Bill Bishop Interview
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Today is July 12, 2001. My name is Robert Marvin Garcia Hunt. I'm happy to be here in the Cline Library with Bill Bishop, who has spent many years in wildland fire management. This interview will be part of an ongoing project entitled "Fire on the Plateau." Jennifer Kern is also present in the room.
Garcia Hunt: Hi, Bill. Would you please tell us a little bit about yourself and where you're from, and also a little bit about your education?
Bishop: I was born in Phoenix, grew up down there; came up to NAU to go to school. I started in pre-med and was in pre-med for about the first two-and-a-half years. After my first summer here, so after my freshman year, I got a job working for the Forest Service, and I really liked it, and decided I couldn't build a medical practice with a "Gone Fishin'" sign hanging on the door all the time, and so I switched over to forestry, ended up on the five-year plan because of the late switch. My degree was forestry, and then I spent six years working for the Forest Service in fire control.
Garcia Hunt: So would you happen to know what brought your family to Flagstaff?
Bishop: It wasn't my family, it was just me. My parents stayed in Phoenix. I came up here to go to NAU.
Garcia Hunt: So you just came to further your education?
Bishop: Came to go to NAU. I liked a small college. When I came, NAU, just the year before, had changed from Arizona State College to NAU. It was still a very small school.
Garcia Hunt: Can you tell us a little bit about that, when you first got here, like exactly what was it like?
Bishop: Very small. If I remember right, there were two traffic lights in Flagstaff back then. All the rest were stop signs, or just a free-for-all. (chuckles)
Garcia Hunt: So they did have forestry classes at that time?
Bishop: Yeah. NAU had probably one of the better forestry schools in the country at that time.
Garcia Hunt: Can you tell us how you began your career in firefighting?
Bishop: One of my really good friends from high school, who also came up to college with me, had friends of his father from when they'd served in World War II together, that had a little ranch outside of town. He was working for the Forest Service, running a thinning crew-they were called a TSI crew, timber stand improvement. And you would go out into the woods and the way things are so overgrown now, they're talking about reducing fire hazard by thinning trees. Well, in those days, they were thinning trees basically instead of having 200-300 very small trees per acre, you would thin them out to where you would leave maybe 50-100 so that that growth could go to fewer trees, but make them grow better. Essentially you had so much nutrients. Usually you had too many trees competing for the available nutrients. And, yeah, it also did reduce fire risk somewhat.
My first year, I was on a TSI crew, but what they did, they didn't have any organized fire crews then, as such. Or at least, when they had a big fire, they would import crews. They didn't have any organized crews on the forest, like a twenty-man crew or something. And so the TSI crews, ten people, they would send us to the fires. That was the summer of 1967, and it was either very late July or early August that year they had a horrendous fire season up in the Pacific Northwest. And we went up there for about—well, most of the guys from the forest went for about five or six weeks. Those of us who were going back to college left early, and we were up there for two or three weeks. They had some very large fires up there that summer.
Garcia Hunt: Can you tell us some different positions you've held also, throughout your career, besides TSI crew?
Bishop: The first year I was on the TSI crew. The second year they asked me if I would be a prevention patrolman. The Flagstaff Ranger District had six different patrol areas, and as a fire prevention patrolman, you basically were given a government truck and a radio, and you would drive that area each day. And there were a couple of reasons for this: number one, if there was a fire in that area, you were out there to be a rapid response. And number two, and probably the really important part, is you were there to educate the public. Every time I saw somebody in my patrol area, I stopped and talked to them, talked to them about fire safety; if there were campfire/smoking restrictions on, I would tell them about that. If there was a forest closure, and people were in the area that weren't supposed to be in there, I would have to ticket them. I think in the six years I was with the Forest Service I wrote like two tickets or something, that was a very rare occurrence.
And also, kind of a sideline of this was you kind of had a record of who was in an area, so say if there was an abandoned campfire in an area, and I had talked to somebody there the day before, I had their name and license plate number. So there was kind of some accountability.
The biggest part, though, was really educating the public as to, you know, "It's really dry right now—be careful."
Garcia Hunt: So beyond that, did you hold any other positions after graduating from NAU? Was it just patrol?
Bishop: I think I patrolled for two years, and then I started running what in those days we called a pumper. Now they're engine crews, but in those days, on Flagstaff Ranger District, we had two one-ton, four-wheel-drive trucks. Each of these had a 200-gallon slip-in water tank. The truck had a utility bed, kind of like APS or one of those would use, with compartments that opened, in the utility bed and in the actual truck bed itself there was a 200-gallon water tank with a pump on it, and a hose reel with three-quarter-inch rubber hose. And that was what we used. I ran a pumper there for probably two years.
So the first year was on a TSI crew, second and third summers I was a prevention patrolman. So the fourth and fifth years I was running a pumper, and then the sixth year ran the hotshot crew, because that was the first year that they had hotshot crews on the forest. In fact, in those days, in 1972, the first year they had that crew, the Coconino got a crew that year, and the Sitgreaves National Forest got a crew that year, and those were both new in 1972. There was an existing crew over on the Gila National Forest in New Mexico. And those were the only three [Hotshot] crews in Region 3, which is Arizona and New Mexico. Now they've got, I think, four crews on just the Coconino National Forest. Things have changed a lot.
Garcia Hunt: Okay, we'll go back just a little bit. Can you tell us the function of the Indian crew, and then we'll go into what the function of hotshot and then hand crews are. So can you go from telling us what the function of the Indian crew actually was?
Bishop: Of an Indian crew?
Garcia Hunt: Yeah.
