"They'd mapped the whole district, and usually you went beside roads or along ridgetops and you would thin the trees out to where you had about twelve- to fourteen-foot spacing between trees, six chains wide—and a chain is sixty-six feet, so about 700 feet wide."
For fire use, we had two Homalite [phonetic] chain saws: one of them was equipped with a bow bar. From the saw it came out and was kind of shaped like this, and had a little skeg [phonetic] here, where you could use it. I had guards on the chain where you could use it to, say, just jam it down into a smaller tree. You could stand erect, and just cut trees down, or brush, really quickly. The other saw had a twenty-four-inch straight bar, like you think of a chain saw bar, for felling bigger trees. And each squad had one saw. But we also had another blade for each saw, so if we needed both saws, with, say, brush fires—like that bow bar when we were over on the brush fire in California. We had that capability. But they were set up right out of the box on the truck, one with the bow bar, one with the straight bar.
And just emergency rations, like basically Vietnam issue "C" rations, and "K" rations, and stuff, for meals when we were out for extended periods. Headlights, head lamps with lots of batteries. Radios, shovels, pulaskis, mcclouds, just typical firefighting tools.
Also on the truck we carried, when we weren't doing fires, the majority of project work we did was cutting fuel breaks. The theory behind those was they'd mapped the whole district, and usually you went beside roads or along ridgetops and you would thin the trees out to where you had about twelve- to fourteen-foot spacing between trees, six chains wide—and a chain is sixty-six feet, so about 700 feet wide. And it would follow, like I say, ridge crests and along roads. And they had signs, marker signs, where like you might have a Marker S-2, and over here you'd have S-3, and S-4, and stuff, and it was kind of like a road map. And so if you had a fire in that area, you could basically go into where you had these preexisting semi-control lines done, where the trees were thinned out, and you could build line through there much quicker, and then burn out off of it—instead of having where you had to cut a lot of trees to put your line in to burn off of. The whole forest had these. We basically just cut the fuel breaks when we weren't on fire duty.
Garcia Hunt: Again, compared to today's hotshot crews and fire camps, were yours anything of the sort, did you carry a tent, or were you just out on the ground?
Bishop: No. (chuckles) That was interesting. (chuckles) The first off-forest fire, off of the Coconino National Forest, we went to was over out of Grants, New Mexico. It was in April. I think it was around April 20. You name fires by a physiographic feature near there, like a fire up on the Peaks could be called the Peaks Fire; or like the Leroux Fire the other day was named because of being near Leroux Spring. You usually name it something... It was up in the... Oh, shoot, up on Mount Taylor, and one of the features near there was Cold Spring, and so they called it the Cold Fire. And it was very aptly named, because I think it got down to like 15 degrees that night. The fire laid down so much that we were actually going around at spots building little campfires inside the fire line, to keep from freezing. It was miserable! And the next day, we tried to sleep, and it was still so blasted cold that they had these little paper sleeping bags—they were like a heavy kraft paper on the top, built like a regular sleeping bag, but the outer layer was kind of this kraft paper, and they had like cellulose, like ground up newspaper and stuff. They were disposable sleeping bags. But we were stuffing two and three of those inside each other, and we're still just freezing. We were trying to sleep during the day. I can imagine the guys trying to sleep at night, when it got really cold. And when we got back from there, the first thing we did was order some really heavy-duty kapok surplus sleeping bags for the crew.
We rigged out, each person had a fire pack, and in that there were some changes of clothes, there were extra unfilled canteens that you could fill up out of the crew truck and stuff. Changes of clothing, just stuff, because sometimes we'd go to a fire and we'd be gone for two, three weeks, and it was kind of a way to try and have some creature comforts: your toothbrush, something so you could kind of live comfortably away from home for a while.