Claudia Mazuros Interview

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This is Brad Cole from Northern Arizona University. It's June 10, 2002. We're at the Cline Library, and we're visiting with Claudia Mazuros today. This interview is part of the Colorado Plateau Fire Project with the P. T. Reilly Internship. Karen Underhill and Anne Holcomb are also present.

Cole: Claudia, whenever I do an oral history, I like to start from the very beginning, if you could tell us when and where you were born.

Mazuros: I was actually born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, and was fortunate enough to have an opportunity to travel early in my life, and just every summer long then lived to find a way west. When I graduated from Kent State University with a degree in geology, bachelor of science degree in geology, I packed up my grandmother's old '76 Mercury Monterey with all my worldly possessions and headed west, with the hopes of actually landing a job with the Forest Service. I initially wanted to try and get on. I always thought it would be so romantic—not so much romantic—but what a neat job, to work at a fire tower and be able to watch for fires, because I just figured that you'd be up there, and you could see where the birds live, and really get to know the forest, and also look for fires.

The Northern Kaibab had fire towers, so I originally was trying to apply there, but I didn't realize what a sacred job or what a…people who had gotten that job didn't move out of it, because it was such a neat job to have. So I ended up in Phoenix without a job, hoping to try and get on somewhere. I managed to get a job with the Forest Service up on the Dixie National Forest in Escalante, Utah. And that sort of was where my career began with the Forest Service.

Cole: What were you hired on for?

Mazuros: Initially I was hired on to be a timber marker, which the job of the timber marker was— I kind of thought of it as the "Judas of the forest." We went around and marked the trees that were going to be cut down for logs. Some people might have a problem with that, and I'm an environmentalist at heart. I would have to say.... a lot of people would say, "how could you do that?" And I thought, "well, you know, they're going to cut down trees and make two-by-fours anyway, and at least if I'm doing it, I can make conscientious decisions out there, and maybe impact, not the entire Forest Service timber policies, but certainly that area in Southern Utah-Escalante." So I started out as a timber marker. But when you sign up with the Forest Service and you sign the contract, part of the contract says that you will fight fires when needed. And so you don't really have a choice. You can sign up as the guy who's going to clean the bathrooms in the campground, but still, in the event of a fire, you're going to be called out to fight that fire. So that's kind of how I got into the firefighting aspect.

Cole: When you moved up to the Dixie National Forest, where did you live?

Mazuros: A little town called Escalante, about eight hundred people, just about sixty miles east of Bryce Canyon. That was a big booming town: we had two gas stations, we had a bar, we had a bank, and a post office. And you learned real quick that sidewalks rolled up at 7 p.m. It was quite interesting, and sort of an adjustment, coming from such a large town as Cleveland, Ohio, to suddenly come back and live in this tiny town of 701 people. It was 701 when I came into town, I guess. But that took a lot of getting used to, and a lot of just culture shock, like I said, coming from such a large metropolis into this tiny little podunk town, that up until maybe ten years earlier had dirt roads coming out of it. So that's where I lived.

Cole: And then did you immediately get fire training, or how did that all....

Mazuros: Well, actually, my fire training occurred. I hired on as a timber marker, and it was springtime, and in the spring the Forest plants trees. Even though I went around slaughtering trees, I also in the spring I kind of tried to rebuild my karma "account" by planting trees. And we would plant 60,000-70,000 trees a season. And so it was early spring, and we were out there planting trees. I was kind of bummed, because the crew I was working with, planting—I'd come down in another truck, and there was a fire at Bryce Canyon. So the crew that had gotten into town earlier got to go on the fire at Bryce Canyon. When you first start on with the Forest Service, you're just wanting to get out and go on a fire. You get really bummed when you can't go. So they sent these people, and I got stuck staying back home in Escalante, and I was really quite bummed.

So the next day I was supposed to go out with some timber people on a timber sale, the timber administrators, and we were out there and having lunch with the tree fellers. And it was kind of exciting, because we were going to get to see them fall some of these trees. Watching them fall, big hundred-foot trees, is kind of a neat thing. And we were having lunch, and lightning started popping. And the Forest Service guy I was working with said, "There's some dollar signs." And I was kind of like, "What do you mean, 'dollar signs'?" And he said, "Well, when lightning strikes out in the forest, every forester just gets dollar signs in their eyes, because of the possibility of a fire."

So sure enough, they got a call that there was a fire, and we were very close to it, so we were the initial attack. And on the way to the fire—the guy's name I was working with was Dwayne—he said, "have you ever been on a fire before?" "Nope." "Ever had any fire training?" "Nope." He said, "Well, here's your fire training. You want to make sure you keep one foot to black, so you know what the fire's doing all the time. Stick close to me so that you don't get yourself into trouble." And that was my first real fire training that I had. And so my fire training was really, truly, on-the-job fire training.

It ended up being about a twenty-five-acre fire. And when we got there, you could practically spit across it. But we had high winds, so the fire immediately just started racing through things. And it was in an area that had been timber saled before, so they had some roadways going through there, but they had closed them. So they had called the construction company in town to come bring in the bulldozer to open the roads up so they could get better access to the fire site.

And meanwhile, some other people from town had started showing up. There was about five of us up there, trying to put the fire line in, and we kept getting pushed back and pushed back. So we'd dig a little line, and then we'd have to back off, because it was just getting too intense and pushing us back. And we'd kind of go back behind where we had been, and then we'd start the line again. And finally it got to the point where they actually had to bring the bulldozer in to put the fire line in, and that was really quite impressive, because you could hear it. You couldn't see anything because of the smoke, but you could hear it coming. You could just hear the chain, the sound of a bulldozer, the track of the metal coming across there. Soon you started seeing trees just going (fwpft!) as the guy came through. And here's this old guy from Escalante in a ball cap with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, just running the gears and moving the bulldozer around. And you're just like—you know, you'd see him disappear into the smoke, and you'd just be.... You know, you could hear it, and then he'd pop back out somewhere else. So he ended up putting the line in.

Then we ended up having to walk the line all night long. And what we did was we split the line up into sections, and we each had a section. You'd walk up to the section and talk to the person at the other end, and come back down. The whole purpose there was to make sure that nothing blew outside the line, and so it would start a spot fire outside the line. And about three o'clock in the morning we had a spot fire on another end of the line. I spent the rest of the night just kind of standing above the spot fire, in the smoke, watching burning embers falling into the duff, and making sure that they went out. And if they didn't go out, then you'd move over there, and you had a little bit of water, and you'd put a squirt of water on them and put them out. And that's how I spent the rest of the night, was just trying to contain that spot.

So that was my first fire and fire training. It was kind of funny, because I was all bummed that the people went to Bryce got to go on a fire, and it turned out they didn't really have much of a fire to deal with. And with me staying in Escalante, at the time it didn't seem like such a great thing, but it turned out my first fire experience was truly a hot situation, and I got to see a lot of crowning, and things that most people don't get to see in their first few fires. So I was lucky in that sense, but it was scary. And then about two weeks later I had the official Forest Service fire training, in the district. "Okay, here's what you're supposed to do." It was kind of interesting, because it was like, "Okay, that's what we did." But like I said, my initial fire training didn't come until after my first fire.

Cole: When you said the person told you to keep one foot in the black, what do you mean by that?

Mazuros: The saying was, "If it's black, it won't burn back," the idea being the safest place in a fire is to be in an area that's already been burned, because once it's been burned through, then the fuels are gone. And if you have to, that's where you go for your safety zone. That's kind of a double-edged sword, because if you get just a partial burn, where you have stuff burning underneath your trees, and you have a lot of heat going up and drying the trees out, and it gets kind of that brownie, not-quite-dead, but not-quite-green—not burned, but not green—that's a even bigger danger, because those are the kind of things that can really get going once again, fire-wise. And so the ideal safety zone would be somewhere that had been burned thoroughly, and there wouldn't be any fuels left around that you could get into. It was like over the course of the night I can remember having questions, because you're out there scratching your head. They're saying, "Know your safety zones." And you're thinking to yourself, "Well, what's a safety zone? I guess you mean the truck." (laughs) You know? I can remember asking one guy, because you're looking around, where can I go if all hell breaks loose? Where am I going to go? I can remember asking a guy, "Is it okay to, if you have to, can you run through the burn into the flames to get to the other side of the fire?" He confirmed if that's your last option, you want to do it, but you'd rather try and find something else where you're not putting yourself in harm's way to try and find safety.

Cole: And then when you said that it was the dollar signs, what do you mean by that?

Mazuros: When you fight fires, the way it works is that you get what's called hazard pay. The Forest Service pays hazard pay, which was 25 percent of your base pay, and then the other thing, too, is that you just end up working long hours. The way it would work is if you went on a fire at 4:30 in the afternoon, and you were on the clock since seven, you would get time-and-a-quarter for the entire day, because as soon as you went on the fire, you would get hazard pay, and they would pay you, that day's wages would be at time-and-a-quarter. So you made a lot of money on fires, because you wouldn't get home. With that fire, I was out all night, and we got home early in the morning, got to go to sleep for a little bit, and we were the night shift the next night. It was like about a three- or four-day fire. They were actually up there, and they kept people up there at night. At night mostly what you do is patrol things, and on those smaller fires, try and just make sure it doesn't get out of hand on you again.

I was on a fire in Oregon, and the way the timeclock worked was midnight Sunday was the beginning of your work week. And this fire was on up in Oregon. By Wednesday, noon, we had forty hours in. And so the way they would count it, once you got your forty hours in, then everything after that was overtime. So from Wednesday noon, 'til Saturday night, 11:59, was overtime. And you'd work from can't see them to can't see them—from sunup to sundown. It's funny, too, because it's really grueling work, and you come home, and you're tired, and you're sleeping on—the living conditions aren't the greatest. You're sleeping on the ground, you're eating cold food, oftentimes C-rations. And you would complain, and somebody would always say, "Just remember that, when you're rubbing those—when you get home, just rub those greenbacks on the bottom of your feet, and they won't hurt so bad." There'd be times you come home, and you would just make a lot of money in the fires, like I say, because when you're on those things and you're on overtime, you're making time-and-three-quarters, so it adds up quick. So that's why you see....

