Cathie Zettler Interview

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Today is July 10, 2001. My name is Jennifer Kern, and I'm happy to be here in the Cline Library with Cathie Zettler, who has an impressive history working in wildland fire management. One of her current positions is that of fire management officer at the Mormon Lake Ranger District on the Coconino National Forest. She also serves on a national Type I incident management team as air operations branch director. This interview is part of an ongoing project entitled "Fire on the Plateau." Robert Marvin Garcia Hunt is also present in the room.

Kern: Thank you, Cathie, for coming in. We always like to thank our guests. And we'd like, if you would start off just telling us a little bit about yourself and your education, your background, where you're from.

Zettler: I'm originally from Prescott, Arizona, about a hundred miles south and west of here. I lived in Prescott my whole life. I went all through school there and graduated from high school there. And then I attended a year of college in Phoenix, Arizona. And then I came back and went to a second year in Prescott, Arizona. I completed an A.A. degree, and then that was pretty much it for college because I had started working for the Forest Service, and I just went straight into working for the Forest Service.

Kern: How did you get into the Forest Service? Did you have family who had worked in the forest, or what inspired you to go into that field?

Zettler: Oh, the inspiration: Mothers' Day 1972, I was a junior in high school. It was the end of my junior year in high school, getting ready to begin my senior year. And on Mothers' Day in 1972, there was a fire south of Prescott, down toward the Crown King area that was called the Battle Fire. And the Battle Fire burned for about a week, and it burned houses of some folks that we knew in a little community called Breezy Pines. I remember coming out of school—we were still in school—and I remember coming out, and all across the vehicles there were burned oak leaves, and the fire was still about eighteen miles south of Prescott at that point. And it was just those oak leaves were being carried by the wind. I remember seeing all those burned oak leaves on the vehicles. Of course everybody wanted to go out and join up to help fight the fire. And you couldn't do that, but I would go out and we would park and watch the air tankers working on the fire. At that time, they may have even been called glory bombers. But we'd go out and watch the aircraft, and you could park where you could see the fire and see the aircraft. And I thought, "Wow!" I mean, I really wanted to be a firefighter. And that probably was what sparked the interest.

And so I, the following year, graduated from high school at Prescott High, and then that summer went to work as a tree planter, reforesting the area where the Battle Fire had burned. And we planted trees all throughout that area. It was kind of like—partly it was outside—that was one thing I really liked. And it was with a group of people. That was another thing I really liked, the camaraderie of the group. And then it was like gardening out in the woods and getting paid to do it. And so that was what really got me going. After that, after just going out and spending that time planting trees. And then it kind of evolved into firefighting from that, but I actually started as a tree planter.

Kern: So how did the evolution start speeding up from tree planting?

Zettler: Well, after the tree planting, next I went on to Phoenix and went to college that year. And then had an application in with the Forest Service and came back and worked in fire prevention the next summer. And did fire prevention work, and that was mostly public contact work. And so I stayed doing the fire prevention, and then moved back to Prescott and went to college in Prescott that year. And the following summer, I was offered a position in Crown King. It was a remote area that was south of Prescott, accessible by a dirt road. This would have been 1975 by now, and it was still a real remote area. It hadn't been well discovered yet, and the district ranger there contacted me and said, "Would you like to come work in Crown King?" again in fire prevention. They had hired another woman, and they basically wanted her to have a roommate. And so Nancy and I were the two women in prevention, although Nancy did work some on a suppression crew, which was extremely rare in those days—at least in that area. Other areas maybe had more women, but our area didn't.

And so anyway, that summer was fantastic. We spent all summer. I was actually allowed to go on fires, although it was really different. I could tell you all kinds of.... Nancy and I had a little trailer that we lived in that was parked right next to the ranger's house. The fire crews—mostly men—there were twenty-seven men, they all lived up in what we called Trailer City, up on top of a hill. They could party all night, but Nancy and I had to be in our trailer by ten every night, and we had a bed check by the ranger.

Kern: And the men had none of these [restrictions]?

Zettler: Oh, no. No, no. And I'm sure the ranger was probably kind of—it was new to him, to have women. There was also a woman lookout at the time in Crown King—Jan Wilson. And Jan and her husband lived up at the lookout tower on Towers Mountain. And then her husband was actually my direct supervisor, and he came to Crown King every day. But Nancy and I were the only two women that actually lived and worked with the fire crews. And even though we were one of them, we were definitely segregated from them—not at work. At work everything was pretty equal. You were expected to do physical training and what not. Right after we started working, they actually hired another woman, Linda. So there were actually three of us that were in Crown King that summer. Like I say, it was real equal at work, but outside of work, it was real different, because I'm sure it was different for that ranger to supervise and have women in his work force. And so we did have bed checks at night, we had to be in by ten. I mean, it was no big deal: he'd come and knock on the door, "You girls okay for the night?" and that was that. And so our little trailer was parked right under the window of his house, and we had the horses behind us, the outhouses next to us, the shop in front of us, and the ranger's house here.

Kern: Did you have to have the trailer there? I mean, the trailer was there. Okay.

Zettler: Yeah, that was our housing that was supplied to us. But you know, at the time it was great, it was fine. I mean, everything was fine.

Kern: And neither of you—Nancy or yourself—ever asked that ranger, "Hey, why do we need a bed check?"

Zettler: No.

Kern: You knew that the men weren't being checked-in at night?

Zettler: Sure.

Kern: And that didn't …fire you up?

Zettler: Oh, no. You know, when I look back at that stage of my career, I would never have questioned anything. I wanted so bad just to be part of it and work. I would never have gone back and questioned anything.

I can go back a little earlier. Another one of my favorite stories, but true: When I first started, my cousin—he's a guy—my cousin and I, on the tree-planting crew. When we first started, we were both fresh out of high school, we had no experience whatsoever, and we got our first paychecks, and his check was more than mine. And so I thought, honest mistake. And so I went to our supervisor and my cousin was with me, because we each had our little things—what we called "foot-longs" but they were like the receipt of our check. And we went in and talked with the supervisor, and I said, "I think there was a mistake on my check. My cousin started the same day as I did, but his check's more than mine." And this is what I was told. Now, you've got to remember this is 1973, so it's kind of new, the woman thing. And the supervisor looked at me—his name was Bill—and he looked at me and he said, "Honey, it's because you're a girl, and we're not going to be able to pay you as much as we're going to pay your cousin, because he's a guy, he's going to work harder than you, he's going to put out more, so he's going to get paid more." So I was a GS-1, he was a GS-2, on our pay scale of things. Right? And so it made adamant sense to me at the time, and I just thanked him, "Thank you very much." I mean, I wasn't going to win that battle or change anything, so I just accepted it and went on.