Bishop: Okay, well, back then—this is twenty-nine years ago—they had several crews from both the Navajo and Hopi Reservations, and they'd be called Hopi 1, 2, 3, Navajo 1, 2, 3. They were ten-man suppression crews, and they were based on a call-up basis, where if they had a fire where they needed manpower, they would call up to the reservation and the crews would then come down. They were not a regular Forest Service group, employed full-time by Forest Service, not doing project work when they weren't on fire. And actually, I forgot in 1972, they did have a ten-man suppression crew at Blue Ridge and one at Long Valley. They were suppression crews, they weren't hotshot crews.
And the real difference between that and a hotshot crew was those were usually ten-man crews. The hotshots were twenty-man. The hotshots were employed full-time, and when we weren't on a fire, we were doing different types of project work on the forest such as cutting fuel breaks. In 1972 they housed the hotshot crew out at the Ski and Spur Ranch, which is at the base of the Peaks. In February of 1972, they had gotten the ranch in a land exchange from I believe their name was Grassmoen. They had owned the Snowbowl, and that's why the name Ski and Spur. They had this little ranch at the base. If you're going to Snowbowl today, you've got that long straight-of-way where you go up for about a mile of straight road, then all of a sudden the road makes about a 90-degree turn to the right, and kind of keeps going up the hill. Well, if you went to the left, through a gate, back in about a mile was the Ski and Spur Ranch. They'd gotten it in February, and the crew started on March 20. So one of the first things we did was basically to clean it up and make it adequate for our living quarters. We did a lot of clean-up, we had to install a new water line from Leroux Spring. I think we put in about a half-mile water line, dug the ditches and laid the pipe and stuff, because that was our drinking water, all of our domestic water for the crew quarters there. And we also had to do a lot of road work, because the existing road was just a dirt road. We put in some culverts and cindered and stuff with the Engineering Department from Forest Service.
Garcia Hunt: You mentioned March 20 when you began that project. Was that March 20, 1970?
Bishop: March 20, 1972, was when the actual hotshot crew, per se, came on board as a functioning unit. I had started, it was either late February or early March, kind of in preparation, doing the hiring interviews, etc. But the actual twenty-man crew came on board on March 20. I think we had a fire in January that year, up on Mars Hill. It was an extremely dry year.
Garcia Hunt: So is there a difference between hand crew and hotshot crew?
Bishop: To my way of thinking, no. A hand crew is somebody basically that is going to—you're building, hand line, or you're using Pulaskis, McLeods, and shovels, and scratching out hand line. A hotshot crew is one of the type of crews that does it. I'm sure things have changed in twenty-nine years, but back then, basically you had your hotshot crews, you had your suppression crews, like your Navajo 1, 2, 3, Hopi 1, 2, 3, and stuff, and you also had some convict crews. They used them a lot in California where inmates could get credit and reduce their sentence by working on fire lines.
Garcia Hunt: Were you dealing at all with any kind of demolition back in 1972 when you were first starting?
Bishop: No, not on the hotshot crew. A couple of years before that they had sent a couple of us down to—East Pocket Lookout needed a new outhouse, the old one had filled up. And we hit rock when we were digging, so we had to do some blasting down there. They sent a certified blaster down with us, because the two of us who went down originally didn't really know anything about blasting. That was interesting. (laughs)
Garcia Hunt: Could you tell us a little about the training that you went through to become a hotshot?
Bishop: It was basically on-the-job. I had five years of fighting fires. One of the requirements was that most of the individuals on the crew had to have prior fire experience. Actually, I cheated, and I have a copy of the annual report I had to write at the end of the year to go to the supervisor's office: kind of had to break down man hours on this, man hours on that, a very typical government document. And looking at that, it was interesting because out of the twenty men, fifteen of them had at least three years' fire experience prior to going on the crew.
Prior fire experience was a definite plus on that crew. You didn't want a bunch of inexperienced people. In fact, if you read the paper today, like last year the government came up with all kinds of new funding for fire crews, and it's great, I think it's necessary, but they're having problems because they don't have the qualified people to fill them, and there's a real cutthroat piracy thing where different forests are kind of stealing different people, like management people, off of crews, and some crews aren't even—they're at half strength right now because they can't find qualified people to be on them. So I think it's good, it's just going to be a problem finding qualified applicants. It's going to take them a while to get them up to full strength.
But one thing that really helped on that crew is we did—and I can't remember which Hopi crew it was—half the crew was comprised of one of the Hopi crews that came down, and basically half my recruitment job was done for me. It worked out really well. One of the stipulations that I had when I took over running the crew, is I figured I was going to be dealing with the individuals on the crew day-in and day-out. You really just live together. You don't get away from each other. And if there are problems, they really magnify. One of my criteria to run it was that I would do all the hiring and firing. And at first I was a little upset to find out that they had basically given a commitment to this Hopi crew that all ten of you come you're hired. But right away working with them, I could see it was not going to be a problem. I mean I would have hired every one of them myself.
Garcia Hunt: Jennifer and I have been to Mormon Lake and talked to their crews, as in Indian crews and hotshot crews, and what do you think about the P.T. test? Did you have sort of a P.T. test back then?
Bishop: We did not. In those days we did not have a physical agility test. We did have physical training for twenty to thirty minutes every morning, where we would run, do sit-ups, do push-ups, etc. I would say the median age from the Hopi crew that came down to comprise half the crew, the overhead from that crew were older, there were some people like fifty or so (chuckles) which I hate to say that's older, because that's how old I am now. But they were older. If you discounted two or three individuals who kind of spike it and get it up there, most of the people on that crew were twenty to twenty-five, and they'd all been in firefighting for quite a while, and they were fit—they had to be. And I think the new requirements of having physical agility and stuff is very good, because, like I say, this was a long time ago, and things were kind of—I wouldn't say backwards, because we made everything work—but kind of primitive compared to today's standards.
Garcia Hunt: Did you have any women at that time trying to try out for the hotshots?