The other thing they always said, too, "When lightning struck, a thousand pigs die." Because when you get on those big fires, the big project fires, something like Yellowstone, you always get pork sausage for breakfast, and ham sandwiches for lunch. And also they said, "When lightning strikes, a thousand pigs die" so that they can make all those pork sausages and ham.

The other thing, too, there's rainbow roast beef. You know, that kind of stuff that when you sort of tip it in light, it sort of rainbow shines back at you. It's like after that kind of thing you find out that's just one step away from being rotten. And you're so hungry you don't care anymore, you're just like out there eating it, you know. You're just thinking, "Thank God it's not ham." (laughter)

Cole: So take us through the fire training. How'd that work?

Mazuros: Well, it's kind of interesting, because the fire training kind of took an evolution in the time that I worked with the Forest Service. The initial fire training that I had was just the people in the district. Our local people right there in the district warehouse. And they'd pretty much teach you—it's kind of interesting, because they always talk about these thirteen situations that shout "Watch out!" And there was another, I think, ten other situations that were like dangerous situations, "Don't get yourself into [these], because these can be dangerous situations." They teach you things like, "Know what the main fire is doing all the time. Don't go into areas that you're non-familiar with. Know what the weather patterns are going to be." But it was always kind of interesting, because when you got on those project fires, you never knew. A lot of times, you would be building line two miles out in front of the fire, so you had no concept what the main fire was really doing. And you were in areas, you'd fly off somewhere into Idaho or Oregon, and they were dropping you into places you were unfamiliar with. It's funny, because when you live in an area, you know where north is, and south is, just by your geographic location. And then to suddenly move mid-night, mid-stream somewhere, and be deposited somewhere. You're like, "Where's north and south?" You want to know quick to carry a compass with you, even though you can always rely on the movement of the sun. But when you're in inversions, you don't see the sun, you just see smoke for days.

I forget, what were we talking about?

Cole: Training.

Mazuros: Oh, the training. That always amazed me, though, that they'd have these thirteen "watch out!" situations. It seemed like when you go on a project fire, they broke ten of them. But the thing I remember most—you learn about just basic fire behavior, there's a fire triangle. The legs of the triangle are heat, fuel, and oxygen. You break one of those legs of the fire triangle, you can put the fire out. You learn about heat transfer, convection and conduction, radiant heat. And one of the things I remember most was the guy had, I guess, about a two-by-twelve piece of wood that he had holes drilled in. And he would stick wooden matches in there, those wooden match sticks. And he would lay it flat and he would light them, so you could see how they would just sort of slowly move from one row of matches to the next. And the whole point of the demonstration was to illustrate how slopes can increase the rate of fire advances. And then he would tip the board up, and just make a slope out of it. It was incredible to see that thing, because it just sort of went real slow, one by one row, when it was flat. And then as soon as you turned it up like this, the whole thing just went (whoosh!) into fire, to emulate [i.e., simulate] what can happen when fire races up a canyon.

A few years later, the entire Forest—the Forest is divided up into, you have your Forest, and then there's districts within the Forest, so the next evolution in the training was that they did a Forest-wide training, where they actually would set up a fire camp that would act like a camp that you would be at, if you were in a project fire. And so then they would bring all the people from the entire Forest into there: not only Forest Service, but also they had an agreement with BLM, and I think even some of the state people they had. So any state employees of the state parks or BLM people and Forest Service people, they'd bring them in for this week-long training thing.

They had an incident up in Idaho where they had a whole bunch of firefighters that had to deploy their fire shelters, and shortly after that they came out with a training film that they interviewed these guys that had spent these three hours in their fire shelters while they were burned over. That was mandatory that you watch that. Like I said, mostly then you looked at techniques, what do you do. The basic firefighting training, though, is really just, "How do you build a fire line? What do you do once you get the fire line in there?"

At that time, our district didn't really have a fire crew per se. And as time went on, they developed what's called a Class 2 team. I know you said you were going to interview some hotshots. And the hotshots were like Class 1. So when you hear about these hotshot crews that are out there, they were considered a Class 1 team, and then we were Class 2. In Class 1, they go anywhere they need to go in the United States to fight a fire. And Class 2 teams were people whose primary job wasn't firefighting, but they had a lot more firefighting training than just the normal person, but they also had not as much fire training as hotshot crews. And so I was on a Class 2 team. It's called Color Country, and it came out of Cedar City, we were based out of Cedar City.

And so they would call up a crew, and a crew is twenty people, with a crew boss. We drew people from the St. George area, Cedar City area, Panguitch area, Escalante area, and then we also had two crews that came off the Navajo Indian Reservation out of, is it Window Rock? We'd call them out. Then we started doing a lot more firefighting off district, once they got that Class 2 team in place. That kind of came hand-in-hand with this fire camp idea for the fire training stuff. And then they would have some sort of area that they wanted prescribed burn, where they'd actually set it on fire, and then make us go in and put a fire line around it. We would let it burn, because were trying to get rid of fuels and stuff. But then at the end of the day, you'd have to go in and put it out. I mean, that's basically the technique: put a line around it, and then put it out.

A lot of people think, "Oh, firefighting's so glorious, you're digging fire line." Digging fire line is really only 10 percent of what you do. The other 90 percent is just really ugly grunt work out there mixing and stirring, trying to put the fire out. You consider yourself very lucky if you have soil and water, because nine out of ten times, you didn't even have that to work with. I can remember mixing and stirring big duff piles that had burning embers in there. You'd mix and stir it, and then you wouldn't see anything smoking, and you'd move to another spot, and ten minutes later you looked at the spot you just spent a half hour at, and it's starting to smoke again. It's like you can't put the fire out when you're just mixing and stirring dry fuels. But there wasn't any soil around, we didn't have any water around to do anything.

It's interesting, we had these bags called bladder bags. We used to call them piss pumps. Whoever designed them never intended to carry them, because it was made out of inner tube material, it held five gallons of water, and it had a hose that came out of it, and like a little trombone slide on it, where you pull it out and it'd suck water up into the hose, and then you squish it, and it'd force the water out. The straps hooked up here, so it wasn't like they had straps that hook down here—you know the hardware to hook the straps on was right on your shoulders. So when you wore them, it just dug into your shoulders all the time. And we had some stuff, they call it web gear. Every firefighter would have some web gear—they have different types of designs—but what it was just sort of a harnessing thing that you could wear that had lots of pockets and neat places to put stuff to carry, because you carry all your water, you carry your safety shelter, you carry your lunches.

I always carried a candy store. Not that I sold the candy, but when you would stop for a break, everybody could use a candy bar, and I was always the person that had the bag of candy in my pack. So I had the connections to the candy people.

When you carry five gallons of water in an hour, you're very careful, you're not just out there squirting the flowers to give them a drink. You're making really sure that those few drops of water that you're going to use are going to put something out. Nothing would piss a person off more than seeing some novice firefighter out there just squirting water into the air, and you just like want to slap them upside the head. "You ding-a-ling! That's all the water we have all day long, in terms of trying to put the fire out." That's one misconception I think people have. We have tons of fire hoses, but we're not like the city fire department that pulls up and hooks up to a fire hydrant and just starts spraying water on stuff. And you learn real quickly, too, that just spraying water on something doesn't necessarily put it out. You can spray five gallons of water on a spot and come back an hour later and it's still burning. because unless you get in there and actually mix and stir....

And then you did what was called a "cold trail," where you actually took your gloves off and ran your hands over the top of the area and kind of through the ash, looking for burning embers, and you could find them then. It might not be smoking, but you'd find them with your bare hand.

You get black leg disease, where the ash just kind of rubs through your pants, and you finally get your pants off, your legs are just black. And if you got caught out in the rain, it was kind of weird, because it would rinse down to your sock line. You'd be okay until you take your socks off, and then you had this big black line around your.... It was one of those things where you always thought, "Eiyu! if that's what's going on with my legs, what's going on with my lungs?!" And you'd blow your nose, and it would just be like black. I used to think that must be what the guys that worked in the coal mines must have experienced—all that black coal dust and stuff.

Cole: So how unusual was it to be female in the fire crew? Were there other women?

Mazuros: You know, that's interesting, too, because when I first started going on project fires, there wasn't any differentiation between the—in the bathroom situation, they'd bring in those little red heads, and you could always tell how well the fire was going. You knew it was very depressing when you came home and there were ten more of those red heads in the fire camp, because when they kept bringing them in, that wasn't as good as when they started hauling them out. But when I first started fighting fires, they didn't really say, "Here's men's, here's women's." And that's one thing I did notice, that toward the end of when I finally—before I quit—they'd actually started labeling some of those for females only—you know, "ladies" and "men." But it didn't matter, though, when you got up in the morning, you had to go. They tried to respect that differentiation, but if there was an open one, people were going to use it, no matter what.

I would have to say that over the time—and I did it for about ten years—there were more females starting to fight the fire. The biggest problem you fought was the "good ol' boys." The Forest Service really was. I don't know, it's been ten years since I've been out of it, but it was a real good ol' boy kind of an organization. Women really had to prove themselves, and prove that they weren't foolish, and that they could do just as well as the next guy. So there would be a handful of us, but not very many. And I did notice as time progressed, more and more females started doing it.

Cole: What about leadership goals?

Mazuros: What do you mean? In terms of....

Cole: Were there many women that moved up into leadership roles?

Mazuros: Yeah, and I think a lot of that had to do with affirmative action, though, that they started having to fill quotas in the supervisory positions. You had to have a certain percentage that were going to be females. I've always—just kind of as a side note on affirmative action—I think it's sad that we live in a society where we have to have laws that ensure that people who are qualified for a job get the same pay, regardless of your race or sex. At the same time, though, I've seen incompetent women get pushed up the ranks in the leadership roles of the Forest Service, merely to fill quotas. I hate the idea of quotas, but at the same time I know that if we didn't have quotas, that there wouldn't be women in positions where they're at today if they didn't have them [i.e., quotas]. But at the same time, like I said, I know personally of people that had gotten moved up because they were females. We would tell these people, "Hey, these guys are not what they're cracked up to be." And their opinion was, "We don't care, we need a female." And that kind of always has bothered me because I don't see myself as one of those females. It pisses me off that we have these incompetent women that are making the rest of us look bad. But like I said, at the same time, I hate the fact that we live in a society that we have to have some kind of law that's going to guarantee that I'm going to make the same wage that the guy doing the same job—that I might even be doing a better job than he is—you know, I don't want to see him make more money than I am, just simply because I'm a female and he's not.