You know, it was like that a lot in those early years. I mean, not the equal pay, but I don't know that it was all a bad thing, as far as the bed check, or as far as people.... I think people just didn't know how to deal with mixing people in fires, or whatever. Later on, more in the late seventies, when you'd go on fires where there were large fire camps, there'd be very few women, maybe five or ten total, out of 500 people. It would be—another interesting thing were like showers. Women's shower hours were usually after ten o'clock at night. And so just when you want to get rest, you're tired by ten o'clock at night. And I remember one night in Montana, I took a shower, and it was probably eleven o'clock at night, and I came out of the shower, and it was really cold and my hair froze. And it was just frozen, walking back to my.... We didn't have a tent, we had just a plastic tarp. And my hair froze, and I thought, "Darn, wish I could take a shower like at seven, instead of eleven o'clock at night."

It was just different then—not bad, just different.

Kern: There weren't any—especially right in the beginning, when women first started to enter, that first story that you were telling about having your trailer, and the men being in a different position. There was never like rude comments or something underneath the breath—maybe not on the line when you're working, but....

Zettler: I won't say I've never had rude comments, because that wouldn't be true. But I will say that throughout my whole career, even in the beginning, and when there were very, very few women.... And it's very, very few women where I was working. In other parts of the country, there were areas that had more women. But I will say that in my career, if you went and did the work and got along, and you were a team player and you put out 110 percent, like everybody else, it didn't seem to matter if you were male or female. If you went and did the work, and you worked with everybody, you would establish credibility. And once you had credibility, you were accepted. I think that's true whether you're male or female. If there's men that don't pull their share of the load, or they're not team players, the other men don't want to work with them, just like maybe they don't want to work with women.

I know that there's cases where things were either said about me or in some cases things were said to me. I think of another instance where I was in charge of a crew of ten, and we had initial attack of fire, and there was already some other people on the fire. We were all initial attack—they just arrived before we did, we arrived in a helicopter. The helicopter had gotten flown in, and there were some other people already there as well, and so the person that was in charge—that would have been at that time the fire boss, now we call them an incident commander—gave me direction on what he wanted me to do with my ten people, and it wasn't good direction. It wasn't safe. It involved some downhill line construction, and we weren't meeting any of the downhill line construction guidelines. It's a risky thing at best, and you certainly don't do it if you can't mitigate the factors that cause problems when you do downhill line construction. Well, we couldn't. We weren't even remotely mitigating those factors, and I said, "No, I don't want to take my folks and do that." And in front of—oh, there probably was fifteen people there—he called me a lot of bad names—really bad names, just screaming at me. But that was okay, because I knew I was right. And he yelled at my crew to get up and get going, and they all looked at me for direction, and I said, "No, stop, we're going to have to regroup here. It's time to stop, look at this, and regroup." And the fire, in fifteen minutes, went from thirty acres to about 300. It was in light fields, going into brush, and just.... I mean, it was a heads-up situation.

So I won't say I haven't had bad things said to me, or I'm sure said about me. And in the early days, that probably mattered more, but as you go on through, and you make a career out of this, I think what matters is that if you're okay with what you're doing, and you're okay, you know, like in that situation, I knew I was right. I knew I was right. And now, it would be water off a duck's back if someone was going to say something negative. And I still hear negative things about women and fire, like on a hotshot crew, that it "holds a crew back." But not all crews feel that way. Many, many, many crews are very supportive. And I think we're kind of getting to the point where everyone accepts everyone, if people just go and do the work. And a big part of it is doing the work, but a big part of it's your attitude. And if you go in and be a team player and get along, and have a good time, stay safe, get a lot done, it's great. If you go in with an attitude that if someone says or does something you don't like, and as a female you turn around and go and file a grievance, rather than just going to that person and saying, "Hey, I don't appreciate what you said. Can you kind of tone it down?" That's where problems, it seems to me, start.

Kern: Was that more of your take—to actually approach someone in an uncomfortable situation?

Zettler: Always. You know, it was really hard the first time to do that, because in my generation —I kind of feel old to say that — I was raised to be very, I don't know, not confronting a situation, but more accepting and not confronting. And I don't mean confronting in a bad way. I mean you're dealing with the situation. But that had to almost be learned, and I learned it real well in about the first ten years of this career. And the first time I had to confront someone about something, it was really hard. But as time goes on, it's real easy. And you don't have to be real nasty about it. And I can't think of that often that I've had to do that—probably more as a supervisor, it's been with my employees, to try to mediate situations. If someone's having a problem with someone else, to try and mediate that and confront that situation.

But I go back to the thing on the line when the person was yelling at me and calling me some pretty horrible things, for not doing downhill line construction. I confronted him and just said, "No, I won't do it. And you're not going to take my people, and we're not doing that." And I just said, "It's not safe." And so I don't know, it's hard to do that, but that's your job, especially if you're the leader.

Kern: Was the implication in that incident that you were afraid to do it because you were a woman?

Zettler: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. And things were said about why would these other people on that crew follow a woman—take guidance, take advice, take direction.

Kern: And so in that situation you didn't file a grievance?

Zettler: Oh, no! Never.

Kern: Why not?! See, this is not my field, but I would....

Zettler: There was no need. The situation was handled. I confronted the person and said, "No, we're not going to do that," and told my crew, "Sit down, take a break for just a second. We're going to regroup here before it's time to get everybody together." What was interesting was the people that come to the fire with the other person, they actually kind of started coming over to my group. And that is not a good situation. This is not good, when there's two people. There has to be one leader on a fire. And consequently, that person ended up going, and I said, "If you want to do a downhill line construction, why don't you go scout the area out?" And he did, and came back, and he had lost his tool and lost a radio, trying to come back up out of the hole, because when the fire actually burned down and came back up. And so after that, it was a little different approach.

It hasn't happened that often. I would say, if I could rate my career, 99 percent of the time I've gotten along with everybody, and it's been great. I mean, it's just been great. But one percent of the time, you have to just be strong, and you have to be.... I don't know, "strong" is the best thing I can think of.

I know when I became an air attack, that was a whole different world of people where men weren't used to dealing with women supervising, like, air tanker pilots, or helicopter pilots. They weren't used to dealing with women in charge of an air operation. On the very first fire I flew as an air attack trainee, where I had a qualified air attack in the back, but I was in the front seat, my very first fire I flew on, the lead plane, you have the air attack, and then you have the lead plane that's coordinating the air tankers, and the air attack's overseeing all of the aircraft. But the lead plane was also a woman, and she was brand new, she was a trainee lead plane pilot, and I remember a comment being made by an air tanker pilot, and he said it on our air-to-air frequency, so I know he knew everyone was going to hear it, and he said, "Oh no! they're taking over the skies too!"