Bishop: No, there was not a single woman applicant. In fact, in those days, there were a couple of women on the Flagstaff Ranger District, but they were in secretarial, office-type positions. In fact, when I graduated in forestry, Susan Billingsley was in my graduating class, and she was the very first [female] forestry graduate from NAU. So women in forestry back then were kind of an anomaly—they weren't real common.
Garcia Hunt: Could you describe some of the equipment you carried with you?
Bishop: For fire use, we had two Homelite 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 here and it 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 bars—like that bow bar when we were over on a 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 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, McLeods, just typical firefighting tools.
When we weren't fighting 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 400 feet wide. And it would follow, 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 to cut a lot of trees to put your line in to burn off of. The whole forest had these. We basically just cut fuel breaks when we weren't on fire duty.
Garcia Hunt: As hotshot crews do today, were you equipped to stay out for the evenings, or did you constantly come back into camp?
Bishop: No. As a hotshot crew almost always you would end up with the night shift, because usually a fire would become noticed in the afternoon, because in the mornings it was cooler, often the wind wasn't as heavy and lookouts would find the fires usually like from mid or very late morning into the afternoon. So by the time we would travel and get there, if it was a local fire, on our forest, often we'd get there and be a day crew, and if it was small enough, we'd be back at crew quarters that night. However, if we were going off-forest for a fire, as soon as the fires would get discovered, usually from noon on, and then with our travel time, we'd get there right around evening. And really, evening is a much easier time to control the fires, because your temperature goes down and your humidity goes up. So we almost always ended up being night shift. And then somebody else would come in, and they'd end up being the day shift, so we'd try and sleep during the day, and then fight fire nights. We were equipped to fight fire at night, because that's really when you get a lot of your more productive work done, because, like I say, temperatures would drop, humidity goes up, and the fire kind of lays down for you—hopefully. Sometimes it wouldn't do that, but technically it should.
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. 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 and 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. 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 cellulose, ground up newspaper and stuff in them. 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.
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, personal 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.
Garcia Hunt: Speaking about staying in the forest for at least two to three weeks, were they using any type of aircraft to suppress (unclear)?
Bishop: Yeah. In 1972 they had a small three-passenger Bell helicopter on Mormon Lake District. They did have a Helitack crew. And one of the main ways of transporting all of the crews on larger fires was they'd bring in Bell 205s, which were basically your Vietnam issue big helicopters, like you'd see in the movie "Apocalypse Now," and they would hold ten people—or ten people plus the pilot and gear. So that was how we moved around on fires a lot. Sometimes they'd use a smaller helicopter. And they had slurry planes. That hasn't changed a whole lot.
Garcia Hunt: So would they bring you in extra rations, extra water, potable water and (unclear)?
Bishop: Yeah. What we'd do is the radio I had then was strictly a Forest Net. It had Forest Channel 1 and 2, which in those days 1 was administrative, 2 was fire channel. And what you'd do is, we were on Channel 1 all the time, the dispatcher would call us and tell us that we were being sent to a fire someplace. And then usually if there was only one fire going on at that time, Channel 2 was the Fire Net, they would have you switch to Channel 2 so that your regular administrative traffic was not interfering with your fire traffic. If there were two fires, the larger fire would take precedence and would take over Channel 2.
Garcia Hunt: So as a crew boss back in 1972, were you the only one with a radio?
Bishop: Yes.
Garcia Hunt: Or like today, (unclear).
Bishop: No. And we had one radio. It was ironic, because right at the end of fire season, they got two more radios. Actually, one of them was supposed to be a replacement, because the radio I had was rather cumbersome. It was called a handy-talkie. And they did get a couple of what were called personal portables which is more like the radio you think of today. And those were four-channel. And what we intended to do was set those up where they had Forest Channel 1 and 2, and Air Net, so you could talk to helicopters, slurry aircraft, etc., and also Fire Net. In those days, Boise had what they called the Boise Interagency Fire Center, which was kind of a consortium of Park Service, Forest Service, and BLM. It was your staging area. When you had a really big project fire, they would ship stuff out of Boise, and you would get—like at fire camp you would just get a box that maybe had two hundred radios. They were all the same frequency. And that's what would usually happen when we'd get to a larger fire, is that my squad bosses and I would each have a radio. But, like I say, at the end of the season, they did get some appropriations and we ended up with two radios, and they were getting a third one for the next year, for local use. When we did get to a project fire, a larger fire, we would have, each squad boss and myself as the foreman, would have a radio.
Garcia Hunt: So they would have, at a larger fire, logistics then?
Bishop: Oh yeah. They had it set up where—it was called a red card. It was kind of like your driver's license. And you would be red-carded as, say, maybe as a sector boss. And what they'd do is—somebody who didn't have a lot of fire experience, they would go as a trainee, and they really wouldn't have any position, except to, say, tag along with the sector boss. And they would go several times and just observe, help out and stuff, until they learned enough to be a sector boss. Then they could move up to like a division boss, which is multiple sectors. Then they could move up to, say, a line boss, which would be multiple divisions. Then up to a fire boss, up to operations boss, whatever. It was your "driver's license" for what you could do at a fire. And they had teams set up, an "A" Team, "B" Team, "C" Team, etc. If they had a project fire going, usually the fire management—actually, in those days it was called the fire control officer, because they weren't thinking of fire management so much as fire control. But the district fire control officer would usually be the fire boss of that fire until an overhead team could get in. (aside about tape) You'd have the interim local person in charge, and then if it was a big enough fire, they would import a management team.
[END TAPE 1, SIDE B; BEGIN TAPE 1, SIDE B]
Garcia Hunt: So that was my next question also, on wildland firefighting resources, what kind of managers and management would be in place also?, besides that fire [echelon?] I guess.
Bishop: It's kind of one of those ironic things where you might have somebody who, say, was a timber person, a GS-9, on a fire, who was overseeing a district ranger from someplace else that was a GS-12, because he had a lot more fire experience. It didn't go by just your normal, everyday job description in the Forest Service—it went by your fire experience and what you were qualified to do.