Cole: Was there any wage differentiation (Mazuros: No, not really.) when you were....

Mazuros: The thing that really differentiated wages, in terms of like seasonal labor, was whether or not you had a four-year degree. because I would be doing the same work that one of the locals was doing, and he was a GS-3 and I was a GS-5, mainly because I had the degree and he didn't. But we'd be doing the same work. It wasn't so much of a sexual discrimination, it was more of an educational discrimination, wherever you were at. I have a degree in geology, so I didn't have a degree in forestry, but I was still making more money because I had that four-year degree, than the guy that was doing the same job, who only had a high school degree.

So in terms of leadership, I did, I started out as a grunt, just a firefighter. And the chain of command from the bottom, it was you sort of have firefighter, and when you get in these larger fires, these project fires, these Class 2 team type things, when I worked with the Color Country Crew, you have a twenty-person crew, you have four people that make up a squad, and then a fifth person who's the squad boss. And then you have like four squads to a crew, and then you have a crew boss. So the chain of command was you had the crew boss, squad boss, firefighter. And I eventually did work my way up to being a fire crew boss with Color Country. As I moved up the chain of command, I got more training. You actually went through crew boss training, and you got more extensive training than just the firefighters did.

And I remember when they were moving me up the ranks, and I was just like, man, talking to Dwayne, that guy that I'd gone on the first fire with, and I was like, "Dwayne, I just want to be a grunt firefighter." He's like, "Well, why?" "because I don't want to be responsible for other people's lives." And my biggest fear as a crew boss was sending somebody home in a body bag. And he always said to me, "If you know where your people are, just make sure you always know where your people are, and you'll never have a problem with them." The problem arises when you lose somebody, you don't know where they're at, and then you go back in the fire looking for them, and they'd down the trail and sitting out safe and sound, and you're in there risking your life, looking for them. So just make sure you know where your people are.

There were times—we were at a fire outside of Heber City, up in Utah, and they flew us up on top of this ridge, and it was one of those things where the fire was down below us, and it was moving up the ridge towards us. And it was one of those situations where they fly you up there, and they go, "Oh, shit, maybe it wasn't such a good idea to put forty people up there." We're looking around, there's no safety zone. The only thing we had really going for us was we were on light fuels. And the fire was coming up at us, and it's coming up-canyon, and you've got that visualization of that little, you know, your very first fire crew training, that little match thing, and you're looking down at the slope, and the fire's coming up at you. And I'm standing on this big rock, and they're flying my crew up, and they said, "Where's our safety zone?" and I just kind of looked at my rock and I was like, "Well, I got mine. Don't know where you guys are going." But it was like I wanted to make sure, I told my squad bosses, if your people go off to go to the bathroom, you better damned well know what direction they're going, and how long they've been gone, because if we have to—you know, this was one of these situations where we might have to get the hell out of here really quick, and I want to know where you guys are.

And we ended up, they brought in slurry bombers. I mean, that's the only reason we didn't get burned over at that point, was they brought the slurry bombers in, and they put down a line in front of us. But we did end up backing up the ridge, even further up the ridge from where we originally started. The spot we were in did get burned over, but we had fortunately been moved out of there before then. Like I said, the slurry bombers. I can remember that, because they try to make dry runs to see how they're going to come in and what's the best way to drop their load.

The ridge was behind us, and we were just kind of standing there, and all of a sudden, out of nowhere, that (imitates sound of airplane engine). You're just like dropping your hard hat, "Holy God! where'd that come from?!" You know, this plane coming out of nowhere. You're just like, "Jesus!" So it was like, "Yee-hah!" But he just come off over the ridge. We were very close to the top of the ridge, and he just kind of come right down on top of us, and you're just like—you just hit the dirt. "Where'd that come from?" But then he ended up dropping off in front of us. It's amazing when that stuff comes out. I've seen rocks this big just get bounced fifty feet into the air when that stuff hits it.

That's the other thing, too, they train you that if you're in an area where you're going to get dumped, you want to be on the ground, you want to face the direction of the drop with your hard hat, so that if you do get hit, that you're protected somewhat with your little tin foil hard hat. Like it's going to really save you after seeing these rocks, because that's about the size of your head. (laughs) (unclear) my head goes splat.

I did get dropped on, slurry, but not from airplanes—mostly from helicopters. The stuff stinks, and it's sticky. You just.... Oh, God, it smells, and like I said, you get all sticky. You've got nowhere to—nine out of ten times you're at some fire camp, no fire facilities. You're lucky, when you get home, you get a little bit of water to wash your hands and face off, that's it. I sometimes think that the helicopter operators try to drop on you. They would hit you.... They are phenomenal. I mean I've seen them come in with helicopters and fill stump holes, just stand right over the stump and be able to just nail the stump and fill the stump hole with water.

At the same time, I think they always try and take a little bit of their last bit of load and hit anybody that's in the area. I don't know if that's a fact, but you sure, when you're standing on the ground, you kind of feel like that's what they're doing to you. (laughs) That was another thing with being a fire crew boss. On some of the fires you get to call in the water drops. And you have to learn really quick, too, that when you're giving directions to the helicopter, you don't give them from your perspective, you give them from the pilot's perspective. So if he's flying at you, and you're to his left, you don't say.... You have to make sure you realize, "Well, you want to come to your left." The easiest thing to do is just talk in terms of a clock, because everybody—so you would be at the twelve o'clock position, and you would direct him from that point on, on how to find you. You do all kinds of weird things like pull over aspen brows [i.e., boughs?], because if you were thick aspen and just tie a bunch of pink flagging, and then when they'd fly over, you'd just kind of shake the tree and feel like a cheerleader out there with a big giant pompon. "I'm down here! Here I am!" To find ya', to put the water on.

Every now and then you get hit, like I said. Sometimes it was nice, because you'd go up there and it'd just be hot, you'd be hot. It was kind of a nice refreshing thing. But then you'd stop and think about, because when it comes time to putting out fire like that, wherever they can get water from, they're going to get it. And sometimes that's some old nasty stock pond. Sometimes that's some old nasty septic pond. Sometimes that's just some nice fresh river. But it all depends on where you're at and what kind of.... You'd find algae up in the trees, just kind of hanging from the trees, that they'd scoop up. I've never seen, but you'd hear stories. You never knew if they were tall tales or not, about fish. I don't know if they ever—I imagine they could have easily caught fish.

The other thing that you learn, too—I remember one time we were on a fire and you'd see a helicopter go over with his bucket, and then he'd come back, and he had no bucket. A few minutes later you hear [over the radio], "Ah, we need to get somebody up here from helitac [phonetic] to reattach the bucket on the helicopter. We lost it up here on this ridge." So they have to fly somebody in to get the bucket, to put it back on the helicopter. And it's like you would think that that stuff's secure, but like I said, you see it go over with the bucket, and then back without the bucket. You're thinking, "Hm, that's not supposed to happen that way. You're supposed to drop the water, not the bucket too."

There were stories, too, of sling load. Sling load is like a big giant cargo net that they'd throw all your stuff in to fly it up to someplace. They'd fly your gear up there. There was two crews that lost their gear because they lost the sling load on the way up to what was called a spike camp. And actually, some kids found it that were local kids that actually got out there on their bikes and just gridded out the area, managed to find the packs. That was kind of embarrassing for a lot of the firefighters, because they can replace what's lost, so make a list of what's in your fire pack that was lost. And suddenly people had Nikon cameras, and it turned out that they just had little pocket Instamatics, once they got the fire packs back, and they compared what was supposed to be in the pack, that the firefighters claimed, compared to what was in the pack—and it wasn't the same. I was fortunate, I never lost my gear that way.

Spike camps were areas outside the main camp—they'd set up a smaller camp, and you'd just kind of get flown up into a spike camp for two or three days, and they'd fly you back out. If you were lucky, they flew in hot meals that you got to eat at 9 p.m. but you figured they wouldn't fly them in past dark. But usually at four o'clock your hot dinner was landing up at the spike camp. And like I said, you wouldn't get there 'til nine. It might have been hot at one point in time, but it certainly wasn't when you got around to it.

Cole: How long were the shifts? Did they have any regulations (unclear).

Mazuros: Well, they had regulations for like pilots, the slurry bombers, and the helicopters were only allowed to fly certain hours a day. But fire crews, you were just.... The longest shift that I worked was, we were in Idaho, right outside Idaho City. Really, they were working us out of spike camps, and we were up in a spike camp, and we went on the clock Wednesday morning, and we were supposed to come down out of the spike camp that afternoon, and the fire was kind of winding down, things were winding down. And not uncommon to happen, unfortunately, local economies boom when you get big fires going, so you get these little small towns that don't have much of an economy, and suddenly you get this big giant fire in there, and they're making twice as much of what they would make annually. So like I said, it's not uncommon to see somebody go out and set a fire, to keep that [economy] going. And that's what happened here, was that the main fire that we were almost kind of winding down, somebody had gone out and set another fire, to keep the fire economy going.

So we were supposed to fly out of the spike camp. I remember hearing on the radio that they were shutting down the air space to bring in the tankers. And I was just thinking, "Oh, my God, we're going to get stuck up here again." We just wanted to get out of there. We'd been up there three or four days, and wanted to just get out, just back down to camp to have a shower and go to sleep somewhere other than a rock. And we managed to fly out of there, and they met us at the airport, and they said, "Go eat and water up. We need you to go work this other fire." And so we ended up doing structure protection. Well, actually, they put us in a staging area and left us sit there, and about eleven o'clock at night they decided, "Okay, we're not going to use you guys after all. Let's have you go bed down." So we went and bedded down, and about an hour later they came and got us. I remember my squad boss yelling, "Is this a nightmare?!" And I said, "I don't think so. Most times two people don't have the same nightmare at the same time, and since we're both having it, I don't think it's a nightmare. I think they're dragging us out, we've got an hour's sleep, and we're going out to do structure protection.