But you know, as I've gone and done that job, if you just go do a good job, and you work with the helicopter pilots and the tanker pilots or the lead planes—whatever—and the ground people, shoot, they accept you. That's just it. I think the whole key is that you just go do the job and be a team player, and that's that. I think that's the whole key to all of it.

Kern: Well, let's go back a little bit, because I know that we left out (unclear, both talking at same time). But in terms of tracking your career a little bit, because it's so rich, let's go back to you're with Nancy in the trailer that summer, and then what happens the next couple of years?

Zettler: Then the next summer, which was 1976, I move back to Prescott and worked on Thumb Butte, which later became the Bradshaw Ranger District, when then combined Crown King and Thumb Butte, and worked in fire prevention in 1976. And then in 1977, I worked on a lookout. And then in 1978, I also worked on a lookout, but 1978 was when they started to allow more women to be on not the hotshot crew—well, really not the helitac crew—but engines. They started, at least where I worked, women were allowed to be on engines, and they hired some seasonally that year. And then at the end of 1978, toward the latter part of the season, I went to work as the aerial observer for the forest, where I would fly in a reconnaissance aircraft every day and look for fires, or go to fires, help direct crews in, that kind of thing. And so I loved that, because I could fly every day. And so they moved me into the dispatch office as a relief dispatcher, and then in the afternoons I'd be the aerial observer, and I really liked that.

In 1979, I was offered an appointment. Instead of being seasonal, it was guaranteed thirteen pay periods, or six months of work, and then six months "call when needed." The difference was, first, you got benefits and retirement and all the benefits of being a Forest Service employee. But also, they could work you year round if there was work or money. Where as a seasonal, you were limited to 120 days at that time. So that was 1979 I got an appointment. And then in 1980, I moved to the Tonto National Forest as an assistant dispatcher, and did that. And then in 1981, did time on a helitac crew. And then in 1982, I moved to the Cave Creek Ranger District as an interim supervisor on a Type VI or a small engine. And then in 1987, I moved back to Prescott to a Type III or a large engine supervisor. And then to an assistant dispatcher for the Prescott. Then the forest dispatcher for the Prescott.

And then in 1991, I moved to Flagstaff to work on what was then the Long Valley Ranger District as the assistant fire management officer. And stayed as the assistant fire management officer for Long Valley, and later Long Valley and Blue Ridge combined, the two districts. And stayed there until 1999, and then came to Mormon Lake where I'm at now.

And so I never did smoke jumping, and I was never officially on a hotshot crew. Those were the only two things that I never did. It started out where when I first started, you were allowed to do prevention, detection, or dispatching, if you were a woman. And then as time went on, the sky was the limit, you could do whatever.

Kern: Was there some sort of a law that opened that door, or was it.... Because, you said, like, 1977, 1978 is when women were maybe going out for the engine crews.

Zettler: I don't know if it was the laws. I don't know if there was a law, or if it was an affirmative action thing that started happening—not just in the Forest Service, but probably nationwide. And so definitely in the mid to late seventies is when things really started to change, as far as women. But even still, often I was the only girl. Like if I went out of the [filler?] on a crew, or with the regular crew, a Type II crew, I'd still be the only woman sometimes. And maybe just not everybody wants to do this kind of work. I know when I started, it was kind of a different thing, because we were—I always called it "the earth muffin days." It was kind of an era when everybody wanted to be outside. And it was "back to nature" and everything. It was a different time. I don't know. I think, though, as time went on, there was kind of a big influx of women, and then it kind of dropped off again. But I think that's just the change in society, that maybe not everybody wants to go out and spend fourteen to twenty-one days, digging dirt, sleeping in a tent. Maybe they don't want to do that.

Kern: How did your family and your friends react, after four or five years when you seemed to have decided, "This is my career now. And I'm also moving into a bit more dangerous positions"?

Zettler: I think—I know—that my family didn't really care for it. And I remember my dad used to say, "Well, how can a little girl like you ever get anything done out there?!" I don't think that I was ever really taken seriously—especially by my father. As far as friends, though, I have a lot of friends that were really envious, because it was like I would go do things all fire season that other people paid a lot of money to do. You know, if it was with the helicopter, if it was getting paid to fly the forest, looking for lightning fires during the day. I don't know, because I was getting paid to be outside and work with a great group of people, which the whole thing more or less to me was like getting paid to have fun. I mean, that's just the way it's been. I've gotten to do so many things that people pay a huge amount of money to do.

But I think that it can be a real hard job on marriages. It can be a real hard job on that side of a family. And I never had children, and so I would imagine that that would be a real hard thing. You know, you go to work at eight in the morning, and you come home fourteen days later or twenty-one days later. And that happened often. When I was on engines, you'd go to work and it would be, "Okay, you guys are leavin' for Montana." At that time, it was twenty-one-day assignments. Actually, before the twenty-one-day thing, it was as long as—it would be maybe thirty days. And that's hard. That's hard for families.

Kern: So when you went to start working on engines, could you tell us about some of the training that you would have gone through? Being that there were now women, trying out or working in that area, did any of the physical standards change, or not?

Zettler: Different places had different standards. But where I worked, no: everyone was required to pass, then, the step test, which was stepping up and down on a box for five minutes, taking your pulse, and going against the chart to say whether or not you were in, your recovery was in good shape. And there weren't really different standards at all. You know, when I was on the helitac crew, we all did all of our physical training together every morning, and everybody wasn't as fast. I certainly couldn't run as fast as many of the men that I worked with. I had a really hard time ever doing pull-ups—just a horrible hard time doing pull-ups. If I could eke out one or two, I was doing good. But I was real good at push-ups and I got real good at bar dips, pushing up and down on parallel bars. And I think that, again, when we'd go on fires, I was never not able to keep up. I never was behind the crew. And it seemed like with the engines, everything we did was together. I kind of learned that if we were digging line, if we didn't lay hose, if we were digging line, I kind of learned ways to use tools to use the strongest parts of my body to work the tool. Like if I was with a shovel, the strongest muscles in my body are definitely in my thighs, and I could rest my arm on my thighs, and let my thighs move the shovel back and forth, instead of my trying to do it with upper body strength. And like pulling hose, pulling hose with the engine: Instead of trying to pull hose up a hill, I'd put it down around my waist and then pull with my thighs. And so you'd kind of learn ways to make the most of what you had, you know, and to make it a little bit easier. But as far as conditioning, we all conditioned together. And we all did physical training together, both when I was on the engine or helitac: Everybody just did all that together.

Kern: Has that type of training, the conditioning, changed a lot in your career?