Garcia Hunt: So could you tell us a little bit about the origin of the Flagstaff Fire Team itself?
Bishop: Okay, in those days it was called the Coconino Hotshots. Now it's called the Flagstaff Hotshots, because there's multiple hotshot crews on the forest. Like I said earlier, it was the only one then. So we were called the Coconino Hotshots. I don't know a whole lot about it. I do know at the end of the year 1971, the year before the crew actually came on, my boss, who was the fire control officer on the district, said, "Hey, we're getting this crew next year. Nobody around here knows a whole lot about how to do this and stuff, but I'd like for you to be the foreman." And so we sat down and talked about it, and that was when I laid down a couple of things: the fact that I wanted to do the hiring and firing. I didn't want to get into basically being in a management position and having a lot of decisions made that I had no say in—if that makes sense. I figured that was not a good situation to get into. And we talked about it. We kind of worked out how it was going to be, because he was the ultimate supervisor for that crew. That would be like saying the president of the university here is the ultimate supervisor of the library. He usually just lets the head librarian deal with things, but he is ultimately responsible. That's kind of how it worked. The fire control officer was ultimately responsible, but I was the one—and also with my two squad bosses, the management of the crew were really the ones who did all the day-to-day stuff. I mean, it was only when it was a real policy issue or something where it needed to go above to him.
So initially to fill the twenty positions on the crew, I think we had twenty-three people hired, because that way—and we were working six-day weeks. When somebody had a day off, there was somebody—there was always twenty people on, with days off, to do this. And finally I prevailed upon my superiors that this is not a good system. What we should do is pick a day that historically has low fire occurrence and give everybody that day off, because we had an assigned tool order where for instance the assistant squad boss was always end shovel on the squad. End shovel obviously carries a shovel, and he's the last one in line on that squad, and he's a very experienced firefighter. It's his job, if the fire line is not right, he calls them back, says, "Hey, we need to redo this section." But if he was gone that day, you might have somebody with far less experience doing it. And this way the people had an assigned tool order, and they just had the same job every day, and people liked their job, they took pride in it, because you didn't want to be say second Pulaski one day, and first shovel the next.
And the first couple months we did that, and one time we had a large fire right on the Rim, down near Turkey Butte, called the Rattle Fire. It was my day off, and so the crew went down without me, and actually I found out about it, they called me on the phone, and I went down several hours later. I got down there probably about eight that night. They'd been sent probably about three that afternoon. That was a decision that was above myself and the squad boss's ability. I actually went up to the forest supervisor's office for that decision to be made. He saw the sense in it. And I think we ended up with Wednesday as a day off, because historically your heavier occurrence—of man-caused fires, at least—are Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, just because that's when people are out in the woods more. And Monday and Tuesday more, because that's kind of a slop-over because people who've left campfires and they kind of smolder for a day or so. So Monday and Tuesday, ironically, were kind of heavy man-caused fire days. When you got to Wednesday and Thursday, it really diminished. But as far as lightning fires, that was a crap shoot, just depending on what nature threw at you. But you could kind of figure where your fire load was, man-caused.
Garcia Hunt: So in the Forest Service, who looks after the higher administration? Would that be the National Interagency Fire Center, or would it be somebody within the D.C. area or something like that, national area?
Bishop: I'm not sure I completely understand the question. Forest Service is part of the Department of Agriculture. The secretary of Agriculture would be the ultimate "boss" you might say. And then under him would be the director of the Forest Service. And then under him would be the regions, because like California was Region 5. Arizona and New Mexico combined together were Region 3. Utah, and I think it was Colorado, were Region 4. And then within each region you had national forests. Each forest had a supervisor who was in charge of that whole forest. And then in those days, the Coconino National Forest had seven ranger districts, and each one of those had a district ranger. And under him was a fire control officer. And that was my boss on Flagstaff District. So there's a lot of people up above me. But I don't think any of the things we needed decided ever went above forest supervisor level—except probably, obviously, the initial decision to create a hotshot crew on the Flagstaff District—probably came from the regional forester or above. I don't think that could have been initiated at the forest supervisor level.
Garcia Hunt: For a scenario reason, just to ask the question, if there was a much larger fire, would there actually be another hotshot crew established on site?
Bishop: No, you wouldn't establish a hotshot crew on site. What you would do is import one. And often, yeah, we'd be working right beside another hotshot crew, or maybe a convict crew, or a suppression crew. On larger fires, you have multiple crews. And you wouldn't just create a crew right then. What you do is, you would import from another forest, from another region. We went out of—I can't remember exactly—we had about forty-some odd fires on-forest, and we had numerous, probably in the neighborhood of thirty or so that were off-forest, in-region, and then out-of-region, where we actually went over to like California, Colorado, Utah.
Garcia Hunt: Could you tell us a little bit about the most memorable fires that you've been in?
Bishop: Probably the Battle Fire, which was, I think it was June of 1972. It was down at Prescott, and it was an unusual one, because we got the call about ten in the morning, if I remember right. And about the time we dropped off the Rim, driving down to it, we could see the smoke. It was in brush. It was something unusual for this region because it was in the Bradshaws, southeast of Prescott, and there was a lot of brush in there.
[Sound quality drops dramatically, as if narrator's lavaliere mic fails and now the interviewer's mic is the only one picking up both voices. Accuracy of transcription from this point on cannot be assured. (Tr.)]