So we went back out on the line and we came off the clock then Friday afternoon. So we were on the clock from Wednesday (unclear, clock chiming) 'til Friday afternoon. (unclear) I don't know, fifty, sixty hours or something. I remember we ended up getting burned over there, the fire. It wasn't really a true burnover, because we put in our fire line, the fire advanced, we did our backburn, the fire went down, cut us off from the rest of civilization, went down the one road that we'd come in on, jumped the road, was coming back up the other side that night. And I remember we didn't have any of our gear, because we didn't get a chance to get any of our gear. So all we had was what we'd gone in the wee hours of the morning with. And I remember going off to try and catch some shuteye, and just go to try and find a quiet spot to sleep in. Your biggest hope was, "Please, just let me sleep quickly, and sleep a lot." And you'd fall asleep, and you're laying on the ground with nothing but the clothes on your back, and that coolness from the ground creeps into your body. And you just wake up being cold, and you're just like, "God, I hope I've been asleep an hour." And you wake up and you've been asleep ten minutes.

And I remember watching that fire rage up the hill, or up the road, coming back at us. We were in our safety zone, and there were some people standing around a small campfire, trying to gain warmth, and just some peace, I guess, from that fire. And it was just such a contrast to see the same element of fire, where in one instance it was just offering this nice comfort and warmth to these very weary, tired people; and right behind them, that very same element of fire just burning like crazy, just totally out of control and just racing. It was kind of interesting, because the next morning we finally did get back to camp. They wanted us to go back out the next day, and I was bouncing off air molecules. You know, like we needed to go do this?! And I'm like, "Oh, man. Dudes, we can't. We've been on the clock since Wednesday, daylight. You need to bring some fresh people in here, because I just cannot put my people at risk. We're not sharp enough to be in that situation.

We finally got back to camp, I remember talking to somebody who was a spotter the night before, an observer, somebody on those big project fires that just kind of watches it. That person is the eyes for everybody. And he was going, "Man! you should have seen the spectacular fire behavior I saw last night!" And I was like, "Where?" And he was telling me where it was, and it was like, "Oh, yeah." He goes, "And there were some poor crews down there." I said, "Yeah, we were that poor crew that was down there." (laughs) So it was pretty incredible.

That was one of those fires, though, that—you always carried a fire shelter, and I always carried it in my pack, tried to protect it, because it was what protected you. And it actually came in its own little canvas carrying case, but on that particular fire, I actually had it—I mean, it was ready to be used. The canvas pack that it was in was opened, it was sitting right on top of everything inside my pack, so that all I had to do was drop my [web gear?], open my pack, and I had my fire shelter. And that was one of those ones that I really—that worried me.

And I think another thing that worried me was that I was working with a Navajo crew at the time, and we had a couple of guys on the crew who had been medicine men, supposed. They were real low-key about it, but the other guys would say, "You know, this guy's a medicine man." You're real respectful of that, but they were walking around going, "This is not good. This is not good." I don't know what it is, if there was anything to it. A Native American medicine man, you feel like he has some sort of mystical powers—but if he's wandering around, shaking his head and going, "This is not good".... And I don't know, maybe superstitious, I don't know what it was, but I always felt like they were much more in tune with things that were going on. And so when he felt it was not good, and I even could see that it was not good, it was not good, it was not a good situation.

But we didn't have to deploy—we were large enough, we were fortunate enough we had a large enough area that we had, probably about the size of a football field that we were in. We had a bulldozer, had finally brought a bulldozer in, after we had put our fire line in. I was ready to slap the guy from the state on that one. On my crew, there was two of us, two crews up there. We had put the fire line in, and it was probably a twenty-feet-wide fire line, and he was calling it a cat line. A cat line was considered a line that was put in by a caterpillar or bulldozer, and this was not a cat line, this was a hand line. This was a hand line that was put in by forty people. And I just wanted to make sure he realized that this wasn't some guy that came in with his cat bulldozer and just dropped his blade and put it around, but forty people had busted their butt putting that line in there. Thank you very much, but you'd better realize that it's not a cat line, it's a hand line. (laughter) You take pride in that. It's like, "Hey, my people did that." You know? Don't misrepresent what's up there.

Cole: Do you remember what year that fire was?

Mazuros: Well, not off hand. It had to have been probably '89.

Cole: Is that near Idaho City?

Mazuros: Yeah. Idaho City is a neat, neat town. We were working out of Idaho City there, yeah. But I think it was maybe '89, maybe even '90. It's kind of weird, because those seasons just.... Well, I remember in '87 they had a big—it's so funny, because every year anymore it seems like, "This is the biggest fire year we've had in history!" And then the next season comes, "This is the biggest!" I mean, they keep getting worse. But in '87, it was like this was the worst fire season they'd had in years. I remember '87, just because we were in Oregon, and we got, the State of Oregon actually sent us little commemorative pins. That's the only reason I remember that that was even in '87.

So in '87 we were on a fire. We were gone six weeks, up in Oregon. That was one of those fires where they came and drug us out of bed in Escalante and said, "You got a fire," and we'd drive to Cedar City. They put us on a bus, shipped us up to Island Park, Idaho. We worked the night shift up there. We came back in, slept in the outfield of a ball field. Everybody was whining. I said, "You know, it could be worse. We're at least in left field, we could have been in right field." (laughs) It's so funny, you're sleeping during the day, and poor little Vanessa Miller, one of my coworkers, she woke up and exactly half her face was sunburned, because she'd slept on her side. And this side was all white, and this side was just bright, bright red from sleeping (unclear). She looked like something out of an old Star Trek episode.

Then we were supposed to eat dinner and go back up on the line. They fed us dinner, they said, "Oh, no. Get back on the bus, you're going to this other fire." Okay, so then they drove us down to Swan Lake. Is it Swan Lake, Idaho? (Cole: Yeah.) And we were supposed to go up on the night shift up there, and we were hanging around this something like a loading corral area, and it was getting cold. They were supposed to shuttle us in with these trucks. You don't want to drag anything out, because you figure, "As soon as I drag something out, they're going to show up to haul me off." And eventually you just got so tired you just said, "Okay, screw it." I pulled my sleeping bag out and laid down. I didn't bother taking my boots off, because I figured, "As soon as I lay down, they're going to come and get me." And I remember pulling the sleeping bag down and seeing that it was dawn, and thinking, "Well, guess we're not going to work the night shift."

We got up and we worked the day shift, and we worked one day shift there. We came down, we were supposed to bed down, they said, "Nope, get back on the bus, you're going to another fire." We drove to Idaho Falls, maybe, [later corrected to Twin Falls] to a fire outside of there, and they said, "Now, go over there to that area over there by that fence, between that fence and that tree and that pump, and bed down, you're going on day shift." This was at 3 a.m. So we finally bed down at 3 a.m., and at 5 a.m. they wake us up, and we went up on day shift. And we were actually there for about three or four days. We ended up at the Twin Falls High School. They took us in there to let us clean up.

Before that, they came to us and said, "Good news and bad news—which do you want first?" "Whatever." "The good news is you're being de-mobed [demobilized], the bad news is you're not going home. You're going to Happy Camp, California." They took us into town, we had to go to the Twin Falls High School and shower there. There was a laundrymat. Some guy just had a roll of quarters, and he'd just come through and start your machines for us—they did our laundry. They took us then to the airport, we got on an airplane, we're supposed to be going to Happy Camp. Halfway to Happy Camp they come on the airplane and said, "Guess what, you're not going to Happy Camp, you're going to Medford, Oregon."

We flew up to Medford, Oregon. I remember that was on the Siskiyou National Forest. Getting off the plane there, it smelled like the whole town was on fire, because there was just smoke everywhere. And they took us in the restaurant to eat, and we ate in the restaurant, came out again, and it was like you come out of those air conditioned buildings, and you just—it was like gosh, that whole town smelled like it was burning down. And they drove us up to Agnes, which was up the Rural River, on the Siskiyou National Forest, and we were there for five weeks. We were actually lucky, because we got there early, and we got one of the better camping spots. We had a primo camping spot, actually, compared to some people who end up just sleeping in the flat open. We were kind of up in the trees.

But every morning we'd get up and go down and have breakfast. That usually gets you up and moving around four, so you were fed and on your way up to the fire line by seven at the latest. Then at night you just come home. I mean, it was like that was really long. I remember waking up in the morning thinking, "Oh, my God, I'm still here. I was having a dream. I want to go back to that dream. I'm living this nightmare," because you just get so hammered at those long hours, and like I said, adverse conditions, just sleeping on the ground and washing.... They'd have showers, but who wants to take a shower at 9:30 at night, and you're going to have to go to bed with wet hair. It's like getting clean, suddenly just.... I mean, it's weird, because you go through two or three days.... It's the same with when you go camping. You know how you just kind of, those first few days, you're just like, "Oh, gosh, I'm so gross, I can't stand myself!" And then you just get to the point where you're like comfortable. And when you do get a chance to shower, you're thinking, "Wait, I don't want to shower, I'm comfortable with being dirty. If I take a shower and get clean, then I'm going to have to go through those two or three days of kind of uncomfortable until I'm comfortable being dirty again.

That was one of the only few times I actually got to go on R&R, and they sent us into Gold Beach, maybe. Is that the name of the town in Oregon, down the coast there?

Cole: Newport Beach?

