Steve Dudley Interview
| Biographical data |
It is July 8, 2002, and this is an interview, an oral history, for the "Fire on the Plateau" project.� [Anne Holcomb is the interviewer.]
Holcomb:�If you'd like to just start off and tell us a little bit about your background, and how long ago you came to this area, and things like that.
Dudley: I came to Northern Arizona after I was discharged from the military in Phoenix in late 1974.� I was given an early discharge from the military to come up here and attend Northern Arizona University.� So I got out a few months early and came up to NAU and started my career.� While I was in the military, I had fought structural and crash fires for them, so I had probably about four or five years' experience in dealing with fires in the military.� When I got into school, just like every other student, I needed a summertime job.� Since I had a good background in fire already, I talked to the Forest Service, and North Kaibab offered me a position in 1975 on the North Kaibab Ranger District, as a fire prevention patrolman.� And that's really where I began my Forest Service career in fire, was up there.
From 1974 through 1976, I worked on the North Kaibab.� In 1976, I came down to the Flagstaff area and worked for the Mormon Lake Ranger District on the Coconino National Forest, basically first as what they called a tanker crewman at the time, which was just a crewman that works on a fire engine along with three other people.� We were stationed down in Munds Park.� I liked the district, I liked the personnel, and I liked the job an awful lot and stuck around, and eventually worked my way all the way up through the ranks on Mormon Lake District, where I eventually became the supervisory foreman for all the engines on the district.� I stayed with that all the way through fire on the Coconino through 1991.
Holcomb: Great.� When you're part of a national forest crew, do you travel around much, or do you just put out fires, like in the area?� Did you get called to other fires on other places?
Dudley: You do.� It's an interesting position in that you're on a national level.� There is quite a bit of demand for resources outside of your area.� It was kind of interesting on the Coconino National Forest they had kind of a verbal standing policy that until you had so many fires under your belt, that you'd actually gone to a certain number of small fires and stuff like that, you weren't allowed to leave your national forest. They kept you at home.� And it was basically to teach you the basics, the fundamentals of safety when dealing with wildland fires.� I think it was somewhere around a hundred fires you had to have before they would actually let you go out of state or off forest to go deal with a fire somewhere else.� It takes a long time to get that number of fires under your belt.� You spend a lot of time going out on little fires that are on the district that are caused by lightning strikes, or little campfires that get away from people and stuff like that—an amount usually less than an acre.� But these are essentially where you learn your skills, and where you learn your safety techniques. And there was a valuable lesson to be taught in keeping people at home until they learned that.� Now as you know, as you've heard probably from this year and everything like that, the fires in Colorado, being a national resource, like the National Forest Service, you are called out of state to serve on a lot of things.� Once I had gotten through all my initial training and I'd done all the qualifiers that they wanted, yes, I traveled pretty extensively. We've been to North Carolina, we've been to California, we've been to Oregon, and Washington, so pretty much anywhere within the U.S. where there's a national resource that's threatened, you're called upon to go and serve.
Holcomb: How are the fires different in areas like North Carolina or Florida or something like that?
Dudley: It's kind of interesting, because each area has not only its own fuel types that generate its own type of fire behavior, but there's also the human element that gets mixed into it.� You mentioned North Carolina.� It's not an area you really envision as being fire sensitive, but one of the things that we learned [when] we were back there is in the spring they tend to have a little bit of a drying period.� Spring is also the time that coincides with Internal Revenue Service collecting taxes and stuff like that.� And every time some of those backwoods people back there get hit by the revenuers, they go out and start fires to detract from the situation that's at hand, and they start fires all over the place. We've been called back two or three times to go back and deal with all these little fires in the backwoods country, because the Internal Revenue Service had come down hard on somebody, so they went out and started fires.� They also have lightning strikes and stuff like that.� We responded to one big fire in the Great Smokies National Park.
That, and the other end of the country, I mentioned there are different fuel types.� You get into areas like California where the vegetation and the ecology of the area generates a‑-with the intermix of man and what he's done to the landscape, generates its own vegetation type, like the Southern California chemise and stuff like that, where the vegetation grows into these fields, and they're basically chaparral fields, and the vegetation that comes in is just very fire prone.� The vegetation itself is full of volatile oils, and when it gets warm and hot in California, these volatile oils tend to volitize and come into the atmosphere.� And when fire gets into the stuff, you've seen the films before on TV, I'm sure, it just wrecks havoc with those things. It's hard to fight, it's hard to get close to, to deal with.� It's a very dangerous situation, it's very flammable, so it's like standing gasoline.
So wherever you go in different parts of the country not only do you have the human element, you have the fuels element that generate the different types of fires that go on in the country.� And each one of them generates‑-the weather is also the other thing that plays into it.� This year we're in a drought in Arizona.� June is normally considered one of our worst parts of the fire season, but this year its heightened a little bit more so by the extreme drought that we're in.� It makes the conditions that much more flammable and that much more dangerous.� So you have all these little environmental things that come into play that really dictate how the fires behave in different parts of the country.
Holcomb: Speaking of regional quirks, are there any that you've observed in the Colorado Plateau area, [either] with vegetation or with people?
Dudley: In the Colorado Plateau area, most of the fires, particularly the ones that get large, the single most outstanding component of making them large seems to be wind.� In Flagstaff, you know, generally about March, April, May are our windy months.� The wind, when they first come in prior to the fire season in May and June, what they do is prep the field fuels by drying the fields out.� The wind takes the moisture out of the fuels that are laying on the ground.� It takes the live fuel moistures out of the trees.� And about the middle of May and beginning of June we get the sudden onset of the high temperatures that we have here in Arizona.� Once the high temperatures kick in, usually weather systems that pass to the north of Arizona, that don't produce precipitation or anything like that, will generate a considerable amount of wind along with them as they trail across the western U.S.� The tail end of those low pressure systems will kick through Arizona, and they kick up the winds.� And if you get a fire start that accompanies those winds, that's when it really becomes critical, and that's when you really get the extreme fire behavior we're seeing on the Colorado Plateau‑-even to the extent that some of the activities we do in managing fuels on the forest, like thinning trees back to a certain basal area and stuff like that, become almost irrelevant, as you just saw on the Rodeo Fire.� Some of that area down there in the Rodeo-Chedeski area, particular down off the rim on the Fort Apache Reservation, had been actively logged and thinned.� But because that fire started in such a drought condition, and it was driven by wind, it overcame all the mitigating circumstances we tried to put on the ground to prevent such a thing.� And so in my mind, the primary driving factor for damaging fires on the Colorado Plateau is the wind.