Bishop: In this area, you think mainly of timber fires. But it was in brush. We spent eight days down there. When we got down there, it looked like it was somewhat contained at about 3,000 acres during the first burning period. It started on Day One. By the time we got off the line on Day Two, it actually looked pretty good. It was at about 3,000 acres. It finally grew to 28,000 acres because the winds came up that day, and most of the line did not hold. It was kind of ironic, because we were instructed not to burn out our line, and we did not follow directions, because in brush, I wasn't going to get in there and not burn out the line, once we were tied-in. (Our sector boss agreed, and told us to go ahead and burn out.) That means that basically, once you've constructed your line down to bare soil, if you've got fire that's really moving, this four-foot-wide dirt strip isn't going to do anything really. So what you do is, you construct your line, and you burn off of it to burn the fuel, so when the fire comes up, you've got your line here, you've got 100 feet or so where everything is consumed, so when the fire runs up against that, it runs out of fuel. That's the only way on a big fire like that, fire lines will really hold, we were not going to cut line in the brush and not burn out! So we went ahead and burned out the line, and we got our tail ends chewed out pretty good. But by the end of the next burning period, our line was the only one that held, and so we went from a scapegoat to being patted on the head. They didn't tell us not to burn out our line anymore.
But that one was a very difficult fire. At one point they were actually worried about the fire overrunning fire camp. They were starting to evacuate the fire camp. There were squirrelly, very erratic winds. I mean winds were doing 180 degree wind shifts, a lot on that fire. It was technically a very difficult fire to fight.
Garcia Hunt: Do you have any others you might....
Bishop: Oh, like I said, the Cold Fire over there in New Mexico.
Garcia Hunt: [Cold? ].
Bishop: We froze on that thing. I felt sorry for the poor people that were trying to sleep at night. I know they went a couple of days with no sleep. It was so cold. That is one of the things they do at the Interagency Fire Cache. They sent gobs of these disposable sleeping bags, and they were not adequate. If you were in the desert and stuff, they would work-but when it got cold, they just didn't cut it.
But anyhow, I remember little things on each fire. We went to three or four brush fires in California that season. The only Park Service fire we fought that year. That was at Mesa Verde National Park. We had been on a Bureau of Land Management fire west of Salt Lake City. It was out in the sagebrush flats. We were being released from it, and a fire had broken out in Alaska, and they loaded us on a plane, they were sending us up to Alaska, and we were all tickled to death, because it costs so much to send a crew to Alaska. They didn't send you up there just to bring you home in two days. If we were going to Alaska, we were going to be up there for a while. Nobody on the crew had ever been to Alaska, "Yeah, it's going to be great!" Every twelve days, they had to give you one day of R&R. So we're going to be up there, we'll have at least one day to, you know, you're in the middle of nowhere—go do some hiking or just poke around and see the country. We were about thirty-five minutes, headed towards Alaska, they had a fire at Mesa Verde, and they lost it again, and so we were diverted en route and sent over to Mesa Verde.
And there, our instructions were that we were not to use mechanized equipment, because they were treating it like it was a wilderness. We could not use chain saws, and they did not want us cutting indirect line, which means that a fire that had fingered like this [demonstrates with hand raised, fingers spread], if you cut indirect line, you'll kind of go like this [draws a circle around the tips of his fingers], and then burn out to take out all of those islands and solidify the line. So if you cut direct line, that means you're going right along the perimeter of the fire like this [traces an outline around each finger]—much more time consuming, just a very slow way to do things. Indirect line is the way you usually fight fires. But they had caught the fire, and lost it and caught it, and lost it and caught it, and lost it, and then that's when we were sent up there. We were there for around four or five days. It was kind of an exercise in frustration. In those days, Park Service didn't have very many fires, and their management team . . . kind of made it difficult at times. One of the things they did is they finally got permission to use mechanized equipment. Usually what you do is, if you're using a bulldozer, you'd run one bulldozer width, and then burn off of it, burn off of that line. But they elected to run four bulldozers wide, side-by-side. And they pushed all the fuel toward the fire side of the line, so when the fire burned up to that line, you'd have a thirty-foot-high pile of trees and brush and stuff, and it [the fire] was gone again. But it was an experience for the park because Park Service just didn't have that many fires back then.
Garcia Hunt: Have you had any experience, or wanted ever to become a smoke jumper?
Bishop: I had thought about it, and a couple of my friends that I had graduated from the School of Forestry with, a couple of them went on and did do smoke jumping. And I had thought about it, but I'd broken a knee, tore it up pretty good, in high school, I kind of doubted they'd take me for smoke jumping because of that. Basically, about the time I probably would have seriously considered that—well, applying at least, I was offered the position to run the hotshot crew, and I thought, "Shoot, you know, this is a good deal. Why not just stay here and do this?"
Garcia Hunt: As a fire's natural role in ecosystems, why do you think we need to be concerned about this?, as a fire being natural....
Bishop: Well, there's a real controversy right now about thinning and doing prescribed burns, and I'm all in favor of it. Actually, when I was working we called it controlled burns, although occasionally we lost control. So it is smarter to call them prescribed burns. You know, you look at photographs of the Flagstaff area around the turn of the century, and the trees were very far apart, we had a lot of grass and stuff. And one of the reasons for that was that you would have lightning fires that would come through every so often, and they would burn out the forest debris, but they would stay out of the treetops, because you did not have the fuel load on the ground to get things up in the treetops. And then with settlement of the area, basically you adopted a policy of you just had to put out every fire. You know, you just have to, with Smokey the Bear telling us no fires.
In 1972, we would occasionally let a fire burn, if it was a lightning fire. But most lightning fires, we still went and put it out, even in wilderness areas. In Sycamore Canyon, I was down in there numerous times, hiking in and using an axe to chop down a tree, since it was wilderness. And we'd put it out and hike out. It usually was an all night deal, even with only one snag standing there burning. And now, I think once the rains have started and its lightning season, they let these go. If it gets to be a little bit of a ground fire, it's probably beneficial. People kind of outsmarted themselves with total suppression of fires, and they let huge fuel loads build up on the forest floor. So now you don't have those natural low-intensity fires that burn through every so often and keep things healthy. Now your trees are very close together, things are stagnated, and you just have a tremendous fuel load on the forest floor. I think something needs to be done.