Zettler: One thing that changed this year for all of us is the pack test. And the pack test is now the standard by which we hire anyone going on line functions and fire. And the difference between a pack test and a step test, to me, is pretty dramatic! The step test, I never had trouble with stepping up and down on a box for five minutes. And there was a different box for women than there was for men—women's box was a little shorter, the men had to step down on one taller. And so to step up and down for five minutes in cadence with a metronome was really pretty easy—for me, anyway. But for me to put on forty-five pounds and do a three-mile trek around the track in forty-five minutes—I'm five-two—I did it, but it was hard. I mean, it was hard. It was neat, though, that even when we did that, that when we all switched to the pack test, everybody supported everybody else. And while I was probably one of the slowest ones—well, I won't say that—I was the slowest one, okay? People had finished, and I'm out there all by myself, and so they all came and joined in and did the last lap. It's like I guess it doesn't matter if you do it in thirty-three minutes or forty-five—it's that you either pass it or you don't. But that's definitely a big difference. And then now we still continue on with our regular physical training every morning.

Kern: Everybody, everyone?

Zettler: Everyone, even the prevention group. Everyone: the hotshots, the engines, fire prevention. There's a whole different regime of what they do, working with exercise equipment or running. There's just a whole different array of it. But that's every single day.

Kern: So did you train for numerous weeks before the pack test?

Zettler: You bet I did! because I knew I was going to have to take the pack test, and I was frantic about it, because I had tried it and not passed it. I really got worked up over it, and you bet I did. I spent nearly every day, and finally at the end, we used the vests, and I took a vest home with me, and I would walk all over the neighborhood. And I always wore that vest. I think this year when I practice, or when I get ready to take the pack test, I'm just going to practice the pack test, over and over and over, and that's probably the best way. I didn't do that last year, but that's probably the right thing to do. I think with the pack test, you definitely have to be in shape to pass it. The hard part is, you know there's a big difference if you're five-two or if you're six-four. (laughs) I kept thinking, "Well, if I can just walk as fast as these guys...." I took the test with one person that was six foot, one person that was six-four, and I thought, "Well, if I can just keep my feet in their...." Shoot, I was taking four steps to the one guy's step, but it was okay.

Kern: Does the pack go over your shoulder, or is it the waist pack?

Zettler: What we've been using are vests. They're like a canvas vest. They have weight in the front, and weight in the back, and then a strap hooks at your waist, so you can cinch it down good and tight. And what we like about the vest more than a pack is the pack tended to put a lot of weight on shoulder straps, on your shoulders, and pulling your back, where this is more evenly distributed, so it's kind of sitting on you, and it's more evenly distributed. It's probably a good thing. At first I didn't feel that way—I was pretty negative on the pack test, to be quite honest. But I think that it's probably a good thing.

Kern: And it was introduced just this year?

Zettler: For the Forest Service. The Department of Interior has been using the pack test, that has been their standard. But the Forest Service just this year, or 2001 was when we implemented the pack test.

Kern: So the Department of Interior would be the Bureau of Land Management crews?

Zettler: Uh-huh, the Park Service.

Kern: [They] would have held up to that test.

Zettler: Yes.

Kern: And so now you're all on the same page.

Zettler: Now we're all on the same page, as far as physical standards, yes.

Kern: Let's go into a little about helitac, into the air.

Zettler: My favorite stuff.

Kern: What attracted you to that?

Zettler: My father was a pilot in World War II, and I grew up flying. From the time I was six months old, I grew up in an airplane. We actually, over the course of my life, had two different airplanes in the family—nothing fancy, old airplanes—a 1948 Balanca, and I think a 1959 Tripacer. Little, single-engine, old airplanes. Every vacation I ever took, until I was eighteen years old, was in an airplane. And we flew everywhere. And we didn't have fancy avionics. They were really basic, little old airplanes. And my dad and I would put all the (unclear), if we were going to Mexico. And we did a lot of flying all around Mexico, down toward Central America, over to Baja, Canada, across the United States. We would always lie all the charts of where we were going out on the living room floor. And then we would draw a line from Prescott, Arizona, to wherever we were going to go that day. And then we would fly that heading, and we would calculate how fast we were going, based on fuel consumption. It was great. It's that feeling when you take off, it's like when you're just leaving the ground. I don't know, it's just a great feeling, and it's like total freedom.

And so in 1978, when the Forest Service said, "Would you like to be the air observer?" oh! I was thrilled, because they were going to pay me to fly around the forest for four hours a day. It was the same route, every day it was the same thing, but I loved to be in the air. And then when I had the opportunity to go do the helicopter, or be on the helitac crew, the first crew I went to be on was on detail or special assignment to California to the San Bernardino. I worked on their helitac crew, and then the Payson helitac crew at Payson the following summer. And that was a little different than the fixed-wing flying, because you're in a helicopter. But what was so fun about that was, what I loved was, "A," the camaraderie of the crew. That was really good. But it would be that you'd fly into fires, and it was like a tremendous, huge adventure to go get in a helicopter and march off to a fire. It was like a big adventure. And sometimes we could land close to the fire, sometimes we couldn't. But again, it was going back and getting to fly, even though.... And I ended up actually liking helicopters better than fixed-wing over time.

But yeah, it all started probably because I grew up with aviation, and that was a huge part of my family's life. To this day, hanging over our front door in our living room is the propeller off my dad's first airplane. And so I think that that's probably what sparked the interest.

Kern: And what do you like more about the helicopters than the fixed-wing?

Zettler: They're so versatile, because you can go forward, you can stop and hover, you can go straight down. You don't need a runway. And because they're so versatile, they can move around so well. When you're on a fire, when I've been in air attack, or done that with a helicopter and with a fixed-wing, there's benefits to both. It depends a lot on the fire. But a lot of times with a helicopter, you can see so well. And if you're working with retardant aircraft, sometimes, to help evaluate whether or not the drop's effective, it's a lot easier in a helicopter, because you can slowly—you don't want to go too slow—but you can come and look at the drop, or stop and hover and look at the drop. And you can kind of hover up here while they're dropping down here, and see whether or not it's effective.

If you're trying to give a target description to an air tanker on where you want the retardant dropped, if you're in a fixed-wing, and we have a large, heavy air tanker, you're all kind of circling the same thing. You're trying to describe to them, "I want you to drop on this ridge," and trying to pick that out from the air and have everybody see the same thing at the same time, it's tough. But if you're in a helicopter, and can go right down and go right along the top of the ridge, and say, "I'd like you to start about here, and right on this ridge, we're going to pretreat this ridge," or whatever.

Kern: So what determines when you can put a helicopter close to a fire, or you would send a plane in to do the same job?