Mazuros: No. I think it was Gold something. There was five women on the crew. Actually, on this crew I was just a fire—I hadn't moved up the ranks yet, so I was just a firefighter. And I'm standing there thinking, "Okay, five women on the crew, they're going to put two in a room." I volunteered, room by myself, since I figured, five room [sic], they're not going to put three of us, because they always just did double-up in the rooms. So I get (unclear). "I know you're going to have to have three rooms. I guess I'll take the room by myself. I'll sacrifice myself." I did. I remember taking a shower, and they had the nicest, softest, brown terry cloth towels. And I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. I thought, "Man...." You know, we had twenty-four hours. "I'm going to take a shower every hour!" It was such a wonderful feeling, you know. But the next thing I know, I fell asleep, and I just slept. Woke up the next morning, I was like, "Damn! I was going to take a shower every hour!" But I didn't get a chance to.

But that was one of those fires, too, when they finally said, "You're going home." And it's like, "Yeah, I will believe that when I see the back of my front door closed." because [I'd] been just bounced, pinballed around. Actually, when we did fly out of there, they flew us home. We flew to someplace in Colorado, dropped a crew off there, dropped a crew off in Provo, and we finally got to Cedar City, and it was too late, we couldn't drive home. So they put us up in another motel. By that time you just want to be home, you're tired of this. You know, "I wanna be home." And we were driving home the next day, and we were saying to my crew boss, "Hey! there's the smoke!" And he was telling me that I was full of shit, that I just had too much smoke on my mind. And I said, "No, no, I'm serious." We stopped at a little pull-off on the side of the road, and sure enough, coming over Cedar Mountain, there was the smoke. "Damn! you're pretty good!" "Yeah!" Fortunately, we were on our way home, so we just called that into the Cedar City District and went about our way home.

Kind of all over the place, aren't we?!

Cole: You'd mentioned the structure patrol. What would you do?

Mazuros: Well, what you would do is, we'd go in and first off put a line around it. It would depend on the situation. And this structure patrol we were doing was just sort of one small little—some people had some property up in there and they had two houses, two barns, and a trailer, on maybe about ten acres. And so we just put a line completely around that ten acres, and that was going to be our defenses. And then, let me ask the people, "Prioritize the buildings you want us to save." The other thing too that we did there was we got a whole bunch of fire hose. (clock chimes) It's kind of ominous, isn't it?

Then what we do is, we'd put a hose lay around, and went completely around that area with an inch-and-a-half fire hose, and every fifty feet, we had a fifty-foot line coming off it. The only problem was that they brought in a tank to set up a tank of water, and there was a tanker bringing this water in. His second trip in, he got a flat tire. So we had about 2,500 gallons of water. That would be enough to basically charge our fire hoses. I mean, as much hose as we had out there, it was going to about charge the line, and that was it. That suddenly became ineffective.

But we asked the people, "Prioritize the buildings that you want saved." And then we took their list of prioritized buildings and we had our own list of prioritized buildings, and I remember the guy wanted—he had, it wasn't really a garage or a barn, but it was kind of that sort of a structure. The walls didn't come down to the ground, it was made with first-cut off of aspen poles and they'd never stripped the bark off, so you had this stringy, hangy bark hanging off the side walls of the building. He had timber in there—not only firewood, but also construction two-by-fours and plywood. I mean, a lot of money sitting in that building, that he wanted saved. So his first priority was the house, the second priority was that building. No doors, so no way to keep anything burning out of this area that was just full of fuel. So they kind of said, "These are our priorities," and we had our own priorities. He wanted that building saved second, and that was last on our list. We don't tell them that at the time, that this is last on our list, but we were just looking at it, thinking we're not going to be able to save that, if anything gets going in there.

And so they do come in and make assessments. People need to realize that. They'll come in and assess your situation, and you might want with all your heart your house to be saved, but if it doesn't have the right—you know, if you've got shake shingle roofs and you've got a small driveway that they can't get an engine in to turn around, and you've got brush coming clear up to the back of your house, that becomes a low priority for a Forest Service employee to save. If you had a metal roof, and you've got a clear area around your house, and you've got a big enough driveway that they can get an engine in there, then that becomes the priority for saving the house.

And it's kind of interesting, because these people—and I can fully appreciate wanting to have my house up in the trees like that, but they don't realize what risk they're putting themselves at.

[END TAPE 1, SIDE A; SIDE B IS BLANK; BEGIN TAPE 2, SIDE A]

It's June 10, 2002, and this is Tape 2, at the Cline Library.

Cole: Claudia, you were just talking to us about a structure patrol you were working on.

Mazuros: Right.

Cole: Just in general, how that worked.

Mazuros: That was the kind of thing, is they would come in, they always called it the "red rock/green rock." They don't really—I guess in the old days they actually would have red rocks and green rocks, and that was just sort of their signal for what buildings they could save and what not. But that was kind of what they would do with structure protection, is they'd come in and assess your situation, and you might want them to save your area, but unless the factors are right for them to save it, it becomes a low priority. But on this particular structure, we were fortunate that the fire finally did come towards us. The whole idea behind fighting fires in the structure protection thing like that is that you put the fire line in, but you're not going to wait for the fire to get to you.

What you do is, we do what's called a back burn, where you actually start the fire at the edge of your fire line, with the idea that the fire you start burns towards the main fire, and the main fire itself creates its own heat and own weather patterns, so that sucks your littler fire into it, and draws the back burn. This is the fire theory behind it, that that draws the shorter fire back into the main fire, and thereby burning up the fuels. So you actually—your fire line then becomes part of the black. You have not only your hand line that you put in, but then you have this big black area that's been burned. We actually managed to save all the structures on that one, despite the firestorm.

Cole: So how do they decide, when they're fighting a fire in an area where there are a lot of people living, they do the assessment, but how do they decide when to evacuate?

Mazuros: You know, that was one aspect I really never got—I guess I can't speak to that, because most of the.... I think that's become an increasing problem in the last ten years, because we've got more and more people moving out into that interface between urban and rural areas. When I was still fighting fires—it's been ten, twelve years ago—we didn't have the issues that we have today. There was still some isolated cabins off back in the woods and what not. I don't think we had the problems that we're seeing today, with the people living in the forests like they do.

Cole: Do you know, does the Forest Service have the authority to pull civilians out?

Mazuros: I think they do. You know what I think? I think the Forest Service can ask the police department—and I think it's the police department.... That was something, just visiting the few, I thought, "You know, if the cops came and told me I had to move, I don't know...." I'd be kind of like, "I'm the captain of my house, I'm going down with the ship" sort of attitude. (laughter) I don't really know. That would be an interesting thing. Like I said, I don't really know enough about that to really address that, I guess.

Cole: So what percentage of the fires you fought would have been in the Colorado Plateau region? Did you work a lot in that area, or were you mainly just shipped out?

Mazuros: Mostly in the Colorado Plateau. Like that trip to Oregon was about the—most of the firefighting that I did was Southern Utah, Northern Arizona, the Arizona Strip. Do you know what the Arizona Strip is? That's always fun out there, with those joshua trees. You could have the sharpest Polaski in the world, and you'd try to chop off a piece of that Joshua tree, and it would just smash the tree, because it was so fibrous. And it got to the point where you just kind of picked them up and ground them out on the ground like a big giant stogie, packed dirt up in there and threw some water, because you couldn't cut them. We never really tried to cut them with a chain saw, but you certainly couldn't chop through them [like] a traditional piece of wood. It was just—those things were odd, those Joshua trees, because they'd just grind them out and hope that you got it. But, you know, the Arizona Strip.

We used to go out on those fires and think, "What are we saving out here?" (laughter) because there's nothing but habitat. You're basically saving habitat. And then, like I said, Southern Utah, Idaho.

Cole: Talk a little bit about fire in the pinyon-juniper: differences between that maybe and a fire like in Idaho.

Mazuros: The pinyon-juniper can move quick. You get a lot of preheating of stuff down in there. It can race through either one of them. But I think a lot of times in the pinyon-juniper it's a lot drier than in the timber, per se. Not to be punish, but that adds fuel to the fire, the dryness. And that stuff has a tendency to reburn more, because you can get this drying out of, where we talked earlier about how you can get, you know, it just dries them out. It doesn't set them on fire or anything, but just really gets them nice and prime kindling type wood. And then you get a reburn back through there. So you see a lot more crown fires in pinyon-juniper because the crowns themselves are so low to the ground that if you get any ground fire creeping in there, it really inevitably gets into the crown. When you get into the bigger trees, crown fires are a lot less common under normal conditions. You might get single trees crowning out, but you don't see the racing of the fire through the crown like you would in the pinyon and juniper, although it has happened. They had problems with that in Yellowstone. But when you get that, you're really in deep shit when you have that kind of—you know, crown fires that are just racing through the crowns, and the ground fire's creeping along behind it. because typically what happens is, the ground fire creeps up along, and like I said, you might get single patches of trees that actually torch out and crown out, but you don't get the crowning, racing fire through the crown like you can in pinyon and juniper. So that's one difference.

There's a lot more dirt down around pinyon and juniper—or not so much dirt, but at least sand and rock type. When you get up in the forested areas, you tend to get a lot more duff, which is the dead dry pine needles and whatever kind of junk that's kind of fallen down on the ground. You know, I've been in areas where you've got a foot of that stuff. And it's like there's not a whole lot you can do in terms of trying to put the fire out there. So that's one big difference.

You get what they call ladder fuels. They're any kind of like branches, little hanging branches are considered ladders, because what it does is allow the fire to move vertically up the tree, instead of just horizontally across the ground. So a ladder fuel would be something that would allow the fire to move up vertically. Certainly the ladder fuels are higher in pinyon and juniper than in those, because pine trees don't grow well in shade, which is why you don't see pine trees having limbs low to the ground, because the upper limbs shade the lower limbs out, and then the lower limbs kind of die and fall off. So pine needs sunshine to grow. So you don't see the traditional ladder fuels, or low-hanging branches, like a Doug fir or even an Engleman [phonetic] spruce.

But once you get up in the spruce, you're up in the higher elevations, so you generally typically have more moisture. It doesn't mean much now, with how many of the years of drought conditions we've been in, but when I first started fighting fires, it was unusual to have fires in the spruce, just because it was so wet up there, you know, that most of your fires were somewhere in the pine belt or in the pinyon and juniper. I don't think that holds true anymore today. I think that you're seeing extremely dry conditions in the pinyon and juniper. You're seeing drier conditions in the mixed conifer, pine belt, and you're seeing even dry conditions where normally it wasn't—you know, in the higher alpine areas, in the Engleman spruce areas. So that'd be one difference.