Nineteen seventy-two [1972] was one of the worst fire seasons we had up to that point in time. The ones we're having now are much worse. But I just feel your fuel load continues to increase, and your number of people that are out recreating in the woods, building campfires, possibly leaving them, that stuff is increasing. So you've got more fuel and you've got more chance of it being ignited.
Garcia Hunt: So you believe it is very unhealthy?
Bishop: Yes. Especially like the area around Flagstaff, where you've got what they call your urban interface, where you basically have homes built right on the edge of the forest. Those are very much at risk. Look at the Los Alamos [fire] last year. That was actually somebody really making some bad decisions that created that. But the concept is good—it's just that sometimes you have to apply a little bit of logic and say, "This is not.... What we want to do is right. This just isn't the right time to do it."
Garcia Hunt: So how do you feel about the Flagstaff Plan on Urban Interface?
Bishop: From what I've read of it, I approve of it. I think it needs to be done. I consider myself a fairly strong environmentalist. But the forest was allowed to get so far away from what is natural, that I think it needs man to kind of push it back that direction a little bit. And I don't think you can say just, "Hey, it's gone to here, now hands off, we'll just leave it alone and let nature take care of it." I think you need to kind of push it back to where it used to be a little. Once you get it back there a ways, then maybe you can back off and let nature handle it all by itself. I think its gotten too far out of whack to just walk off and leave it—especially with the way population's increasing all the time, and your opportunity for having an ignition source is increasing every year.
Garcia Hunt: Sort of in the same area, how will most critical areas in need of fire application be identified to you?
Bishop: Well, that's a very upper-management decision, but if I were in that position, I would think your urban interface areas need it first just because of life safety and structural damage. Because basically, when you're dealing with fire, a wildland fire, or even a structural fire, life safety is your first concern. Saving structures is your second, and then saving trees and grass and stuff is your third area of concern. I think obviously that the urban interface needs to be first. And then your areas of really high-fire occurrence, or if you have archaeological sites, something like that, some sort of a resource you really want to protect—maybe a watershed, say, the inner basin, where you don't want it decimated by fire, since it's the watershed for the city of Flagstaff. Areas like that, because of either high incidence of fire, or if there are values for one reason or another—whether it be scenic, watershed, or cultural, whatever—those are the second tier, then you kind of go out and do your whole forest.
Garcia Hunt: What tools other than prescribed fire do federal agencies have to reduce fuel hazards?
Bishop: Prescribed fire is going to be, in my opinion, the most cost effective. About the only other thing I can think of-there may be some new technologies I don't know of—would be basically to thin and take a chipper in and just chip everything up, and haul it off-or possibly leave some accumulation of the chips on the ground. One project we did as Coconino Hotshots was-if you are heading out [highway]180 towards the Grand Canyon, just the other side of Kendrick Park, as you're leaving the clearing there, you're going up a little hill, back in the trees, is the Kendrick Park picnic grounds. And one project that we did is we built fire line totally around that on both sides. Instead of being like the normal fuel breaks that we did that were six chains—you know, a chain being sixty-six feet—so like 400 feet wide—this one was one-and-a-half chains, about a hundred feet wide. And what we did is we thinned out trees the way we would at a normal fuel break. But we also limbed all the dead limbs off of trees, that we normally would not do. We then trucked every bit of the thinning slash, limbing slash, and stuff, and hauled it out of the area. So basically you had—except for grass, small brush and stuff—you had no ground fuel, and we built roughly about a ten foot wide fire line down to bare dirt in the middle of that. The theory behind that was, to keep a fire, if a campfire got out of control, in the picnic ground, keep it from going out into the forest. It's basically a way to contain it and to keep it in the picnic ground.
That was an unusual one. The project took much longer than normal, because normally, if we were cutting fuel breaks, half the crew would have saws and would be dropping trees and cutting them up into manageable lengths. The other half would be stacking them into piles that could be burned next fall or winter or whenever it was appropriate for burning. Then people would rotate. On that project, everything had to be chopped up really small, and it was all hauled out, and then that spread quite a distance away from the perimeter. It was very time consuming.
Garcia Hunt: What is the relationship between fire and air quality, especially as yourself as an early hotshot crew member?
Bishop: Well, you are impacting air quality when either you do a prescribed burn or when you have a wildland fire. However, with a prescribed burn you have the options of picking when you're going to do it, and thus minimizing the impact on air quality. Though with a wildland fire, it happens when it happens, and you don't have any say, so it usually impacts air quality more.
Garcia Hunt: Back in 1972 when you were starting—now they have respirators and different types of equipment—going back to the equipment part—were you equipped with any type of....
Bishop: Every person had a little individual first aid kit. The squad bosses all had a minor first aid kit, and in the truck we had a major first aid kit—but that usually didn't go with us. I had a belt pack first aid kit as the squad boss did. Each individual had a minor one that was carried with them: like bandaids, aspirin, this kind of stuff. And we did a certain amount of training. There were supposed to be two days of training a week. It often didn't happen because . . . it was inevitable . . . if we picked, say, Thursday for training this week, we'd get sent to a fire. Just Murphy's Law. We did have first aid training, I was a Red Cross first aid instructor. And the squad bosses also had Standard Red Cross first aid training. Crew members did not have to be certified. Basically, they did not have a formal program where they had a card from it, but they had the training actually in the stuff that we were going to deal with, because we weren't going to deal with, say, electrical shock or drowning or something like that, that the normal Red Cross course taught. Things like sprains, cuts, stuff that we would have, we spent far more emphasis on than the regular Red Cross course. So we kind of geared to what we needed, instead of just doing a blanket course.