Zettler: It depends on a lot of things: like if it's in the air attack role of where you're supervising aviation over the fire, if it's in an air attack role, availability. Helicopters aren't always available. They're usually tied to a helitac crew, and they may be needed for other things. It's a lot easier to get light fixed-wing aircraft than it is to get a helicopter most of the time. And so that's one thing. And then on large, large fires, it's better to be in a fixed-wing aircraft, because they're faster. And they'll cover more country, when you're making circles around a fire 'cause you're directing aircraft and coordinating with ground personnel. You can cover more country. And if you're trying to cover 20,000 acres that's on fire, then you're in a helicopter, it's probably not as effective. But they are good for small—in that role.

But as far as fighting fire, they are two different beasts, an air tanker and a helicopter. It's apples and oranges. Air tankers are great for building line, working in conjunction with crews or dozers, equipment, to cool off the line, and allow people to work usually directly on the fire line, with the air tanker support. But where helicopters are wonderful is if you have spot fires. If you're getting small fires starting outside of your line, whether it's from just fire behavior, trees torching out, throwing spots, wind blowing stuff across your line, a convection column that's lifting stuff up and dropping it over here—helicopters are great for that, because they're very precise. And so a helicopter with a bucket can come in and drop right on your spot fire, but an air tanker is still laying line. So they're different beasts, you know.

We have big helicopters that are tanked. They're more like an air tanker and they work real well like an air tanker, because again, they can lay line, rather than drop, like with a bucket. Buckets are great for precision targets.

Kern: Could you tell us a story about when you might have come too close to a fire, or been in—have you ever been in a precarious position?

Zettler: No. Well, I ran out of gas one time in a helicopter. (laughs) We were coming back from a fire, and the fuel pump light started blinking, and then a buzzer goes off. What it was, was that we were running low on fuel, and the pilot—excellent pilot—he elected to land the helicopter in a field rather than try to use—we were real close to the helibase, but rather than go back to the helibase and try and use a lot of power, which uses a lot of fuel when you're landing.... And so we landed in a field.

I can think of times when I've had bad experiences. I don't think we were going to die, but I think.... One time, flying air attack on a fire down on the Grahams, down in Southeast Arizona, the Graham Mountains, those mountains, they rise up over 11,000 feet right off the desert, and so there's all this hot air coming up. And we were flying a large fire, there were a lot of aircraft working, and I was an air attack, coordinating the aircraft. And it was requiring me to—I had a pilot, I'm not flying the aircraft—I'm with a pilot, but we were in a Beechcraft Bear, a light twin-engine aircraft. And as we were circling that fire, we would have to go on the windward side of the mountain, and then on the leeward side of the mountain. And then the windward, and then the leeward.

And so what would happen is we'd kind of gain altitude as we were going into the wind, and then when we'd come around the other side, it bottoms out. So we were kind of in this constant, not real drastic, but as we were coming around the leeward side about one in the afternoon, we just hit a down draft, and it was a severe down draft, pretty severe. And it just pulled the nose of the airplane almost straight down. Everything, anything that was loose in that airplane—there were some flight charts and manuals in the seat pocket behind me; we had a little thing of water in the back—anything in the back came to the front. We were strapped in: you have on a shoulder harness and a seat belt, just as tight as it can go, and still the pilot's wallet ended up on the dash of the aircraft. And it was real loud.

When you fly into that, it pulled the airplane straight down, but almost immediately you're out of it, because the airplane's still flying. And it flies right out of it. But we dropped about a thousand feet, and it just was a "boom—boom." And as soon as we were going straight down, then we were kind of not going straight up, but we were going down, and then immediately popped back up. After that, for a while, every time I would fly, my hands would sweat. And I think it was just—that made me nervous. It made me real nervous, because I'd never hit a down draft that hard before. I'd hit lots of bumps. It's always bumpy flying fires, 'cause you've got all the hot air that tries.... But after that, my hands just would start to sweat real bad. So whenever I flew with that pilot, he always brought a towel, and he'd keep it in between us so I could.... I think it was just nerves after that. I eventually got over it, and everything was fine. But that was probably, that was definitely one time that scared me. I mean, no doubt it scared me.

But then I remember another time, flying fire in New Mexico—again, a real large fire, the Burgett [phonetic] Fire. And we were flying in the early evening, it was dusk, and we were just getting ready to go back in, but we were trying to help establish radio communications with a crew and the base camp. And it was really interesting, because the whole fire just blew up. And I mean it really blew up. And I could see it. From the air I could see what was happening. And it started, like a fire will, in the middle of the fire. It was kind of like a tornado, and it just started going around, and then it started sucking fire in, and it just got bigger and bigger. There was so much smoke, we weren't able to fly complete circles around the fire because out toward the head of the fire there was so much smoke we couldn't see. And so we were just flying half-circles, kind of back and forth, and trying to help this crew get communications.

And as I was looking out, pretty soon I could see, as this fire whirl thing was going like this, it would shoot flames kind of straight up. And as I was looking out, it was really pretty, but there would be—it was real smoky, and then through the hole—there was a hole where this whole thing is going on, and smoke kind of around it—and you could see these flames that would come up higher than the aircraft. And we're not that close. I mean, we're out on the perimeter. But I could look out and see flames going up in the air. And it was really pretty. We were certainly safe. Everything was safe—it was just really interesting to see that, and see just how powerful that is.

Kern: Is that what a blow-up is? It sounds like a vortex.

Zettler: Yeah. And a blow-up is just that. It's just what it describes: a blow-up is when a fire, everything starts combusting, everything starts burning, everything is crowning, it's running. And the gases that it's putting off are flaming. And that's a blow-up. It's not where you want to be.

Kern: But that's different from what you were just describing before?

Zettler: It…when the fire started to blow up is probably what caused the vortex to start going. That's probably because of the heat, the intense heat. And once it got started, it just got bigger and bigger. When you're in that air attack role, that's a huge part of that job, you're seeing all that. And so you need to make sure that people on the ground are aware of that kind of stuff, or potential problems as well. In that job, the ground is every bit as important as the air. While you're coordinating everything in the air, you also need to be helping the ground.

Kern: So when you said you were trying to establish communications, what does that exactly mean?

Zettler: We had a crew—well, actually, it was a whole division, but it was one crew. You know, a fire is divided into divisions. I think of it like a piece of pie, and you have your fire, and each slice might be a division. And so that it's broken down into areas, and each division has a division supervisor that's responsible for the personnel and equipment on that division. And on this particular division, there was a hotshot crew that was part of the division, but had actually, their initial assignment had been kind of ahead of everybody else. And so they were separated from other people in that division, and they couldn't get communications, nobody could talk to the crew but me, because I'm right over them in the air. But due to terrain or whatever, nobody could talk to that crew. And so until we could get the communications set where someone could talk to the crew, I just was staying over the fire, because normally, as an air attack, you're down. I mean, we have very specific hours in the Forest Service that we can fly aircraft on a fire, and it's a half hour before sunrise and a half hour after sunset. That's our operational period, and we don't work outside of that. You're in a twin-engine aircraft, and you're at night, and we can do point-to-point transportation, and I was still okay to be over the fire, but we certainly wouldn't have been working helicopters or air tankers at that time of the evening. And so all I needed to do was just keep talking to the crew, and finally we got it where the crew could talk to the division supervisor.