I was on a fire one time outside of Cedar City, and there was an old shack. It was in a mining area, and so the old shack had dynamite in there. The fire got to it. I mean, it was incredible to see how—we went up on a ridge, and it was just incredible, how quick the fire consumed that building. It was just an old wooden shack, and then the dynamite started to going off inside there. And it sounded like gunfire. You know, everybody's standing on the edge of the ridge, and I'm like, "You idiots! get the hell away from there! You don't know what kind of stuff's going to be flying out of there when it's blowing up. I could just see you guys getting killed by flying shrapnel from that thing. And one of the reason they saved that area is they had a helicopter and there was a stock pond within, it was like a three-minute turn-around time for water drops on that, and that's how they managed to get that thing back under control. It was impressive, just (imitates sound of explosions) all kinds of stuff going off. It's just like, "Holy cow! hit the dirt!" (laughs)

Cole: How long were you crew boss?

Mazuros: I don't know, I guess it might have been three years. With Color Country, there was actually four different Color Country crews that went out, and I was only one of the crews. Every month you kind of were on rotation, and you only had like one week that you were like quote, unquote, "on call." We had other people on our district. Your Color Country crew might be on call, but.... At first I didn't really have to be there, because there were enough other bodies, but then once I became crew boss, when my crew number was up on call I had to make sure that I was available to be on call. Unfortunately, they didn't pay you to be on call. I always thought they should, if I'm going to hafta stick around town. I should get paid, but I didn't. That was the only thing about that. So I guess I was crew boss about three years.

Cole: And then you were always a seasonal?

Mazuros: Uh-huh.

Cole: So what would you do in the off season?

Mazuros: One year I drove bus in Park City, the tourist bus. That's kind of a good job, you can tell people where to get off—you know, on the bus. I went to South America one off season. I went back to Ohio for a couple of times—went back and just kind of hung out there in the winter. Went up and hung out in Salt Lake a couple of seasons. I always found something to kind of occupy my time. Then I decided to go back to school, so I would go back and that was when I would do my schoolwork. We were on a quarter system up at Utah State. So I'd go back for winter quarter, and then spring quarter I'd be back down in the forest, because usually I ran out of money. Go back down and call them up, "Hey, are you guys planting yet? I need work." They'd say, "C'mon down, we're planting."

Cole: Questions, Karen?

Mazuros: I know she's been busy writing over there.

Underhill: Claudia, what kind of people become seasonal firefighters? How would you describe your crews?

Mazuros: A lot of them are college students that are usually in forestry, working on forestry degrees, trying to get the foot in the door for Forest Service. They work seasonally. Fire crews, it's an interesting breed. I don't know how I would classify them. They're definitely people that are willing to work hard, that can live under adverse conditions. I think they're like thrill-seekers. I think they're the kind of people that are off doing bridge jumping and airplane jumping, and those kind of.... Because it really is, it's very much an adrenalin rush when that fire's just bearing down on you. You have to be a tough, hard-working person that can do that.

We had a couple of women that would work seasonally that we'd be on our way to a fire, and they're carrying their pillow, and it's like you'd ask them, "Did you bring your blow dryer?" And they'd say, "(happy gasp) Can I bring my blow dryer?! I didn't think there'd be electricity out there." And you say, "Yeah, well, there's usually a current bush or two you can plug into." (laughs) They didn't last very long in the firefighting industry. Or they'd come out with their hair all dolled up, and you'd be like going, "Didn't you ever read the label on that, says how flammable that stuff is?" And even though you have a hard hat on, you get into some situations where the wind is blowing, and you've got embers. You're buttoning up your shirt and tieing your clothes down so that if there are burning embers, they're at least not blowing into your clothes. And you just think about, "Gosh, that person's head is just going to go up like that." (snaps fingers) (laughter) But you always had some guy that'd say, "Well, that's okay, I'll hit her over the head with a shovel and put it out." (laughter)

It's definitely not a job that everybody can do. Like I said, long hours, a lot of hurry up and wait kind of thing. And it's really military, the whole structure, the command structure. It's all military time. It's not two o'clock, it's 1400. So all that stuff. So it's very military oriented in that sense. And I think it has to be, just because of the logistics and whatnot. You need to have some sort of place intact. I think it's a rare breed of people that do it.

Underhill: You've mentioned a few pieces of the equipment: the bladder bag, which we won't forget anytime soon. What would you go out in the field with? You have your fire shelter—also known as shake 'n bake—but describe for us kind of the standard equipment that you had (unclear).

Mazuros: Okay, you had Nomex. You had gloves. And you had a tool. And that tool could be one of many things. It could be a Polaski, could be a shovel. There was another tool called a McCloud. I don't know if you've heard [of that]. The McCloud was kind of an oversized hoe on one side. On the other side it was sort of like a fork kind of thing. And so that was primarily what we used. You get into regional areas, and they have different kinds. You go down to Florida and they have like these giant flyswatters that they use to swat the fire with. So you would have one of those tools. Usually you had your Nomex, which was your fire clothes, your pants and shirt, hard hat. You always wanted to make sure, too, that you had a chin strap for your hard hat, because if you're on a helicopter, you had to have your hard hat with a chin strap, and if you didn't have a chin strap, you had to take it off. And when you get around those whirling blades, there's a lot of dirt and stuff that flies around. And if you didn't have your hard hat on, you'd get down, you'd go like this, and you'd be pulling twigs out of your hair. So you learn really quick to make sure that you had your hard hat, chin strap.... You also carried a spare one, because they had just little plastic clips on them, and invariably you'd break one of the stupid little plastic clips. So you always made sure you carried a spare. I always carried a couple of them: one in case I broke it, and one if somebody on my crew broke one. I had one for them. But I also didn't give them mine.

You'd carry goggles, you had goggles, but mostly you didn't really wear the goggles. The only time you really wore the goggles was when you're flying on helicopters, and it was just to kind of keep the crap out of your face and out of your eyes. Some people would actually wear them when we would be in heavy smoke, but I [found] that to be more of an annoyance, because you'd be sweaty, and then they would start to steam up on you, and it was like it's just easier just to kind of close your eyes for however long it took. because even though you were living in constant smoke, you'd get gusts through where you just—you know, that stinging, burning sensation in your eyes.

You would have your web gear. You'd carry your lunch, water, and I always encouraged my crews to carry a minimum of a gallon-and-a-half of water a day. And I would make sure that they were drinking that gallon-and-a-half of water a day. I'd tell them, "If you're not stopping to pee [at least] once an hour, you're not drinking enough water." But that was always a challenge, to try and find someplace, because you're in these bright yellow shirts, you're off in burned-out areas, where everything is black, except for the bright yellow shirt, and you're trying to find some tree, ha ha, some kind of cover. That's why I always thought guys had the advantage over girls, because they didn't have to completely disrobe, practically, to go to the bathroom. And invariably, you would just get to the business of the day, and a helicopter would fly overhead. "Hi!" You know, you kind of wave at them.

You'd have your lunch. You'd carry plastic bags for rain gear. They were the GSA rain gear. On rare occasions you actually would get some rain, especially in Northern Utah, (unclear) summer. And once you get to the monsoon season, it wouldn't be uncommon just to get a couple hours' worth of rain. They were just garbage sacks, and you'd get out your little knife and you'd cut your arm and head holes and slip them over your head, and you had GSA, Government Supply Agency, rain gear, your fire shelter.

Like I said, I always tried to carry candy and extra kind of munchies. And the thing you learned really quick, too, don't take—you know, when you took candy, you took things like Planters peanut bars, Nibs, anything that wasn't chocolate and going to melt. You got to eat those Skittles. Ugh! I'll never eat another Skittle in my life. That was the other thing, in lunch you got Skittles, and it was just like (shudders), oh gee! I can't even look at Skittles anymore. I always liked to have Starbursts. That was another good one to have, because you didn't have to worry about eating them all. With Skittles, you pretty much had to eat them all, once you opened the bag. But with the Starbursts, you can dole them out. It was also, like I said, just in terms of lifting the morale of the crew. It was like we'd take a break and they'd ask me, "Is the candy store open?" and I'd say, "Yeah." And I just had a gunny sack that I would try to keep supplied. And a lot of times what happened, you know, you'd get candy and that kind of stuff in your lunch. I shouldn't probably tell you, but a lot of people would have extra stuff, and we'd just throw it in a box. And so I would find those boxes, and that's where I'd pick up all the extra candy, because I knew that even though I didn't eat Skittles, there was some kid on my crew that would. And that was more just trying to keep their morale up and stuff.

But that was basically about it. You'd have a brush jacket that you would carry, that was just another piece of Nomex, basically. And that was basically about all you have, in terms of gear. You had a red pack, or a back pack that was your off-district fire pack. And you were allowed thirty pounds there. And so what you would take would be twelve pairs of socks, twelve pairs of underwear, three or four tee shirts, a pair of shorts. I found you want to have a pair of shorts, because when you were sleeping in the daylight and it's hot, you don't want to have to sleep in long pants, but you're sleeping on top of your bag, and I just always thought it was kind of—I didn't really want to be sleeping in my underwear out in the open like that. And I couldn't guarantee that if I started in my bag in my underwear, that I would stay in my bag in my underwear, so I always just made sure I had a pair of shorts to carry.

You also tried to carry a pair of tennis shoes, just so that when you weren't in your boots, you could get out of those boots for—and even when you were like traveling, it was nicer to have, you know, if you were flying somewhere, it was nicer to have tennis shoes on, than having your big old clunky work boots on. Like I said, you'd spend hours in them anyway, and you long to get out of them. And so you were grateful when you could wear your tennis shoes. So then you'd have just basic kind of toiletry things. But like I said, you were limited to thirty pounds. So I'd try to keep a warm jacket in there. The other thing, too, is you kept things in there that you didn't care about losing, because you never knew, if it was in a sling load, you might lose it somewhere. So that was the other thing that you carried.