And actually I may have said this earlier but when I looked at the [1972] report, I was amazed, we only had four accidents that whole season: one of them was an infected bug bite. On a fire in Utah, a guy got bit by, I think it was probably called a kissing bug, and his whole arm was swollen, because it became infected. We pulled him off the line, choppered him out to where he could get a vehicle, got him into Salt Lake City, went to the hospital, got some antibiotics. I think they may also have given him some steroids for it, he came back, and four or five hours later he was back on the fire line. One guy got into some poison oak over in California, and that just needed a topical treatment. One guy got a laceration on his finger from the edges on a Pulaski, which is kind of an ax with a hoe on the other end. And one guy sprained an ankle. And that was it for the whole season. And really, I was amazed, because considering you're working in rough country at night with chain saws and sharp tools and flames all around you, that's a pretty good safety record.
Garcia Hunt: So going into that, and also this being a grim question, how do you feel about the firefighters that lost their lives just this last day over in Washington?
Bishop: Up in Washington?
Garcia Hunt: Considering they were eighteen, nineteen, twenty years old, and I believe a few were just volunteers and pretty much unexperienced, how do you....
Bishop: Well, I think it was inexperience that created the problem, because all I know is what I read in the paper. I just read it this morning.
[END TAPE 1, SIDE B; BEGIN TAPE 2, SIDE A]
[Tape quality still poor. (Tr.)]
Bishop: I was having breakfast. Sounded like for one of them it was the very first fire she'd ever been on. One of them had been on a couple of fires before that—fairly limited experience. And from what I read in the paper, there were five of them on the crew, which tells me it was probably an engine crew. And they had given everybody orders, told everybody basically to get out, they were all scrambling for their trucks to get out of there. These people couldn't make it, they elected to employ their fire shelters. And in the paper they even called them "shake 'n' bakes." That's what we used to call them because they're basically an aluminumized Kevlar type thing. And we always had the feeling that, you know, occasionally fire shelters work. But our basic gut feeling on them was, "Well, they're kinda nice, because you can identify the remains." I mean you're well done, instead of burnt. If you think how hot a forest fire is, and then to be in this little thing right in the middle of it, it's like—imagine being in this tinfoil Kevlar thing and crawling into a thousand-degree oven, and being there for, let's say, ten minutes, until the fire burns over. Sometimes they work. From what I read in the paper, it sounds like they were headed toward a stream. If they made it to the stream, they'd probably have been okay. Because there, basically, you can just hang out in the water, and that would have probably been ok. The one person who did survive, from what I read, evidently did not have his gloves so he could not hold on to the fire shelter. And so he basically baled and ran. He got severely burned, but he also was not killed.
Garcia Hunt: So do you feel that prior to sending them into that certain situation, could somebody have evaluated the less experienced?
Bishop: That's a hard question to answer, because I don't know what the situation was. It may have been the one lady's first fire. Possibly she'd been taking fire science classes and had at least some lecture or textbook training, even though she didn't have any actual on-the-ground experience. But not knowing exactly what happened, it'd be hard to second guess. On the hotshot crew of the twenty people that we actually had, once we pared it down through a little bit of attrition from the original twenty-three, when we had alternating days off, we had the twenty that really made the core of that crew for the whole season. Fifteen of them had three years' experience or more. And I think that's what you need to do. But again, I think I mentioned it earlier, I know I talked about it with friends a while back, that the way they expanded the funding for wildland fire crews they are really having problems getting qualified people. It's a real problem for them. They're kind of caught between a rock and a hard spot. This is what you want to do, but if you don't have the people to do it, you have to fall back upon those who don't have quite as much experience. And you have to gain experience somewhere. You're not born knowing how to fight fire. Hopefully you can start out on very small fires on your district, and kind of work your way up.
Garcia Hunt: So what type of fire have you been in the most strenuous situation like that?
Bishop: We were on a fire over in California in brush. It was close to . . . San Francisco. Can't think of the name. Carmel! The year that I ran the hotshot crew, that first year, we did not have fire shelters. They elected to order them for us the following year. I was kind of surprised at that when I read my [1972] report the other day, but we did not carry fire shelters, and I think we were just as happy not to, because it wasn't mandatory then—it is now. And we did have one situation where we did build . . . . We basically started a backfire.
Garcia Hunt: To interrupt, did you at all have Nomex yet, or were you still using levis and....
Bishop: No. All we had, we wore basically levis, and fire shirts, they'd just graduated from the old orange ones that were basically like a regular long-sleeved shirt, with two pockets in them, and they just graduated to a heavier-weight cotton that was yellow, more like a jacket. Both of them were treated with fire retardant. That was pre-Nomex days. We wore heavy boots. A lot of guys on the crew opted for Whites, which were very expensive. You could have them custom built. They would send you the forms, you'd measure your foot, send them back, and in about six weeks you'd get your boots, and they were basically built to your foot. And you could order them any height you wanted, because most guys wanted them higher, to protect their shins. Your other option was Red Wing loggers at about a third the price. They were only about an eight-inch-high model. My Whites lasted me the whole season. A couple guys went through the Red Wings-at least two pairs in a season. The Whites were built for really heavy-duty use, but also were very expensive. And then just levis.
A lot of the time I would be wearing a Forest Service uniform shirt because I had to sign contracts and stuff like that, if, say, we needed to eat someplace on the road. But on fires I didn't, because the old uniform shirts weren't 100 percent cotton—they were a synthetic blend, and if you got to close to a fire they'd melt. You didn't want to wear them in a fire. And so I always had a uniform shirt with me when I had to be official, but on fires I just wore the regular yellow fire shirt. The government supplied a hard hat, goggles, etc. People basically supplied their own boots and gloves. The government supplied everything else.
Garcia Hunt: And then to get back to the first question—I'm sorry I interrupted you—but your most stressful fire, as if I was like sitting here, having coffee with you, or we were in a cafe or something, tell us about how that experience . . . .