That happens, I don't know, it happens fairly often where everything's not in place with communications—especially in the early stages of a fire, before repeaters are set up. Then they tend to rely real heavy on a human repeater. We put a person with radios out on a mountaintop, maybe a lookout tower, or in aircraft is a real good one, if the aircraft's over the fire. When air attack is working, that's a real good one too. And then eventually, once repeaters get in place, the problem no longer is there. But in the early stages it can be.

Kern: So the repeater would—say I'm a repeater, and you're sending me a message from the air, and then I'm sending out on a frequency that everyone can hear?

Zettler: Uh-huh. Yeah. And then it might be, you know, with that particular thing we were getting the crew tied back into the division supervisor, and the division supervisor wanted to know where the crew was, and would call me and say, "Can you get the location of the crew?" And the crew would tell me, and then I'd give just messages back and forth. And then eventually we got them tied together and all was well.

Kern: Usually how long would that take, once you get a crew out there, and then the incident management team is setting up? Is there like a set number of hours that you want to have everything done by?

Zettler: Oh, with the incident management team and communications? On our team our communication specialist could answer this better than me, but I would say that generally within an operational period, which is twelve hours, we want to be up and running, we want to have stuff pretty much going. Normally, if we're starting from scratch, if I was an incident management team coming to a large incident, and there's nothing set up, we're not assuming the incident from another team, or it's just been in initial attack, went into extended attack with local forces, and then we come, it takes a good twelve to twenty-four hours for everything to get set up. But still, when you look at it, it's incredible what gets set up in twelve to twenty-four hours, and the ability to support 1,000-3,000 people.

We went to a fire last year over by Pecos, New Mexico, and got there, the fire was being fought by local forces on the Santa Fe National Forest, and nothing was set up. And so within twelve hours we had the logistics part of the team had found a camp and set up a camp. Myself and the air support supervisor had located a good place for a helibase and started setting all that up. And for us to get the helibase 100 percent operational was about twenty-four hours, because that first twelve hours you're in a massive ordering phase: ordering aircraft, ordering just whatever—crews, equipment, supplies. It's a huge organizational ordering thing. It is incredible—I mean, absolutely incredible to see how quickly all that can be put together, and how effective it is. And that's the whole concept. I mean, an incident management team is the epitome of teamwork. It's incredible.

Kern: And what are the four divisions again?

Zettler: On an incident management team? Well, on a fire, if you think of a fire as like a piece of pie, the fire gets divided into geographical divisions. They're usually done by geographical boundaries, so that when people are out on the ground or looking at a map, it's a real logical place to break one division to another. And so you might have seven or eight divisions on a large fire, but with an incident management team there's different parts to a team. There's a common leader. The leader is the incident commander. And then there's a person that manages all of finance, with a lot of help, a lot of folks helping. Finance. Logistics. Operations, which is all the divisions. And the air operation falls under operations. And then there's the planning section. They put out an incident action plan, or a plan of work, what we're going to do, what everybody's going to do, a written plan, so that everybody starts the day with a written plan. Have I left anybody out? Fire information. When you were talking with Ken, real key part of an incident management team: fire information shares the information on the incident with everyone. And then safety. There's a person called the safety officer in charge of safety. They have many safety officers out on the line working for them, but safety's a big part of it. Have I left anyone out? Logistics, finance, plans, operations, safety, fire information. That's an incident management team.

Kern: Okay. Why don't you tell us a little bit about the position that you have now on the incident management team.

Zettler: Right now I'm on Dan Bateman's Type I team. There's two Type I teams in the Southwest Area: Larry Humphrey is incident commander on one, and I'm on Dan Bateman's team. And I'm the air operations branch director. And what that is, is basically I supervise all of the aviation operations, but mine is a ground-based position, until an air attack, which is supervising aircraft over the incident. But now I oversee the whole thing. And so working with me or for me—I like to say with me—I have a trainee air ops branch director this year, but we're training another person. And then an air support supervisor. And the air support helps support all of the helibase operations, where we park and work all the helicopters out of at the helibase. And so I have air support who helps with the helibase, and then two air tactical group supervisors or air attacks. Their full title is an air tactical group supervisor. And so their job is coordinating all airborne aircraft over the fire. And air support is helping support the helibase, which has several positions under them to help make all this work.

And then so my job, with the help of all these folks is to first and foremost safety: are we doing things right? And I mean by the book. We don't bend a rule, we don't break a rule, and there's a lot of them in aviation. And there's probably a lot of rules because there's been a lot of lives lost in this field. I don't know anyone in aviation that can't say, "I lost a friend." And so there's a lot of rules, and it's kind of it's a whole separate part of firefighting. But safety is the biggest part of my job, making sure our operation is safe, from everything going on at the helibase to everything going on with the air attacks.

And then I work real close with the operation section chiefs to make sure that we're providing their support, the divisions, the pieces of the pie. They work for an operation section chief. So do I. And so I work with operations to make sure that we're giving them the air support they need. But it's up to me to figure out what is that air support? I mean, how many air tankers do we need? How many helicopters? What types? What capabilities? What do we need to do? Are we moving lots of crews? Do we need helicopters to move crews? Or is this going to be a support operation where maybe it's a lot of sending in supplies, helicopter bucket support. And so ordering the right mix of aircraft, that's a huge part of my job.

And then every evening the key players on the incident management team—and it's mainly those ones that I said before: the incident commander, finance, logistics, plans, aviation, operations, safety, fire information—each evening we meet and we put together the plan for the next day, so that the next day there's a written plan for everybody. Even if there's 3,000 people and thirty aircraft assigned, everybody has a written plan so they know the next day who they're working for, what their objectives are, what their mission is for that day. So I'm responsible for the air operations part of that plan. Everything that we're going to be doing in the air the next day.

I'm responsible for identifying hazards, set flight hazards—and that can be a host of things from power lines to military training routes, where the military might have jet aircraft doing training missions: is that in the vicinity of our fire? I do a huge amount of coordination with local area dispatch offices, like when we were at Pecos last year. I was with the Santa Fe dispatch office all the time, because you kind of work hand-in-hand with that dispatch office. They're providing the aircraft. That's who I order the aircraft through. So then frequency management: do we have enough frequencies in the air, or on the ground?—the whole thing. It's real unnerving to me when I keep hearing if we have like one air-to-air frequency, and air tankers need a dedicated frequency when they're dropping. But helicopters need to talk too. And so I have to make sure we have a helicopter frequency and an air tanker frequency so that everyone can talk. And sometimes we might need more than one air-to-ground frequency. If we're on a big fire and we've got a lot of aircraft and there's a lot of helicopter traffic to the ground, for bucket support, say, is where it really happens. Maybe we need another air-to-ground frequency: one for these divisions, one for these divisions, because one isn't enough for everybody.