Holcomb: Interesting.� I don't think we've heard that before.� I know you also mentioned safety before.� Can you talk a little bit about maybe what kind of safety factors you've been involved in before, or like how....� I don't know exactly how to phrase this, but how safety plays a role.
Dudley: Safety plays a big role in fire, and it's a very important role.� Again, it's something that they can teach to somebody, and you can give it to somebody in a book.� I mean, the Forest Service has what they called The Ten Standard Firefighting Orders.� Back when I first started, it was The Thirteen Situations that Shouted "Watch Out!" And these were a written set of rules and commandments that basically ran down a little hit list that said, "If you're doing this, and this happens, you should be aware that something's going wrong."� And generally it was you needed to be cognizant of the weather, you needed to be cognizant of the fire behavior, you needed to be cognizant of your proximity to the actual active fire line.� Things like that:� your manpower needs, your manpower resources that are in the vicinity with you.� You need to be able to develop a relationship and understand how that fluctuates from minute-to-minute, section-to-section, as you work the fire.� Firefighting is a risky business, and the good firefighters are people that learn to balance and understand the safety risks that are out there.� Yet, take that little bit of edgy riskiness and get up next to the fire and do what it takes to manage the fire or steer it, or to actually get in front of it and contain it.� It's knowing when to do that, it's knowing when to listen to subtle clues that you develop over a lifetime of doing this.
There were times when I'd be on fires, and things would be happening:� the fire's behavior would suddenly flare up, or something small would happen, and you couldn't quite put your finger on why, but something just didn't feel right.� Things weren't extreme, things weren't falling apart, but something just didn't feel right.� And you have to learn to develop a sense of listening to that inner voice.� And this is what the good firefighters have.� They'll be out there, and all of a sudden they'll go, "Something don't feel right. I don't know what it is, and I don't know why.� It's time to leave." And they'll get out of an area, and lo and behold, invariably something goes wrong.� It's kind of an interesting job in that it becomes a cuing type thing, that you learn to cue in on your environment very subtly on the things that are going on, and listen to the clues that are being given to you.� You may not know why‑-you just have to know that they're there, recognize them for what they are, and react to them.� The Forest Service and the agencies that are involved in wildland firefighting from the safety aspect, go through great lengths to teach in the booklearning courses and in the structural courses, the firefighters how to deal safely with the incidents, and given the background, the fundamental knowledge they need to work from.� They offer eighty-hour training courses, they offer weather courses, they offer courses in how the command of the fire is broken down so you can understand how it works.� There's really a wide variety of classes that are offered, and most of the firefighters that are out there‑-well, virtually all the firefighters that are out there‑-go through these.� And these things give you the foundation. It takes years of practice, years of being on the fire line, which goes back to why that old Coconino policy existed that you couldn't go off forest until you had a hundred fires under your belt.� Well, this is [where] the other half of the training policy comes in, because they want you to learn on the fireline the subtle clues that you have to develop to listen to that little innate voice that's telling you, "Something's wrong at this point in time.� You need to rethink what you're doing," or "you need to leave."
Holcomb: Have you ever had any instances where that helped you out in a fire?
Dudley: Oh, many times.� Absolutely many times.
Holcomb: And people that you were with?
Dudley: Many times.� One instance, probably the one more memorable that comes to mind is the‑-we were on the Sand Point Fire up in the Lewis and Clark National Forest in Montana, and I was with two Navajo crews.� I was in charge of one Navajo crew, and Bob Smith from the Flagstaff District was in charge of the other.� And we'd been assigned to go up into an area that had already been burned over‑-and this was a large fire, I believe 126,000 acres was burning in tall timber, and very rugged, remote terrain‑-and they had assigned us that day to go up into this canyon that had already been burned over, and it'd been a patch burn. Some of it had burned completely, where it torched all the trees and took the needles.� And some of it had been an incomplete burn, where it'd burned under the trees and preheated the canopies but left all the needles intact. And they were concerned about losing elk habitat.� And the command team had assigned us the responsibility to go up into this burned area and start lining these little areas that hadn't burned, because they wanted to preserve some of that area.� So we said okay and we grabbed our crews and we hiked up this ridge, and we got on top of the ridge, to where we could look, and it was a very steep canyon.� It was almost from one ridge side to the other, almost a mile across, and you could look down into it, it was about a half-mile down to the basin where these little patchy stands of unburned fuel were standing down there.� And we looked down there, and there was still a lot of hot smoke coming out of the area, it was still pretty active.� It was in the early morning hours, so the fire was laying low, it wasn't real active, so we were getting a lot of smoke hanging in there.� The fire conditions had been very erratic, very extreme, very similar to what we're seeing here in Arizona this year, and I looked at Bob and said, "I'm just not comfortable going in there. It's just not right.� There's just too much unburned fuel in there, it's too far away from a safety zone."� All these were safety things that came out.� And Bob agreed with me.� So we sat down for a moment and we decided‑-well, they give the firefighters that are in charge of crews little belt weather kits.� And we started taking the weather.� And we usually check for relative humidity, we check for wind speed, we check for temperatures.� I had a sling cyclometer, and I was doing relative humidity.� I checked it, and the relative humidity was down to 2 percent‑-it was very low, it was just bone dry.� And I called Bob on the radio, and I said, "Are you taking RH?" And he called back and he said, "Yeah, mine's almost unbelievably low."� And I said, "Mine's 2."� He said, "I'm getting 2�."� As we were saying that, I was talking to him on the radio, I said, "I don't feel comfortable going down in there.� There's nothing active now, but something's not right."� He said, "I agree, I don't want to go in there."� So we called back in to command and told them we couldn't, in all good conscience and safety, take the assignment, we weren't going in there.� Well, they got pretty angry with us.� They threatened to send us home, they said, "If you're not going to do the job, why don't you just come back to camp.� We don't need you if you're not going to do the job." Well, instead of sending us back to camp, they kept us up on that ridge, and that ridge we were on had already been burned over.� They said, "Well, just stay up on that ridge and start doing mop-up operations on the ridge." And so we said, "Fine, we'll do that."� So we had the crews bump out, and we were doing our mop-ups on the ridge, and about 10:30 in the morning, the temperatures rose rather sharply, and the wind came up, and Bob and I were watching into this canyon, and a spark had started on the other side of the canyon over there, into one of these patches of lumber and fuel.� In the interim, they had found two crews from the Deer Lodge National Forest to take that assignment and go into that basin to do what we had declined to do.