Bishop: We were up near Carmel on a brush fire with very erratic winds. We ended up getting onto a scree slope on the side of a hill and basically started a backfire. You burn out off a line, if you've built fire line, you burn off of that line, that's burning out. A backfire is when you don't have a control line, basically you just start a fire that is not tied into a line or anything . At least this is the terminology we used to use. And we started this backfire and basically burned a couple acres of that scree slope, got into the burn, and the main body of the fire burned around us. And it was tense. We used our heads; no one was injured, not even smoke inhalation. No burns or anything from it. It was beautiful. You'll think I'm a little warped but just kind of looking out and seeing nothing but 50-75-foot high flames, just everywhere you look. I think one of the guys on the crew said, "You know, if Hell looks like this it wouldn't be that bad." (laughs) It was beautiful. It really was. You have to understand the mentality of firefighters, though. They're not your normal, everyday-type person—they are a little different.
The other time that we really had fun was on the Battle Fire near Prescott. I think it was the third night we were down there. We burned out about 2,000 acres that night. You've got guys who've basically been building fire line and doing a little bit of burning all season. But that night they just wanted us to burn out massive quantities of brush off of this road. The road was being using as the control line. So actually, we were burning out, but it was more like backfiring. They just said, "We're not even going to deal with trying to get up close to the fire to build a line. We are just going to fall back a quarter of a mile to the road . . . let's burn it, let's get it done." And so it was twenty of our guys running through the woods with drip torches, and we thought it was Christmas. We were just having fun.
Garcia Hunt: Family. Tell us, you personally, not thinking of any other but your own, how does that go?
Bishop: I was single. I was dating, I had a certain young lady here in Flagstaff at the time. And I always had some postcards in my fire pack. She was used to—she wouldn't get a call from me, and maybe like Thursday we were supposed to go see a movie or something, and I didn't show up. She'd figure what was going on, because I wasn't the type just to stand her up just for grins. And about Saturday she'd get a postcard from Salt Lake City saying, "Well, we're in Utah. I'll give you a call when we get home." I didn't have any control over it, and there was nothing she could do about it. If it was going to work, that's the way it had to be. Other guys on the crew who were married and did have families, the dispatcher in those cases would call, and notify their families when he got a chance. That was a very hectic job. You couldn't have paid me enough to dispatch. Those guys were the real heroes—they really were, just keeping track of everything that was going on at one time with two, three guys manning these radios. That was where the real success came from, because they were coordinating everything else.
But when they got a chance, they would call and notify families. And sometimes the dispatcher if it was something major I'd ask him to give a call. He had my girlfriend's phone number. Not just for a movie, but if we were going to do something special, I'd try and get word to her.
Garcia Hunt: So what are you doing now, and what have you done since you left forestry?
Bishop: Well, when I left Forest Service—and again, the reason I left was I was supposed to have been a GS-7, working year-round. Because of the [1972] wage/hiring freeze, I was a GS 5 and it looked like it would be quite a while before I had a year-round job. Friends on the Fire Department asked me to apply and I did. When they sent out the announcements, there were no jobs. Right after they sent it out, one guy turned in his two weeks' notice. And so when we took the test, they said, "There is one job," and I ended up getting it. I spent twelve years with Flag Fire, where I was a paramedic and a hoseman. And in, oh, about 1985 or so, I left Fire and I had been kayaking and canoeing for a little while, so I basically learned how to row a raft, and I worked as a commercial river guide, and taught swiftwater rescue classes for Rescue 3 out of California, which teaches safely extricating people from moving water, because over half the time it's the attempted rescuer that becomes the fatality, and the mission of that program was to educate people so that they don't . . . . Self-sacrifice is noble but it's not real smart, and we try to prevent that.
And for the last four or five years I'm been dealing in out-of-print Grand Canyon and Colorado River books, papers, etc. That's how I know everyone here at the Library. Richard [Quartaroli] and I were going up to a river trip, and I was talking to him, and he said, "I didn't know you used to be a hot shot. I've got someone who wants to talk to you." So that's kind of how this all happened.
Garcia Hunt: This has been a really great interview, and if Jennifer has any questions....
Bishop: I do have one more thing that I'd like to add.
Garcia Hunt: Sure, go ahead.
Bishop: Just to show how far things have come. Again, it was the very first year they had the hotshot crew on the forest. And there at first we didn't have a vehicle. We basically had a half-ton Dodge Carry-All that would hold eight people. Dodge doesn't make them anymore. We had a three-quarter-ton, six-passenger pickup, and two half-ton pickups, and that's how we moved the crew around at first, because there was a delay in getting a vehicle. The vehicle they finally got us was a two-and-a-half-ton stakebed truck, with a twenty-foot bed. And that was our crew truck. It was woefully inadequate, because what we did, we put a bunch of wooden boxes in it, lined on all four sides, and they held all the equipment and stuff. Guys sat on those, no seatbelts. That two-and-a-half-ton truck was made for hauling really, really heavy loads. And if we were going down to, say, do fuel break work down at Buck Ridge that summer, going down Forest Road 231, Woody Mountain Road, usually I was doing fifteen to twenty miles an hour, and it's thirty-five miles down there. That's four hours travel time each day. Because you couldn't go faster than that, or you had scrambled crew in the back. Now they have, these regular crew carriers.
So things have come a long way, they really have. But again, that was the first year. It was an experiment, it really was. For me to try and organize a crew, they called around to the Gila Hotshots, and to existing crews in Southern California to get copies of their annual reports for me to go over, to see kind of how to organize things, because everybody on the Coconino [National Forest] was totally in the dark. And it worked out because we had a very heavy fire season. We had just minimal injuries. It worked out well.
Garcia Hunt: Great. Thank you, Bill. We're here at the Cline Library, and we're finishing up. Jennifer Kern is present. Thank you, Bill.
Bishop: It was fun.
[END OF INTERVIEW]