What else? Oh, gosh, I do a lot of coordination with aviation safety teams. There's different aviation safety teams who get put together, and we start having a lot of aviation activity. And I always try to make sure that one comes to check out our helibase, check out our air operation, because a new set of eyes that isn't part of that group might see something that I've overlooked, or that the air support has overlooked, or our helibase manager. And so I'll do that.

I'm real responsible for tracking costs. On an incident, in the beginning stages of an incident, aviation will be more than half the cost of the fire. As the incident goes on, the aviation costs usually go down as the fire starts getting picked up. Then we're not dropping retardant, our air tankers out there. And so daily I track costs of what the air operation is costing, and then try to make it be cost effective. And sometimes it's the mix of aircraft: like as an example, on a fire like one year with the Type I team. We assumed the fire from another Type II team, the Type II incident management team. And they had on the fire three Type I or heavy helicopters. And they're a wonderful resource, if you have water. And that was the purpose for them, was with water support on the fire. Two were tanked and one had a bucket. But the bad part is, if you don't have water, or if you have to go a long ways for them to get water, it's not real cost effective. And so in that situation, it was more cost effective to trade to another fire the Type I helicopters, on a fire that was more toward the coast, and they had a lot more water on the west side of the Cascades than we did on the east side of the Cascades. And so I traded the big helicopters for Type II or medium helicopters, because it was easy for us with a water tender and a portatank or a pumpkin to set them up at this site.

Kern: So where do you call in for all this? Is there an interagency…could you talk about that?

Zettler: Absolutely. From the fire, from the incident, as far as aircraft—this is just aircraft—but from the incident I deal direct with the local area dispatch office. If it was a fire on the Coconino, I'd deal with the Coconino National Forest [which would dispatch]... one helicopter. They would go to the Geographic Area Coordination center—GAC is what you'll hear it called. Oh, gosh, we're notorious for acronyms, aren't we? But they would go to the nearest GAC and then the GAC may go to Boise or NICC, the National Interagency Coordination Center. So let's say that we've ordered an air tanker. Okay, we've ordered an air tanker, and there's nothing local and it has to come, for some reason, out of California. Let's just say that's the scenario. I ordered through the local area dispatch, who went to the GAC, who went to the National Interagency Coordination Center, who went to either probably North Ops or South Ops, Redding or Riverside, who went to the local area dispatch office, who ordered the air tanker. (chuckles) And it sounds totally out of control, doesn't it? It actually works really well. It doesn't always have to go through all those channels. If we can get things locally, we get them locally. Nine times out of ten, if there's a fire on my ranger district, on the Coconino, or let's say I'm an ops branch director with a Type I team and I'm on a fire on the Coconino, and I order an air tanker. There's two at Winslow, there's three at Prescott this year. Probably those are available, and we'll get one of those. But I would still, that local area dispatcher would still go through the Geographic Area Coordination Center or GAC. And that's only so that everything is being tracked, because everything has to be shared.

Kern: And very quickly.

Zettler: Yeah.

Kern: So when did that system come into play?

Zettler: Oh! good question! Let's see, my first exposure to dispatching was 1978, and in 1978 we kind of had the predecessor to a GAC in Albuquerque, which is where our geographic area coordination center is now for everything in the Southwest, part of Texas, and part of the grasslands. But then we didn't have that. We had a group of folks down at Marana called West Zone, and then there was another group called East Zone in Albuquerque. That's the zones in East Zone talk, Arizona-New Mexico talk. But now everything is in Albuquerque. And I think—I don't want to give you bad dates—but it seems to me that that shift where everything became the Southwest Interagency Coordination Center would probably have been 1981, is what I want to say—1980, 1981. Actually, it was definitely 1980 or 1981 because when West Zone closed down, I went to kind of the retirement party that was there, and that would have been in 1980 or 1981 that we went to everything in Albuquerque.

Kern: And now who was coordinating that? Is that the Department of Interior, or Department…

Zettler: Absolutely, all the agencies, everybody. Everyone's supporting, and there's representation from all agencies: Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Land Management, Park Service, Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the Forest Service. And so all agencies are represented in there, and it's an interagency coordination center. I remember when everything used just be the Forest Service, and when the interagency concept first came in, at first I don't think it was real well welcomed—probably because it was new, and like everything, something new, we don't want to do it. But I don't know how we'd do it if it wasn't interagency. And I think interagency's the best thing. It's wonderful, because everybody has a little different way of doing something, and you can learn so much.

I spent different assignments, going up and working at the Grand Canyon National Park, working on their helibase up there. They have a helicopter that's on a year-round contract, working for the park. But during different things that went on up there, whether it was a fire, or a really good one was a big flood. They had real bad floods in the canyon that washed out trails, washed out water lines. The South Rim gets its water from the bottom, and it's pumped up to the South Rim. Well, it washed all that out. But at any rate, great experience, going and working for another agency, because you learn a whole new way of doing things, and that's really good. Interagency stuff is great.

Kern: So when it's a really bad fire season, and there are limited resources, how is that arranged in terms of you would really like this plane, and you want this helicopter?

Zettler: Last summer was a great example of this. Fire season of 2000, especially up north, when Montana and Idaho really, really started burning. It was great. When our incident management team went to Missoula, and we were on an incident outside of Missoula called the Nine-Mile Complex. An area command was set up, and so there'll be several large incidents managed by incident management teams that they work for the area command. And the area command is kind of mirrored. Or an incident management team, I guess, would be a more appropriate thing to say. The incident management team overhead, those positions are mirrored from area command. Area command has an area commander, kind of like an incident commander, only overseeing all the incident commanders. There's planning, logistics, and finance. And then there's an aviation part, too, because of the specialty of aviation.

But we work for area command, as well as the Lolo National Forest. And so we also were in competition for helicopters, air tankers, personnel: a helibase manager, helicopter crew members, helicopter managers, anything, were all in competition with each other. And so what we would do is, every evening we would all conference call. And every evening we'd have a set time where every air ops branch director from each team got on this conference call with the aviation area coordinator, working for area command, and we would say how things went that day, but what our needs were for the next day. And we all shared. And it's really, really neat. I mean, it's not like (taunting) "I've got six helicopters and you've got two, and too bad!" We all shared. We would share aircraft. If we had an operation that required a Type I helicopter, and I didn't have one, I would just say in that conference call, "I could really use a Type I helicopter from seven in the morning until noon." And we all shared.