� And that fire started on the opposite side of that drainage, and it got in that fuel and it made a run to the top of the half-mile ridge, in about two seconds.� (snaps fingers)� It just went up like that. �All I could think of was those guys that were down in there.� "Wow, this is spooky." And within a matter of less than thirty seconds, that whole one-mile drainage, almost a mile square, had gone up in flame.� It was like somebody had dropped an atom bomb in there.� We were standing there, looking into it, and the smoke got so thick after a while we couldn't see into it.� And the wind coming from behind us, and being drawn into this fire and this drainage was taking my shirt and just doing this (flaps shirt fabric) as it blew past us and went in, as this fire was drawing air into this fire.� We gathered the crews up, and I turned, and behind us, where we had come from, was the last fork of the Judith River.� And we just told the crews, "Head down the thing and head for the river."� As we were running back down the hill the way we'd come in the morning, away from this fire, there were embers dropping out of the sky and starting fires below us.� And we were having to run through the little fires that were starting below us, down to the river.� We finally got down to the field down there, and one of the pictures in my photo album, I think, has that, and it just shows little bitty trees up on the horizon, these incredible flames, just leaping out of this canyon.
The fire that had blown up in that basin had actually spotted two mountain ranges further to the east, and was starting fires on other mountain ranges that we had to send helicopters out to, to pick these fires up.� Of course everybody's worried about the Deer Lodge crews that had been in there.� I saw them later that evening in camp.� They came in about nightfall.� They were lucky, nobody got hurt.� They said they had seen when that fire started on that ridge, and they had nowhere to go but run uphill.� They had to drop their packs, drop their tools, and just literally run for their lives to get out of this canyon.� They said they just did crest out of this canyon when that fire hit.� The next day the helicopters went in there and evacuated their equipment, and they had, you know, the five-gallon jerry cans that they use to carry gasoline in.� They had some pumps in there, they were going to drop these in the streams to work on mopping up the fires.� When the helicopter brought this equipment in, these jerry cans were like beach balls with handles. They had just exploded up from the fire so big.
But everybody made it out safe, and that was just an instance that, you know, Bob and I are standing up there, the conditions just weren't right. There's a lot of pressure on a firefighter to go in there and get the job done, do what you're doing.� It was really intimidating when they called us on the radio, said, "We're going to send you home."� In hindsight, we look back and say, "Well, we made the right decision."
Holcomb: Obviously on that one, too, the wind probably had a big influence.� Do you know any other ones where, like especially in this area, like you were talking about the wind, where wind had a huge influence on the fire?
Dudley: Yeah, one of the fires, the Sanderson Fire out here in Parks, Arizona, started in, I believe that was June that started.� There was a logging and thinning crew that was working up there, and they had pretty well thinned that stand out to where it was really nice. They had taken a lot of the small trees out, and everything like that.� And somehow a sawyer, I can't remember what he did exactly, but a sawyer had sparked‑-he was starting to saw or working on his saw, and started this fire.� It took off so fast.� We responded from Munds Park, and by the time we got there, the fire was over a thousand acres, and it was driven off to the north.� It was a long, skinny fire.� It was about eight miles long and maybe a half mile wide.� It was a typical example of how a wind will catch a fire and just drive it through a stand.� It just drives it in a long, thin type thing like that. That fire lasted, we were on it for probably a week.� It was driven through stands that were fairly open, stands that were thinned down to what were appropriate standards for fire, and it had no trouble moving through it.
Holcomb: When you worked as a prevention officer, and also just in your general knowledge, can you describe a little bit about public education for fire, and like trying to educate people about fire prevention?� Also I noticed you have a lot of Smokey stuff in your scrapbook. If you want to talk about, if you've seen Smokey the Bear's message evolve at all, and stuff like that.
Dudley: Being a fire prevention patrolman is kind of a fun job, particularly if you like to talk with the public and schmooze a little bit.� When I worked on North Kaibab as a fire prevention patrolman, I was essentially given a rental truck and told, "You're expected to put 150 miles a day on this truck and go out and contact people in the forest and deliver the fire prevention message."� So that's what we did. I worked out of Jacob Lake and Big Springs for quite a while, and just daily I'd take it out and just....� You learn a good deal about the country.� It teaches you a lot about how the country lays and all the roads and stuff. And you go into the back country and you meet all the people who are camping. The North Kaibab is an interesting place, because there are not a lot of people that are just tourists that go up there, because it's an isolated area.� It's also interesting that you get a lot of people that hike the canyon come up into that forest and use it.� It's a high-elevation forest, it's a spruce-fir type forest on the south end.� On the north end it moves into Ponderosa and pi�on juniper.� So as the people come out of the canyon, out of these hot hikes, like to come up into that forest and relax.� So we would contact quite a few people who'd been hiking in the canyons, particularly down the south edge of that forest where it bordered the Park Service.� And my daily job was to go out and remind them what the fire danger was at the time, instruct them on how to properly maintain and construct a fire ring, and how to put it out when they left, what was proper, what was not.� I also contacted a great deal of campsites where people had already left, and left their fires burning.� They didn't understand how to put them out, they'd throw a little bit of dirt on them and think that was good, and you'd still have a hot fire there.� So we carried 125-gallon tanks around there, on our trucks with little ten-horse-power engines on them, and when we needed them, we'd pull into those campsites somebody had abandoned, we'd go ahead and take care of the campfire and put them out.� It was fun, it was interesting.� You'd talk to all different types of people‑-everything from hikers to retired people, to....� At that time in the mid-1970s, the Hell's Angels had their biker rally on North Kaibab, and there were just hundreds of bikers who'd pull in there.� And you'd spend one whole weekend just talking to nothing but bikers out in the woods.� Most of the people were really pretty receptive. If you approach people with an attitude of, "I'm here to help.� I'm not here to harass you, to write tickets or hang paper on you."� If you really talk to them in that kind of spirit and everything, generally you have very little trouble getting along with people.� People tend to learn in that atmosphere a lot easier.� They would listen to what you were saying, they would take your advice, and stuff like that.� So we never adopted a position where we'd go in and say, "I'm going to write you up because you didn't do this right," or "your fire's still burning."� I would always go in and just try to leave them with a positive message.� To me, that always worked very good. And I carried that when I came onto the Coconino.� And a lot of the good patrolmen working today, work in that kind of manner.
