fresh. I was in one place for ten years and I was a captain the whole time. Find those opportunities, chase them down, bring them up overhead and be like, "This is why I'd to do and how I'd to do it.”

There are ways, including grants through at least the park service and I'm sure other agencies too, to do that stuff. The training aspect, at least on the park service side I know, pumps some money into folks being able to get out and do details, classes and that kind of stuff. That's a great opportunity to take advantage of.

We will look at how much-advanced rescue stuff they do. They do short haul and all sorts of crazy stuff. They've got a short-haul ship in Yosemite and one up in Wenatchee.

I'm not sure what North Cascades has but I know Grand Canyon has one too.

They do some pretty outside-the-box stuff when it comes to what most people would consider standard Wild Bend Fire Operations. They get to go outside the box a little bit but that's all making the program, bigger, better, faster and stronger. That's huge.

It wasn't the fun thing I learned but the thing I learned when it got to the park coming out of several years at BLM was it's less of a land management agency and it's a little more of a people management agency. We have the law enforcement aspect. We have the visitor center folks and all the inter rangers. They were much more worried about the people doing things in the park than the temp. It's the desert. There's nothing out there to manage.

A lot of Joshua Trees to burn up turns out. That's where it was like, “We need to focus more on first aid.” If we come across a wreck or go to rec, how do we manage traffic? How do we manage our safety to close off roads and get people stabilized until the helicopter gets there? Those were things that, through being in the right place at the right time, forced me to learn new things and then share that with the folks coming in behind me and my seasonals and stuff like that.

That was one of the things I enjoyed about being at the park. Living at the station, we would get calls 24 hours a day potentially and you didn't know what you were getting into sometimes. It might be somebody stuck or it could be a single-vehicle rollover with people ejected out all over the place. A lot of weird stuff in the desert.

There's a lot to be learned and said about that. The learning component of that is what's going to accelerate your career. Taking those opportunities and taking that risk to get outside of your comfort zone and seek those training opportunities and be hungry for quals and being a better human is going to take you a lot farther than you think in your career than taking quals as they come. I appreciate you being on the show. We're coming up to the end of the episode here. I got a hard stop here. We're going to do a little bit of an episode debrief here but before we go, I always give you the opportunity to shout out to some homies, heroes or mentors. Whom do you got for us?

Saving Lives: Seek training opportunities and be hungry for quals. That's going to take you a lot farther than you think in your career than just taking quals as they come.

I’ve got a couple. I was sixteen with the Oregon Department of Forestry as a student worker. I didn't know that the state was different from the Forest Service or that there was BLM or anything except the Forest Service. Gordon Foster Sr. was the unit forester at the time. He worked with my mom. They'd done engine academies for Region 6 together. Sometimes it is who you know but I went in and did a job shadow with the state because it was something different. He called me about the time I got out of school that year. I was like, “We have a spot open. Would you like a job?” “Sure.” He got me started early in my fire career.

Steve Jolly and Dave Meyer were the assistant unit forester and the lead forest officer. They instilled a work ethic. We work for the taxpayers so everything needs to be nice all the time and you work all the time. You don't get to sit down and hang out. You can sit down for fifteen minutes on your break and your lunch, the rest of the time, you're mowing the lawn, raking gravel, painting and stuff and sharpening tools. You find stuff to do. That was exactly what I needed coming into my career at that teenage level. I can't thank them enough and forgive me for solid opportunities to grow even when I was 18, 19 and 20. Shout out to those guys.

Jay Walter is awesome. He signed me off on my division. We were down in Florida. It was a weird place, time and operations. I learned a ton from him. If I have questions, concerns or something, he's one of those guys I still can call and we stay in touch. We were texting about this. He saw one of the news articles and he's like, “I know that guy.” Jordan McKnight also. He is the FMO down at Big Cypress responds down there. He's up here in Region 1 at the regional office. I pick his brain probably more than he wants.

He's also the WFM overseer. He was huge in getting me settled in and I appreciate the help that he's given me. Greg is still on our instant management team down in California, Team 12. He's going to be on call and not rostered but in my last couple years as an Ops 2 trainee with him, I have learned an insane amount of things. Some of them are hysterical but a lot of good old school mentality but with the new school thinking of you take care of your people, get a job done and do it right and safely.