And then as a crew boss, you had extra stuff to carry. You had your radio to carry. Although I usually would get somebody on my crew, you always had somebody that did weather, spot weather checks for where you were at. And you would turn those in at the end of the day. You would have a handbook that I'd carry, a firefighter's handbook that I carried mostly just for referencing things. And it's kind of weird, because, I mean, they had it down to a science. They have a little chart that they can look up and say, "Okay, you're in pinyon-juniper, you got this many people working, you should be able to dig this much line in an hour's time." So that kind of stuff. There was a lot of like wind charts and relative humidity kind of charts that would be in there that you would look up stuff on. So I carried one of those.

Basic first aid. As a crew person I had to always carry basic first aid, but I also was a crew boss. You'd carry extra first aid stuff for your crew people. As a crew boss, you're their mother, their father, their brother, their best friend, their boss. You're everything to them. And I really seriously took that stuff serious. I really wanted to look out for my people and make sure that their feet were in good shape, because if your feet aren't in good shape, then you can't work. So I made sure I had moleskin and that kind of stuff to take care of any kind of blisters or anything like that, that might arise. And antihistamine type things, just for if somebody had an allergic reaction to a mosquito bite or something.

I really took my fire crew bossing seriously. I wanted to make sure that my people were safe, make sure that my people were taken care of, make sure that they weren't abused and overused, and that they got the acknowledgement that they deserved. I wasn't afraid to tell people that I'm not putting my people in that position. And that's one thing they teach you to do, and it's one of those things, that "shout thirteen," those thirteen shout things. But at the same time, it's not something you want to do, because then you get a reputation. My feeling was, my people were much more important to me than any piece of real estate they could put me on. And I think that's something that we tend to forget. And I think we forget it more these days. I mean, it's like when I was firefighting, you never heard incidents of people getting killed. And if you've noticed in the last five years, more and more firefighters are getting killed, and I think it's because we're putting ourselves at risk to protect properties.

And the thing is that people themselves should start to realize that there's things that they can do to help protect their property. And they might not like what a metal roof looks like, but a metal roof looks a lot better than no roof a lot of times. And they have this attitude "not me." And it's like as soon as you have that "not me" [attitude], look out! Maybe I should think that way about the lottery! (laughter)

Underhill: What was your favorite part of the job?

Mazuros: You mean firefighting? I think partly knowing that you went to places where no man has gone before, and no man will be back to. You know what I mean? There was times when you would just be eating dinner up on some ridge, [after a] long, tired day. There's something about working hard that makes you feel like you've accomplished something. And then having dinner up there, and just looking at this view and just thinking, "Gosh, this is a view that only twenty of us get to see, in the world. And we're the only ones that will ever see this view." And so that was kind of neat.

And I think just also seeing the awesome power of Mother Nature. It's like I've done control burns in the fall where we come in and try to reduce fuel loads. We have to accept fire's part of the process. And so it can be awesomely destructive, but it can also be awesomely constructive. I think that was the thing to see. And like I said, I got to see things that nobody ever got to see, or nobody will ever get to see. So that was always a neat thing.

In terms of just working for the Forest Service in general, it was kind of neat. I'm working in a place where people are paying to be on vacation. And I'm being paid to be there! So that was the neat thing, in that sense. I'm driving on roads that people are vacationing on, and I'm being paid to be doing that. I mean, that wasn't one of my favorite things, but that was definitely a perk to it.

Underhill: How would you portray what goes on in the media? You mentioned there may be a little bit of discrepancy.

Mazuros: Yeah. I think people need to realize that the media is out there to sell stories, not necessarily the truth. And I think that this can be a lesson that can be learned for all things. What is reported in the news, what you see on TV, what we see in the movie theaters is not necessarily what's really going on out there. And it's oftentimes, they really add fluff to the story. I know before we started the interview I was relating a story about being on a fire in Idaho where we were standing around talking to the news crew, and then we were ordered to march down this ridge and up the other side. A lot of times you don't know what you're doing, but you just go do it because you were told to do it. And so we pop up on the other side, and there's the media crew, taking pictures of us. And it turns out that the whole purpose of our little hike was so that they could get pictures of us. We were at some obscure point of the fire, digging line around nothing. "And here's the fire crew out working the fire." So you have to be real....

And anymore I won't even watch fire shows, because I know that's not what's happening out there. I know that they are not putting the media in risky situations where firefighters really are being put at risk. It's fluff for the evening news. Like the movie Always was fluff. God, I would have loved it if they'd had a bar in the fire camps—everybody would have, but they would have never gotten anything done. And frankly, you don't see some dame coming out in a white dress in the middle of a fire camp to dance with the star of the movie or the star of the fire, because people are just too damned tired to do that. I mean, it's like when they're not working, they want to eat, they want to go to bed. I'll tell you what, some of the biggest beer drinkers I've ever run into have been firefighters, but when they're out on a fire, they got other priorities. That's stuff that they do on their off time, when they're out of....

But I will admit that there were times like when we were in Idaho, when we were getting ready to fly, we were right near the grocery store, so every one of us was in the grocery store buying a six-pack of beer. And we had one guy, Cody, he got sick on airplanes, so he's popping Dramamines and drinking tallboys, and he got on an airplane and wanted to sit next to me and it's like "Unt-uh, dude, you go back and sit by the bathroom. Don't even come anywhere near me." I think he was so afraid of flying and getting sick that he just wanted to make sure he was going to pass out on the airplane, and thank God he did. But he wanted to sit down next to me. It was like, "Unt-uh, no way, you're not puking all over me. Go to the back of the bus, dude." He was kind of a funny guy, because every day he'd come up and go, "Got me a VCR!" Or "Got me this today!" He was like racking up what he was going to buy with all of his money.

So yeah, the media glorifies it, they glamorize it. And I think that's true of everything, any of the stuff that we see. The glorify everything, and glamorize it, and it's not. There's some truth to it. We do wear yellow shirts and green pants, and do carry shovels and what not, but a lot of times, like I said, I think a lot of it's staged. And I think that might be different. Like A&E, and there's been a lot of documentary kind of things that have come out. And I think those might be truer to life than what you're actually seeing on the six o'clock news.

Underhill: You mentioned the airplane, and I just wanted to clarify. Are these commercial air flights, or are these National Guard airplanes, or where are you getting these?

Mazuros: It depends. I've been on commercial planes. Even though we might fly on a commercial airlines, they don't take us through the main terminal. You're out on the tarmac, and I've gotten stuffed up a time or two in the cargo hold of an airplane to pack gear in it. It got known that I'm very good at packing things. And so trying to get twenty packs up into this tiny little hold, they want somebody up there that can get it in there. And so you're kind of rolling around, and you're kicking stuff, and what not. (laughs) It would depend on whatever they could get. There's smaller commercial airlines that pretty much kind of contract out with the Forest Service to fly crews around. But I've also seen them put them on United or American Airline type planes too. I've been on big planes and smaller planes. I've even flown home on Leer jets out of fires, when they finally get around to de-mobing it. I think it's kind of whatever they can get their hands on at the time.

That's one thing, and maybe it's changed, but there's no ceiling on spending when it comes to firefighting. And oftentimes you want a big fire on your district because your annual fire budget depends upon what you spent the previous year. So if you have a big project fire on your district, and you spend big dollars, then you're going to get a bigger budget next year. And like I say, that may have changed, but that's how they operated in the past, which is unfortunate, because then it becomes "spend, spend, spend." And a lot of times you see things that they didn't need to necessarily have. But because they could buy it, and they didn't have a ceiling, they did.

And a lot of times, too, a lot of the equipment, like pumps and hoses and things that they might buy for a specific fire, gets left at whatever district it's at, after the fire. That's how a lot of districts actually get a lot of their equipment, especially in Idaho and places where they have these big fires. They want you to, "Yeah, go out and buy ten pumps," because they know that they're going to get them.

The BFSE [phonetic]—or actually, it's not BFSE anymore, but it used to be called BFSE. It was a place up in Idaho, like the main fire....

Cole: The Boise....

Mazuros: Yeah, the Boise International Fire something. I mean, they have a lot of stock equipment that they will send out. But when you get a lot of fires going, their stock's gone, so then they turn to just buying stuff.

Underhill: You mentioned tall tales, like fish and trees, (unclear) algae. Does anything else leap to mind in terms of the kind of tall tales that you might hear in camp that make the rounds?

Mazuros: Not so much tall tales, but one of the kind of—I shouldn't really admit these things either—one of the fun things that you would do is you would start a rumor, and then just see what would happen to it by the time it'd get back to you. Like, "Did you hear it's burning in Alaska? Big fires in Alaska. They're talking about sending crews to Alaska, and we might be one." So you would kind of see what would happen. You'd let something like that out, just to see how it would sound. It was kind of like playing this covert telephone game. And that was one of those things. And then every now and then you'd have to have, okay, sit down and dispel any rumors that came out of the rumor mill. That would be one thing that you would do. Let's see if there was any other.... I can't think off hand, any other that are kind of like real tall tales that you would hear.

Underhill: Within the camp, is there a rivalry between crews? Or are things pretty cohesive?

Mazuros: For the most part, things are cohesive, although there is some crews that there's definitely bad blood between them. And so they really do try and separate them, and not have them in the same area. And not so much rivalry type thing. Well, you know, it's kind of funny, because hotshots think they're hot shots. It's like I've been up on fires with hotshot crews doing the same damned thing we've been doing, in the same risky situations that they have been doing. So, I mean, it's like they think that they're something, and they're just.... It's like you just kind of want to say to them, "Look, we're doing the same shit you're doing, getting the same pay." And oftentimes, more, because like when I was—I was a GS-7 at one point, and it's like I know a lot of those fire crew firefighters on the hotshot crews are GS-3s and 4s, and you're just thinking, "Well, you know, dude, you might think you're something. I know you're nothing, and I'm making more money than you anyway." (laughter)

I was on a camp crew. That was a cushy job. We were on camp crew up in Idaho, outside of McCall, and they'd gone in and commandeered a Forest Service campground, right there on the Salmon River. Usually camp crews are just like a YCC group, or pickup crews that they get from outside the Forest Service, and I don't know how we managed to be camp crew. But we were working fourteen-hour split shifts, so we'd have seven hours on, and we'd have a couple-hour break, and then seven hours on again. And we were kind of working the afternoon shift, because we'd feed crews until ten, eleven o'clock at night. And so basically, what our job was, pack their lunches, and then go around and kind of police the camp, pick up litter and pick up whatever was left over from the lunch situation. Then be ready for dinner.