Holcomb: Did you ever have any people that thought that's what you were there to do, and wouldn't listen to you?
Dudley: Oh, you always get some that are belligerent.� You get some that are drunk.� You're out there with just a radio that sometimes works, sometimes it doesn't.� When it doesn't work and you're out in these isolated locations, and the old radios in the 1970s didn't have a lot of carrying capacity.� So a lot of times you couldn't get out on the radio.� So you had to really be cognizant of what position you were in.� And if people got belligerent with me, I usually just backed off.� It's not worth getting yourself hurt.� It's not worth getting into any aggravation. So I would usually just step my way out of an argument and sidestep those kind of things.� But yeah, you always run into those kind of people.� There's a certain element that always wants to argue.
I had one guy‑-I'll give you a "what if"‑-I was coming back from patrolling and was coming into [Mott?] Park from the east rim view on the North Kaibab.� I had my truck on, I dressed in my uniform.� There was a motorhome at the bottom of the hill there, and he was waiting to turn onto the pavement at Mott Park.� I pulled up behind the guy to see if there was something wrong, and as I pulled up, I noticed out in the field, somebody taking a spare tire and tossing it out in the field.� So before I talked to this guy, I walked over and fetched the spare tire and heaved it in the back of my truck.� I walked around the side of the truck, and by that time, the guy in the motorhome had got out, and he come running up to me and he got in my face as I got around the rear of the tailgate and he goes, "What are you doing?"� And I go, "I was picking up that tire."� He says, "No you weren't.� You were picking up drugs.� I know you're picking up drugs."� Okay.� I said, "I really wasn't, sir.� The tire is right here."� And he grabs the tire and he starts going around the inside of it like this.� And he sees my toolbox in the back and he goes, "What's in there?"� And I go, "Those are my fire tools and stuff like that." He opens the box, and across the top shelf‑-we had first aid kits that were in segments at that time, and the bandages came in little white boxes‑-and he picks a little white box up, and he goes, "What's this then?" And he is waving it in my face. (laughter)� This guy's just really bizarre. After a while, I just‑-there's just no reasoning with this kind of guy. "Look," I said, "my supervisor works in Fredonia.� I work for the Forest Service.� If you have any more questions, feel free to call Dick Johnson at this number.� He'll explain everything to you."� And I just left.� (laughter)� So yeah, you do run into some unusual people out there. (laughter)
Holcomb: How about fire prevention in the Forest Service in general?
Dudley: As far as?
Holcomb: Like Smokey the Bear, advertising, that kind of stuff.
Dudley: Smokey Bear has been the main tool for fire prevention for a long time.� Smokey Bear has also been some of our undoing, as we come to understand fire behavior and stuff.� The fire on the plateau, particularly here on this plateau, this is pretty much a fire-dependent area.� I mean, it's an area that was born of fire, it's an area that is sustained by fire.� When you read all the old accounts of what the forest looked like before mankind arrived here, they were open, park-like stands, and they were maintained by a fire periodically that ran through this area on the basis of three to seven years.� And what that then generally does, that type of fire behavior, is it weeds out the little trees, and it leaves the big ones, and it takes care of the pine needles that drop every year off the trees. And the Ponderosa itself, as it matures, is a very fire-resistant species. It's a very tough tree.� It's drought resistant, fire resistant.� It's a tree that's perfectly suited for here.� The Smokey Bear thing has done very good in the fact that it's gotten across to the public the concern we wanted to relate to the public about being careful with fire when you're out there, but on the other hand, it's also been detrimental to some of the public's understanding of what the key role fire plays in this ecosystem here.� And the Forest Service now finds itself caught up in this dilemma of, almost in certain areas, like in these fire regimes, like the Coconino Plateau.� Another fire regime would be like the chaparral fields of Southern California.� These are all fire-dependent regimes, and it has kind of worked a little bit against them now, because now we're trying to get the public to understand that this stand has been over-logged, and we have an abundance of second-generation growth coming in there, small trees all crowded together, and something has to be done about these small trees.� Either they have to be cut, or they have to be weeded out through prescribed burnings.
And in today's world of legislative affairs and Congress being involved in the decision-making process, and the public being more involved, it's not as easy to go out, like we used to.� We used to go out, and at a time, it was not that big a deal to burn 1,200 or 1,300 acres in a prescribed burn in the fall.� Down on Blue Ridge and Happy Jack we did it every year.� And by burning those mass numbers of acres, you can eliminate a lot of that fuel that was on the ground that accumulated, and a lot of small trees that had come in.� Well, we've got smoke regulations and air quality regulations imposed on us.� All that started dwindling back, and now the Forest Service is stuck with this thing, saying, "Well, Smokey the Bear is good, and we don't want you going out there starting fires, but it's also the fact that maybe in hindsight, some of those smaller fires, when it was wet out and we had some water on the ground and the fires weren't that active, maybe we should have let those fires do what they were supposed to do, instead of stopping every little fire dead in its tracks the minute we saw it.� So it's created a interesting dilemma in the Forest Service.� I mean, in certain areas of the country, it's certainly applicable.� It has done wonders for the Forest Service as far as prevention and getting the word out to people.� But I don't think they saw this hidden side of it coming.� It's catching up with them a little bit now.