I love that. I have a few assignments I’ve had with him that have been exceptional. Lastly is Jameson, who was my FMO down in California Desert District. I could usually bring these crazy ideas to him, like going to Florida, jumping and stuff like that. We'd usually have to talk it out a little bit but he was very supportive of me doing that and that was huge. He's the IC of the team I'm on so that worked out very well.

Everybody has helped me get to where I am. I want to pass those experiences on to the folks coming up. I got a lot of good deals in my career already and I want to make sure that we're getting other folks good deals and getting them those training and the opportunities that I had because that's what's going to make a bunch more competent solid career firefighters.

That's the way to do it. Don't ever change. Don't get salty. It's real easy to get salty. I appreciate you being on the show and sharing your subject matter expertise and your story for your career and the rescue, being prepared and all that stuff. Especially the leadership and how it ties into education. Taking those risks is good. More people need to know it. It's inspiring. I appreciate you.

Thank you very much. I appreciate it.

Right on J.T. Thanks for coming on the show.

Have me again anytime.

---

Another episode is going to be in the books with our good friend J.T. Sohr. J.T., that is one heck of a story. That is cool. It goes to show you that with the proper training, gear and knowledge and being aware and all that jazz, you never know what may happen. You could end up being in the thick of things or even saving a life and it's pretty cool. I dig your story. I hope that you get your $250 worth of gear back. It sounds like you're already covered. If you want to find out more, go hit up. J.T. on the old gram. He is @WildSohr. That's his screen name on the old Instagram.

If you want to hit him up, hit him up. Maybe ask him some questions like, “What's the best place to get swift water training? What's the place for this gear?” You're going to gain a lot of knowledge from this. Hit him up. I hope everybody enjoyed the episode. It looks the lower 48 is heating up so head up. Remember, get complacency kills. Don't get complacent.

I hope everybody's doing well. We'll get you on the next one. Special shout out to our sponsors. We've got Mystery Ranch, purveyors of the finest packs in the fire game. Head over to www.MysteryRanch.com. While you're at it, check out the Backbone Series. We've got Hotshot Brewery. Kick-ass coffee for a kick-ass cause. Go over to www.HotshotBrewing.com and check out their full line of morning-making essentials.

We've got The A.S.S. Movement. Our good buddy Booze over there is spreading the words of poo-bearing propaganda. If you want to help spread the word about bearing your turds, go over to www.TheFireWild.com and check out The A.S.S. Movement. Last but not least, we have The Smokey Generation, AKA the American Wildfire Experience. Go over to www.Wildfire-Experience.org and check out all they have to offer, including The Smokey Generation. Bethany, you have a kickass organization over there. Keep it up. As for the rest of you, you all know the drill. Stay safe. Stay savage. Peace.

Important Links

• Mystery Ranch

• Hotshot Brewery

• The Wildland Firefighter Foundation

• The American Wildfire Experience

• The Smokey Generation

• J.T. Sohr – Instagram

• Moose Creek Ranger District

• Stop The Bleed

• Jon Freeman – Past Episode

• The A.S.S. Movement

• https://www.Facebook.com/JT.Sohr

About J.T. Sohr

"JT grew up in Eastern Oregon where both of his parents, and eventually his younger brother, worked for the USFS. He spent most of his summers on the lookout with his mom and brother, then started his fire career with the Oregon Department of Forestry when he was 16. After 5 years with ODF, he spent the next 15 years with BLM and the NPS. In his 21 years in fire, 18 have been in leadership positions. He’s been lucky enough to go to Southwest Florida for burning and helitack assignments, detail to Northern California as a Battalion Chief, and detail to Missoula as a smokejumper.

His trips to New York and the US Virgin Islands for hurricane responses were two other highlights of his time with the NPS. He is currently the superintendent of the Selway Wildland Fire Module on the Nez Perce/Clearwater National Forest in Idaho. He believes each firefighter has to be their biggest advocate when looking to get training; seeking out opportunities; and thinking outside the box for career building. In his off time, JT enjoys adventures in the desert or on rivers. Annual family trips to Utah and international rafting trips with friends are each highlights of his year."