They had caterers there, so we didn't really have to do any of the food stuff, we just had to be there to empty the garbage cans and wipe the tables down. And so you'd have these guys coming in that just were assholes. I was working with a lady who was a GS-9. We're out picking up trash. She's a GS-9. We're getting hazard pay too! "We're making twice as much money as you guys are! Pick up your own damned litter," kind of attitude. That was nice, because we were on the Salmon River, so every afternoon, we went swimming. And then we knew, we were in camp, I was sort of like the radar for the camp, because I had friends that worked down in Supply, we were working with the caterers.

There was a campground host and hostess that were like—you know how they have the campground people that kind of hang out there all summer long, and they're the "Hi, how ya' doing" kind of people. They let them stay, and they kicked everybody else out. And I saw the lady diving in the dumpster, getting cans out, and there's tons of aluminum cans, because there's tons of pop and stuff, and I was saying to my friend Elizabeth, "You know, it's too bad we can't figure out some way to get some of this stuff recycled, because I just hate to throw all this aluminum away." And that's when we saw the lady diving in the dumpster, and it turned out [she] and her husband would collect cans for their grandkids, and then they'd take the cans in, cash them in, and keep the money, and when the grandkids came, they gave them the money. And so we said to her, "Hey, if we get some cans, do you guys want them?" And they said, "Oh! we'd love that!" So I had friends in Supply, and I traded a couple of cases of cold pop for a couple of extra garbage cans, and we set up recycling bins. We figured we got about 40 percent of the cans.

Well, these people were so grateful that we were doing this, that they wanted to do something for us. And we were like, "Look, you are, you're getting these cans recycled for us. That's what we would like." And they said, "Well, how about we do your laundry? We know that you can't do laundry and you don't get clean clothes. How about we do your laundry?" And we're like, "Okay, we'll let you do [our] laundry." So we were taking our laundry over to them, and every day we were getting clean clothes on, and all the rest of our coworkers are complaining, because they're wearing the same socks for the third day in a row. My biggest fear was that we would walk—because they would hang our clothes out to dry—and we'd be walking by their campsite, and there's my shirt hanging out to dry, and I was just hoping that nobody else on my crew would recognize that that's my shirt on the clothesline over there. But it was nice.

We also knew the guys that ran the shower. So you could barter and get them to turn the showers on early. So it was nice, because when we had our two hours off, then we'd go down, we'd swim in the Salmon River, kind of relax on the sand bar. Then we'd go up and take a shower and put our clean clothes on. Like I said, everybody else was just (growling) "When are we going to get with the laundry?" "I don't know, I'll ask." (laughter) I didn't have the heart to tell them every day I had clean clothes on. So that was one of the kind of things that you'd do.

Underhill: You've left firefighting now. Are you still with the Forest Service?

Mazuros: No, I actually got a job where I get a paycheck twelve months out of the year, and I have three months off. So I thought, "Well, okay, I don't need the job right now in my life." And it was like it was a nice part of my life, I would not trade it for anything in the world: the firefighting or even just the other work that I did on the Forest. But it was time to move on. And like I said, it was nice to finally have a summer off. I mean, it was nice to have winters off, but then it was like for ten years I never had a summer. And even though I was working in the forest and got outside every day, it was still work. So finally, when I finally did get a job—I teach now—and when I started teaching, I just decided that I would end my Forest Service career and do other things in the summer.

Underhill: What do you think you learned, as part of your firefighting career?

Mazuros: She asks tough questions! What did I learn? I think I learned a lot about myself and what I could do, because you really do get pushed to your limit. I think that came in handy when I was in South America, hiking in the Andes and got tendonitis and realized that I had to just buckle down and get up and start walking, even though I couldn't. The only way I was going to get out of there was under my own power. And I think that working long, hard hours like that, it enables you to realize that you can do that. You might not want to, but I can. And it's one of those things I don't go out and do every weekend, but it's like I know that I could if I had to.

I guess experience, life experience. I don't know how you quantify that or qualify that. And I learned a lot more about if I'm going to build my house in the woods, how I'm going to build a house that is going to last and that can be defended and protected from a fire.

Sure, I could sit there and probably talk about other—like I learned about weather and just kind of trivial things that I don't necessarily use every day anymore. And I think the thing is that you just learn internally what your limitations are, and how far you can push yourself. I think you learn more just about who you are, as a self.

Underhill: If there would be one thing that you could tell the American public, especially people in the West, about fire, what would it be?

Mazuros: 'Don't be stupid.' I was on a fire in Idaho, and it was that one we talked about earlier where we'd gotten bounced around. It was when we finally got to Twin Falls. And that fire actually started from some campers who thought they'd put their fire out. They'd poured their water on the fire, and then they'd dried their little thing out with a paper towel, and threw the paper towel into the fire pit and left. They never mixed and stirred. The paper towel caught fire, it blew out of the fire pit, and 25,000 acres later, we stopped it.

Just before we had arrived at that fire, there was a guy on a crew that was there working on a slope, and he got hit with a bushel-basket-sized rock that came rolling down the hill and broke both of his legs, massive internal injuries. And it had happened like two days before we had arrived. And they were still waiting to set his legs surgically, waiting for his internal injuries to stabilize so that they could fix his legs. That didn't have to happen, if campers had been [more] careful with their fires, and realized that just pouring water on it doesn't put it out. You need to mix and stir it. And like I said, that's the grunt of the dirty, filthy ash in your face kind of work. But if you're going to be having fires out in the woods like that, then be responsible, and take the time and the effort to put it out.

I think the American public was totally outraged when Yellowstone burned, and how horrible that this happened to our national treasure. And today, when you go back to Yellowstone, it's beautiful up there. I mean, there are some areas that were definitely burned hot enough to sterilize the soil, but for the most part it was very healthy for the forest. A couple of those fires were also man-caused. Right now, with the moving into these [more] rural areas, we have to be more conscientious about what we're doing out there. If you're a smoker, the world is not an ashtray. You have an ashtray in your car—use it, don't be throwing your butts out the window.

I had a guy that worked on the Forest Service, and we were even on a fire, and we were driving down the road, and he threw a cigarette out the truck, and I slammed on the brakes, and we were on a dirt road. Whoosh! Dust storm. I parked the truck. He said, "What are we doing?!" I said, "You're going back and finding that butt. Not in my truck, you're not doing that." And he couldn't believe I was going to make him go back there, and I made him go back and find it.

But I mean, it's just like.... You shouldn't be throwing any [litter] out the window. The world's not here to be trashed. We've done enough of that. It's only our one earth. We have to take care of it. And each and every one of us are a steward of it. To think that it's somebody else's job, there is nobody else, it's your job.

So I guess that would be my message, is to continue the Smokey the Bear story, make sure your put your fires out. And realize too that you're liable, if something were to happen. And forensically, they can find you. No ceiling on spending, folks! Remember that, next time you're out in the forest and you're having your little campfire. You could be the proud owner of a big debt. And there's no way that you can pay it off, but they will garnish a portion of your wages for the rest of your life, for your working life, to pay off a fire. And like I say, there's no way you could. We don't make that much money, but they will take a portion of it.

Underhill: Brad or Anne, any other questions?

Holcomb: Actually, I have a couple of questions.

Underhill: And you have to yell, since we're not mic'ed here.

Holcomb: Okay, I was just wondering, when you were talking about supervising a crew, and you were talking about making sure that you know where everyone is. What kind of things did you use to do that? Did you just have to walk around, or did you have radios?

Mazuros: Yeah, your squad bosses had radios. You pretty much relied on your squad bosses to know where their squads were, and then they reported back to you. So just radios. It's kind of interesting, because as a crew boss you get to wander around a lot more. That was the other thing too, was wandering around, and you would find people. You would just know where they were. You just made sure. You just had to make sure you knew where they were. And you also had radios. On smaller fires, where you didn't have big crews, just like a district fire, you were just hoofing it around. You had radios too, or a lot of times, you could just yell, because the fires would be small enough. But that's how you'd kind of keep track of people. And like I said, you relied on the squad bosses to know where their people were from the squad. It's definitely a chain of command thing.

Holcomb: Another question I have is about slurry. I was wondering, because I've been researching a lot, and I've seen it a lot, but I don't really know what's in it. Do you know what's in it?

Mazuros: It's an ammonium nitrate. And you think, "Oh, gosh! ammonium?! Isn't that what Timothy McVey blew up the building with? What are we doing dumping that on the fire?!" But what it is, is it's red, it's an ammonium nitrate fire suppressant, so it's a stuff that's mixed with water. It's primarily water with this ammonium nitrate in there. And then they also put an iron oxide in there, and the iron oxide is what makes it red. And so the idea being that we talk about when they're dropping slurry they talk about "painting the hillside." The ammonium nitrate is nice, because it eventually decomposes into a fertilizer. I mean, it's actually healthier for the forest, once they've dropped it or deposited it on there. It actually helps stimulate growth. And the red stuff is in there, just so that they can see where it's been dropped, so they'll know where, because a lot of times they'll just like paint lines, and where one stops, they try to start the next one. And that stuff, even that wears away after a few years.

Underhill: Claudia, is there anything else you want to add?

Mazuros: I don't think so. I got more stories, but.... You just sit here and you think, "Wow! here's another story." But I don't know. We could go on and on, but I don't know. Unless you guys have anything else you want to....

Cole and Holcomb: [No.]

Underhill: It's been a great interview. We want to thank you very much for taking time to come in and do this.

[END OF INTERVIEW]

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