Holcomb: Are they doing anything to address that?
Dudley: They're trying.� There's a lot of public education, and there's other groups out there that are calling attention to the fact now that these are ecosystems, like the plateau here, that were basically built on fire, and they need fire to be maintained.� If we don't do the prescribed burn, and if we don't do the [tree?] thinning, and if we don't do the other management practices that some of the experts are advocating, then Mother Nature's going to take its own course, as it did in the Rodeo and Chedeski Fires.� I mean, either you can have the smoke when we can do it in controlled positions in the fall, or you can have it when Mother Nature takes everything out and you lose vast chunks of landscape to these things.� So through examples like this, the Dude Fire, the Rodeo-Chedeski Fires this year, and everything this year, the Forest Service will be working to try to educate the public a bit more about the value that fire really does play in ecosystems.
[END TAPE 1, SIDE A; BEGIN TAPE 1, SIDE B]
Dudley: Sure fire did some bad things there, but at the same time this ecosystem really is dependent on fire to do what it's supposed to do, and thrive.
Holcomb: How do you think things like politics and policy affect the way fires are fought‑-like the regulations you mentioned, and things like that?
Dudley: It's changed that landscape, it really has.� In the early 1970s, it was an attitude of pretty much....� (sigh) The Forest Service was pretty well unregulated by Congress.� It was an agency that made its own decisions, it was an agency that acted within its own expertise. It's been accused of doing things that are not in step with modern thinking, as far as the ecology of the plateau goes, but you have to remember in the 1970s, these people that worked for the Forest Service and fought fires for the Forest Service were the leading experts at the time.� There was no other agency that had the expertise and the depth of knowledge and the depth of skill that the Forest Service had.� So these people were operating with the best knowledge available at the time.� It may appear today that it was faulty knowledge, but at the time, I guarantee you those people that I worked with all had the very best of intentions at heart, and they threw their hearts into the job.
And as we came into the eighties, we saw the rise of public awareness of some of the ecosystems, and the issues that affected the ecosystems come into play.� As that happened, Congress got more and more involved in Forest Service decisions.� As that happened, of course it sort of tends to create a certain amount of analysis paralysis.� The Forest Service is caught within this dilemma now of How do we deal with this, and how do we appease all these other parties that are asking for things to be done?� It's a real difficult situation and challenging situation to be in at the moment.� It's affected not only the way they make their policy decisions, but it's also affected the way they actually manage fires now.� Some fires are actually‑-on these smaller fires that are maybe less than ten acres, they're actually managed now, as opposed to strictly going out and just jumping on them and putting them out immediately.� They may say, "This fire's at ten acres, and it's in an area that needs work.� The fire danger's not all that high at the moment, we've got good resource capacity here to manage it.� Let's let the fire go to fifty acres."� And they'll back off to a road and say, "As soon as the fire gets to the road here, then that's as large as we'll let it get." So they actually started creating some management situations, and allowing fire to play the role that it's supposed to play in the environment.� So it has changed some things for the better.
Holcomb: In the political arena, how informed do you think some of these policy decisions are, that are made outside the Forest Service?
Dudley: That's a good question.� Some are undoubtedly driven by election-year politics.� Some are driven most definitely by money.� Some of them, as far as the bottom-line firefighter goes on the line, if you're tying it to firefighting, some of them are actually dangerous. You know, you can't legislate firefighting.� You can't legislate that on-the-ground know how.� There's certain things that Mother Nature's going to call the shots, and no amount of legislation is going to tell you how it's going to be done, or how she's going to make it come out.� So it makes those positions on the ground, those people that are making those instantaneous decisions out there in the fire camps, it puts them under the gun, and some of it's very difficult for them to manage.� And I sympathize with them.� I mean, I'm no longer in it, and I still go to the fire camps, and I still see them wrestling with some of these plans and how they're going to balance what's going on versus the safety of these hundreds of thousands of people they may have on the line, working the fire.� I mean, that's the top primary concern.
Another thing the Forest Service kind of fell down in‑-and we were warning them as we came up through the ranks when we were the young firefighters‑-when we started reaching middle age, Congress and everything wouldn't allocate the money to hire new resources, and we were saying, "You know, there's a generation gap behind us, that when we reach old age, who are you going to get to fight the fires?"� And that's coming in another ten to fifteen years.� That went on, they just kept dragging their feet and dragging their feet, and here we are today, firefighters of my generation are all sitting behind desks now.� They've got bad knees, they've got bad backs from working fires for thirty years, and they can't do the job anymore.� We have a whole new generation of people that are coming into wildland fire now that are being really trained by the seat of their pants.� They're being trained trial by fire, because they have not had the fifteen years' upbringing that we had behind the generation before us.� They're just being thrown into the pot now, and in my opinion, this is why we're seeing some of the accidents, the deaths on the Storm King incident, the Thirty-Mile incident.� We have young people out there that don't have that basic hundred-fire experience under their belt, and they're being thrown into these disastrous situations, and making bad decisions.
Holcomb: Do they still have that hundred-fire policy in effect?
Dudley: No.
Holcomb: Not at all?
Dudley: No.
Holcomb: There's nothing like that?
Dudley: It became politically incorrect and went by the wayside.
Holcomb: What's your view on the Rodeo-Chedeski Fire, and kind of the situation around that?
Dudley: I think it was waiting to happen. Again, the Forest Service got curtailed on how it managed the fuel situation out there.� Those communities over on the Rim [Mogollon Rim] that are situated in such a position that‑-and it's not their fault‑-but they're situated in a very precarious situation.� They're right on top of the Rim, below a major timber belt.� The way the Rim divides Arizona, if you sit on that Rim, and the southwestern winds, the prevailing winds that come out of the southwest can really set you up for some precarious situations.� And that was one....� Nobody knew exactly where something was going to hit, but the common consensus among the older firefighters was sooner or later something like that was going to happen.� And I think we saw it this year, the conditions came together.� I mean, we were coming into the very beginnings of this real heavy drought we're in.� The week that that started, we were getting a lot of storm systems moving to the north of us, generating wind here in Arizona. We had closures, we had people that were not being conscientious, or didn't care, and were wishing to make money, and they started the fires, and off they went.
Holcomb: Have you ever experienced that before, people starting fires for economic gain?
Dudley: You know, I've heard about that back East.� There's always a little bit of, just kind of under the surface, talking to the Forest Service types you'd hear that every now and then.� Somebody'd get desperate and they said they needed money, so they'd go out and start a fire.� These kind of people have always been around, but I don't think they ever‑-the fires never reached the magnitude that we're seeing, that developed in the Hayman Fire in Colorado, and the Rodeo-Chedeski Fire here in Arizona.� This was just a bad year for somebody to play that kind of game, and it came to the forefront.
Holcomb: Where do you see fire management heading in the future?
Dudley: I think the challenge with fire management is to work through the regulatory process that's been imposed on them now at different layers‑-state layers, federal layers, and everything‑-particularly here on the plateau, to get a viable fire management policy into place.� At this point in time, we are still vulnerable to another fire of the magnitude we just saw over there.� Until we come to an agreement or a consensus among all these agencies that would allow proper use of the management tools and the acknowledgement that fire plays an important role in this ecosystem, and get that blend balanced correctly, I think we're still at a significant danger.
Holcomb: And what about training the younger firefighters?
Dudley: I think they need to concentrate on that.� And I really wish they would go back to something like a policy where they would say, "You need to have a certain amount of fires under your belt before we're going to allow you to leave home," because though that sounds discriminatory, and it sounds like it's holding resources back, that hundred-fire policy, or whatever you want to set the number at, it gives you that non-booklearning experience.� It gives you the opportunity to learn to listen to that little innate voice that tells you something may be going wrong here; it's time to do something about it; either leave or do something. And you've got to develop that.� You know, they can preach to you all day long, but until you learn to listen to that little uneasiness in there, and learn to react to it, even though you may know what it is, you're not at the par of a good firefighter that you should be.
Holcomb: How many fires have you been on in your career?
Underhill:� This is a test.
Dudley: You know, I've never really counted them up.� I'd say 300-400.
Holcomb: Wow.� We're also kind of interested in the humor and stories of fire camp, and if there's anything like that, that you'd like to share.� Just give us an idea of what it's like.
Dudley: Fire camp life.� (chuckles)� It's usually pretty crowded, it's out in a field somewhere, it's hot, it's windy, it's dry.� Fire camps are akin to setting up a city in the middle of a forest, in a disastrous situation.� So the guys that do it, they're really quite talented. I mean, they have the systems in place to do all this.� It's really rather amazing that they can, within a twenty-four-hour period go and not only fight a fire, but set up a city in the middle of the forest that takes care of all the needs of the people that are there, from the showers to the feeding, to the sleeping quarters and everything else like that.� They can set that up in a matter of twenty-four hours.� I always just find that astounding, that they can do that kind of organization.� And along with it, of course, comes all the humor and all the funny little quirks.� You go to these fires off the plateau, like you go to fires in California, or you go to fires up in Idaho, in spite of the fact that it's seeming so large, it's a small-knit community.� You start running into personalities, people from home that you didn't know were up on this fire.� Or people from home were sent to another fire over here, and suddenly they end up on your fire.
In '98, when they had all the bad fires in Northern California, we had been sent to the Sierra National Forest with a couple of crews, and we worked there for about a week-and-a-half.� And from there, they moved us up to the protection zone of the Sequoia-Kings Canyon National Park, and we worked on there for a little bit with the California Department of Forestry.� And from there, they bumped us up into Happy Camp in Northern California, where they had a lot of fire going in the tall timbers up there.� One of the fires we had to work was down along the Pacific Crest Trail, and there were a lot of huge doug firs.� They were, gee, 150-foot trees, and maybe six foot in diameter. And these trees were on fire, and of course they had to be dropped, because they were presenting fire hazards across the canyon.� So we had falling crews in working these trees.� They would take them and fall them.� This ridge that we were working on, as they were dropping these trees, the trees would fall into the canyon, and they'd just take off down the canyon, and they'd head for the Pacific Crest Trail.� And they're just like rockets, coming through the forest.� So we were once a day walking that trail to make sure nobody straggled through the lines and were getting on a trail when trees would come down.� And I got down on the trail, and it's smokey, and it was dirty, it was about mid-morning.� And I walked up the trail and encountered these two guys up the trail, and they were firefighters.� And I stood and talked to these guys for must have been about five minutes.� And the one guy was kind of quiet.� He was standing behind a fallen-down tree, he wasn't saying much. And I finally turned and I said, "By the way, my name is Steve Dudley." And he smiled and looked at me in this kind of funny way.� He said, "You don't know me, do you?"� And I go, "I don't think so."� And he goes, "Look closer."� It turned out it was Bruce Grecco [phonetic]. It was a guy that was a timber staff officer on my own district from Mormon Lake that I'd been working for.� But here he was, with three weeks' worth of beard, and ash all over his face, and wearing this yellow equipment that I'd never seen Bruce in.� It's a guy I work with every day of my life, and I didn't even know him, and I'd talked to him for five minutes.� So you run into situations like that.� There's a lot of good things that happen, a lot of fun that comes out of fire, a lot of good camaraderie with the people you work with.
Holcomb: Do you think there's a certain personality type that works best for firefighters‑-certain kinds of people that become firefighters?
Dudley: I think so.� I think the people that really enjoy being out-of-doors, people that are independent, with initiative, generally excel at the position, because a lot of times, particularly when you're on a fire, you're given an assignment to do in the morning, and from what they give you and when you walk out there to actually face the situation may be two different things, and you have to be able to think on your feet and improvise and do the job safely, still within the parameters of what they want you to do.� So people that can come up with improvisation and think on their feet and do things are usually the ones that make pretty good firefighters.
Holcomb: You also talked a little bit about the aerial view thing that you're doing.� Is that now, currently doing that?
Dudley: Yeah, I do aerial detection surveys.
Holcomb: And the insect diseases?� What's that like?� I know that some insects can spur on fires (unclear) or whatever.
Dudley: (unclear)� What I do now is, I'm employed by the Forest Service to fly on an annual basis all the national forests within Arizona.� We fly in a little Cessna 206, and we cover pretty much every national forest in the state, and we look for the manifestations of insect disease.� So what we're looking for are the dead trees that occurred this year, and we'll actually physically sketch map those by looking out the window of the plane, put them on maps, and bring them back.� We'll confirm the electronic format, and GIS, and ship them to the land managers as reconnaissance data.� And then it becomes their responsibility to either do management practices for those outbreaks, or whatever they decide to do with them.� A lot of the insect disease outbreaks in Arizona are not very severe, as compared to whole stands you see wiped out by insects in the Great Basin area.� They tend to be little patchy things in Arizona.� So insect disease in Arizona is here, but it's not as big a factor as you see like up in the Northwest and the Great Basin.
Holcomb: What about the affect of fire on wildlife?� Do you know, do the elk and things like that, do they just leave the forest?� Are they harmed by the fire?
Dudley: Actually, the initial passages, particular with a large fire, it generally chases, displaces them from an area, but from working fires, the animals like the smoke and the fire.� They'll come back in as soon as the flame fronts are passed.� I think some of it's for insect control.� I've seen deer and elk just rolling in the ashes, and I think it may be for the ticks or the fleas or something like that.� We come out after control burns in the morning here on the plateau, where we did burns down in Munds Park area, and back in the T-6 and Bar M Canyon areas, and those fires would just be full of deer and elk, just laying in the ash.� I don't know exactly what drives that, but like I say, one of our theories was to get rid of some of the insects, or maybe even to hide their scent.� But they certainly weren't scared of it.
In the aftermath of a fire, after it's put out and everything like that, the wildlife comes back into that.� They like the edge effect, because you get a different vegetation regime up on the edge of the fire, because it's burned the trees out, so you're still getting the successional species coming in around the edge of the fire and on the inside of the fire.� It attracts a lot of wildlife in for food and for cover and for shade and stuff like that. From my perspective, I think the wildlife is really probably‑-I guess indifferent is not the word‑-but it really doesn't bother them that much.
Holcomb: It's not a big surprise.
Dudley: No.
Holcomb: And then the last question I have, what do you think is the best part of firefighting, and do you have a most memorable fire?
Dudley: The best part of firefighting probably is going to the large fires and being on the initial attack.� You're the first person in there, and it's getting next to the fire and doing what you have to, to either steer it or get in front of it and pull it down and contain it.� It's a high-adrenaline job, it's a very physical job, it's very wearing. You have to be able to keep your wits about you and not panic, and make safe decisions at the same time, but provide that edge of aggressiveness that you're going to do something about this.� And the good firefighters are the ones generally that love being on initial attack.� That's the most exciting part of it.� I was never so much of the glory thing, the news media never meant that much to me.� It was just the adrenaline rush of being up next to the worst that Mother Nature could throw out at you, and seeing the results first-hand, and being right there.� It is really quite a rush.
Most memorable incident.� Hm, that's a good one.� So many big fires.� Like I said, once I became qualified, I would just say in general it was going to a lot of the large fires out of state, going and seeing what other forests had to deal with, and the magnitude of how do you deal with a large fire like that?� It's quite a challenge.� And to watch them up close and watch how they behave.� They generate their own weather, they generate their own storms. They're almost a living, breathing entity.� It's real interesting to deal with.
Holcomb: Can you think of maybe what was the most‑-and you already gave one example‑-but maybe other examples of extreme fire behavior, where it just did like completely wild things?
Dudley: Wild things.� Let me think.� God, there's so many.� Just in general what you said.� I mean, once those large fires get rolling, they all do their own erratic fun thing.� I mean, you see trees that get so swept up in heat so quickly that they literally explode because the moisture inside cannot get out quick enough.� So as it vaporizes the moisture inside the tree, the tree has no way to get rid of it, and it explodes into splinters.� And to see trees do this while you're standing next to them, and to hear them in the fire, just exploding.� And to see large fires as they get rolling, generate enough smoke up in the atmosphere that they generate their own weather systems and drop lightning ahead of themselves and create rain.� Just the magnitude of the power of what they can do is just.... And you can see this in almost all big fires.� You begin to see the pattern of how it generates stuff like that.� I wouldn't recall one more than any of the others.� You pick up these pieces as you go off each fire.� I've never been in a position where I've hurt anybody, I've never been hurt myself, and I think that's a hallmark of a good firefighter, is to have served twenty-five or thirty years in the fire service and have never hurt anybody, and have stood next to these big fires and worked with them.
Holcomb: I never thought about it before, but you made me think about what the volume of that must be like.� Is it really loud?
Dudley: It's very loud.� The wind‑-like I say, it creates its own weather, so there's a very rushing sound.� You hear trees exploding, you hear the fire being carried by its own wind it generates into the trees ahead of itself.� As the needles vaporize, the volatile oils inside them, you hear the hissing, "ssssss," the hissing noise that comes off of it.� And then as the resources come into the fire, air tankers come into fires, and oftentimes they're at treetop level.� You have DC6s, the four-engine planes, flying over so close at treetop level, you can see the rivets in the wings.� So you have the engine noise of the airplanes coming over.� You have radio traffic going on in your ears, you have people talking to you, you have fire engines starting up their trucks.� You have crews and bulldozers working.� So it gets to be a real lively and noisy scene after a while.
Holcomb: I hadn't really thought about that before.� We also have Karen Underhill here with us today, operating the camera. Do you have any questions?
Underhill: A couple.� Steve, can you tell us how the composition of your crews on Mormon Lake changed over time?� I would assume in the seventies it was a bunch of young men, coming on the service. (Dudley:� Yeah.)� What was that like and how has it changed?
Dudley: Well, when I first got on in the seventies, kind of the prevailing population that was in the Forest Service when I worked on North Kaibab were a lot of the old ranch hands out of cowboy families, formed up a lot of the working force in the Forest Service.� That, and a lot of the Hopi Indians.� And it was kind of a very rural Arizona type scene, working with these people.� Some of the Mackelprangs that have been up on the North Kaibab, we've been founding families up there.� I worked with a lot of them.� The Judd family.� A lot of those guys, those were founding Mormons that lived and worked in that area.� And working with them was really kind of an interesting thing.� It was almost a cowboy atmosphere.� I mean, it was, "Yahoo! let's go get the fire!"
On the other hand, you had the Hopis, and we had a Hopi crew that would work, and they would send those guys out on fires, and sometimes you wouldn't see them for three days.� They had a very noncompetitive nature, a very low-key atmosphere, and they were very much in tune with the way Mother Nature flowed. So they would send these guys to a fire, and it was nothing to see them come back to camp three days later.� They would just stay out there until the job was done.� However long it took, they'd just babysit the fire, the three of them, and three days later they come wandering back into camp.� It was really kind of a laid-back, kind of a loose atmosphere like that.
And as we evolved into the eighties, and the Forest Service started becoming more aware, and we started hiring some more of the young people, they started getting their appointments, like me, and stuff like that.� And they started getting some of the people that were in their twenties and thirties in, and they also started hiring both sexes, started hiring the women and the men into service.� It was kind of a fun period, because the early eighties was very active, we were coming off a dry period in 1977, the later seventies, when we burned the Radio Fire and Mt. Elden.� So things were coming off an active period, and the Forest Service was really getting into beefing up their fire engine crews, their hotshot crews, their prevention patrolmen, so there were a lot of jobs available.� It was a great kind of learning experience that we were expected‑-like I mentioned before, the generation that was supposed to be behind us wasn't there.� Well, we were that new generation, and we were coming in.� It was really kind of interesting, because the attitude of the old cowboy-type atmosphere was fading away, those people were attritioning out of the Forest Service and retirement, and we were the new ones coming in, and we were the new ones kind of cutting the way this was going to go. It was a lot of fun.� And like I say, it was when we started seeing women come into the Fire Service.� There weren't very many at first.� I can only remember one or two every now and then, and then more and more started becoming interested in forestry and started working their ways into the crews, and going out on assignments, and taking jobs in forestry.� And it became pretty much a mixed service.� All the way up into the nineties, where I think pretty well that transition was completed probably about in the late eighties and early nineties.� We started seeing a vast majority‑-the Southwest has always been rather an interesting mix to work in, because we have the cultural element here in the Southwest:� we have the Indian tribes, we have the Hispanic populations, and we had the women who were getting interested in forestry. So we always had a really diverse work force here in the Southwest that was fun to work with.� I've enjoyed working with the Hopis, I've learned so much by going out with these crews of the Navajos and the Hopis.� You live with these people for two or three weeks, and that's your only contact with Navajos and Hopi.� And you learn a lot about their culture when you have time to sit and talk to them, and there's nobody else around.� They teach you some interesting things.
You mentioned the humorous aspects before.� I have always been astonished by the artistic capabilities of the Indian tribes.� We were at a fire in Montana, in Darby, and they brought us back into the fire camp, and there was nothing to do for a while.� We had some Navajo crews, and I can't remember what other crews where there, but these guys were sitting around, and somebody had dropped some pens on the table, and they were sketching pictures on the tablecloths. Their artwork was just awesome.� Some guy got the idea, and he took and stood up about four tables on end, and covered them with paper, and then hung pens on them and said, "Have at it."� These guys would stand in line for hours, and draw.� People were coming up and taking photographs of these drawings, they were so good.� To watch the talent of these people do this, you learn so much about their culture and what they're interested in.� I always just found that really fascinating.
Underhill: I guess my last question is, what prompted you to create your wonderful scrapbooks?� Was that a conscious decision, or did it evolve?
Dudley: As I got interested in fire, I got more and more‑-I knew I was going to make this a career, so I got more and more interested in the behavior of fire, or why it was doing what it was doing.� So I started taking pictures when I went out on a fire.� I bought a little Olympus 35mm camera that I could just slip in my pocket.� When situations weren't so critical and I had a few moments, and something interesting would happen, I would just start taking pictures of the fires.� And it just kind of grew on me, it snowballed.� I just started, everywhere I was going, I was taking pictures.� I had opportunities.� I would come back from these fires, and everybody'd be sitting around going, "Yeah, wasn't that a fun fire?" and "I did this," and "Joe Blow did this," but nobody had a picture of it.� I was thinking, "It's really a shame somebody's not kind of doing something."� So I just started taking more and more pictures.� Before I knew it, it grew into these albums.� I had them laying in boxes.� My wife goes, "You should do something with these photos. They're just laying around."� So I started putting them in albums, and that's how those came to be.
Underhill: What do you see, from environmental conditions today, what would be your prediction for the next few years, in terms of fires?� Should we expect more of these catastrophic events?
Dudley: I think this is an extreme year. I think we can expect more large fires.� I think that prediction is going to be predicated on the drought conditions.� If this drought gets more severe and deepens, I think we can look for some more catastrophic fires.� If the drought condition abates, I think we can still anticipate our share of large fires, but not necessarily catastrophic.� I just differentiate those two between the extreme fire behavior like we saw on the Rodeo-Chedeski Fire this year, versus a large fire that normally behaves in a wind-driven condition here on the Colorado Plateau.� Those two conditions.� That one was pretty much that, but it was so drought driven, and so drought dependent, that it grew to almost a 500,000-acre size that you see today.� I'd say a large fire in non-drought conditions, we could expect to see 1,000-2,500-acre fires of reasonable frequency occur‑-until we get a handle on the fuel situation, particularly in and around these urban interface areas, the outlying satellite communities around Flagstaff.� Flagstaff proper is certainly not immune.� Anybody that's actually living inside the forest is vulnerable to this type of situation.
So yeah, I think that's the challenge before the Forest Service now, is to get past these incidents, get something workable in place that works with everybody else to come to some kind of agreement that we can really start making some tangible inroads into the fuels conditions and stuff we need to in this area.
Underhill: Is there anything else you'd like to add?
Dudley: No.� Just thank you for the opportunity. It's been fun.
Underhill: Oh, thank you.� And for the official record (unclear) find it online.
Dudley: Good.� I hope you all enjoy them. I had fun doing them.
Underhill: Thank you for your time, Steve.
Dudley: Certainly.
Holcomb: Thank you.
[END OF INTERVIEW]