One incident management team was from Canada, and it was wonderful to see how they do things just a little bit different. But they had some great ideas, some really neat stuff. And so not only did we all talk on the conference call every night, but the air ops branch directors, we all started going to each other's helibases, whatever, and we'd meet in person and talk, and say, "I've got this, do you need that?" Like maybe one didn't have, they weren't able to get, say, a helicopter manager. And maybe I had a person managing helicopter, but one of their crew members was also qualified as a helicopter manager. Well, then I'd let them go to the other camp and manage the helicopter for the day. We shared everything.

I think at least the area command that we worked for in Montana—'cause I hate to say blanket things like it's always this way—but it seemed like to me in Montana, I don't know that I've ever seen that kind of cooperation, sharing, and everyone working together. And that was really good. And boy, that's huge, when each incident has between one and three thousand people, and you've got seven of them, and you're all trying to share aircraft, people, equipment, whatever—but in the air world competition gets real fierce real quick, first for air tankers and lead planes, because there's so few of them. The next thing will be helicopters, and then Type I helicopters. And hotshot crews, when you get in the ground world—hotshot crews. Everybody orders, they want hotshot crews first. And so competition gets fierce for those . . . what we call national resources. And it does get fierce, and there's been times when I've placed orders—another thing that happens, "A," command will prioritize fires. And so if your fire is a lower priority, you might not get anything.

The deal with Montana was everything was threatening structures. In our area command, in our area, every single fire was threatening life and property, so everything was a priority. It was real hard to say, "Well, your fire is in a wilderness area, versus one that's threatening houses, so this fire is going to be a higher priority, because it's threatening life and property." Well, all of them were. And so normally, though—and I've been in other situations where maybe our fire was in a wilderness, or in a more remote area, maybe not a dedicated wilderness, but a more remote area—and someone else had life and property threatened—they get the resources. And then you tailor your plan accordingly. I always caution operation section chiefs, division supervisors, "Don't plan your whole day around air operations." I mean, I always have a backup plan. You can incorporate air in your plan, and we want them to do that, but there needs to be a backup plan, because all it takes are high winds, and your operation may be shut down, and you may not have.... And what happens when there's high winds on a fire? That's when the fire's at its worst. That's when everything is at its worst, but it's also when your air operations are the very least effective, unsafe, and if we hit certain limits, it's time to shut it down.

Kern: I'm curious about Montana. How many acres at the end of the fire season, at the end of the fire, how many acres were taken? How many crews, more or less, were deployed?

Zettler: In the United States last year 6-1/2 million acres. That's a lot of acres. That's a huge area. I don't know in the end how many were deployed. I've heard numbers, including the military, between 20,000 and 30,000 personnel deployed over the course. Last fire season, with the Type I team, we started out on the Coon Creek Fire on the Tonto, and we went directly to Sierra Grande. And then we went back to New Mexico again, to the Vivash [phonetic] Fire at Pecos; and then to the Solace [phonetic] Fire at Reserve; the Clear Creek Fire in Idaho; and the Nine-Mile Fire in Montana. Basically everything started on April 17, and I came home on September 19. I mean, you're home in between there, but it was like you're gone, you're home for three to five days, you're gone. Last summer was a busy, busy, busy year. Every now and then we have busy years, but we've never had a 2000. I would certainly never say that it won't happen again, because I think it will.

Kern: And so because of this awful fire season, the National Fire Plan was created and instated. (Zettler: Uh-huh.) In terms of air operations, how has the budget affected your work?

Zettler: More helicopters were added this year. And so that meant more helicopters available for resources, more helitac crews. I believe the number of air tankers stayed constant. And the number of lead planes, there's unfilled lead plane positions, but that number stayed constant. But more light helicopters were added on contracts to forests around the country, and that's a good thing, because it seems like when a fire breaks, and if it's not caught on initial attack, if it goes into what we called extended attack, it kind of goes in we need hotshots, helicopters, and air tankers. And a lead plane falls right in with that. And so it's nice that's there more light helicopters available for initial attack. That's really a good thing.

Kern: I know I haven't asked you much about your training in terms of the air. Can you pick maybe one position and talk a little about the training for that position?

Zettler: Sure. Each formal class, the next one builds off of the last one. So in the helicopter world, you start out as a helicopter crew member, and I had the S-217. That trained me in helicopter operations, how to do load calculations, manifests, capabilities and limitations of different helicopters, the different helicopter types, how to construct a helispot, what's needed for a helicopter to make a remote area landing. Safety, safety, safety, safety, safety. That's the name of the game in aviation.

And so then to go to a helicopter manager it was on-the-job training assignments. And the thing with the helicopter manager job wasn't just all the previous—everything you knew as a crew member—but then you were dealing with all the contractual stuff: how does a helicopter contract work? Because the aircraft and the pilot are contracted, they're not Forest Service employees. And so you need to understand the contractual things, and how contracts work, and what the contractor does and doesn't do; what you do and don't do—that kind of thing. So it was all the contractual stuff, and I did go to contract training on how to understand and manage contracts.

And then after helicopter manager, the next thing was helibase manager, and then that was more classroom training for helibase manager. And then there were two levels of helibase manager. There was a helibase that had one to three helicopters, and then there's a helibase with more than that. And so again it's on-the-job training assignments. You know, doing those two, working and managing those helibases.

And then from there to the air support job was another formal class session of air support supervisor. And then I worked with the Type I and the Type II team to get my air support training. And I was a trainee on both teams, actually over a period of two years doing that, to do the air support training.

And then the air ops branch director was another classroom session, and then it was two years on the Type I team as an air ops branch director trainee, under a qualified air ops branch director.

And then on the air attack side, not everybody that does the helicopter/helibase manager, air support, air ops also does the air attack. But before I got really wrapped up in the helicopter end of things, I was pursuing ground qualifications all the time. You know, you start out as a firefighter, and then what we call now a single resource boss or a crew boss. Maybe you're an engine boss or a hotshot superintendent, but you're a crew boss of a crew. And then the next thing above that is a strike team or a task force leader, and then a division supervisor. And a division supervisor is that piece of the pie person that I was talking about earlier, right? And so I wanted to pursue that, because to be an air attack, you had to be a division supervisor, because you have to know what's going on, on the ground if you're going to help make that work—if you're going to have the air help support them.

And so I made it to the division supervisor thing. That took me sixteen years. And so I was kind of doing both parallel: doing the air thing and doing the ground thing. And in the jobs that I was in, it was conducive to doing both of those things. Sometimes that could be kind of hard: If you're in the helicopter world, it's real hard to get all the ground qualifications, 'cause you're always tied to a helicopter. You might get a lot of initial attack, but when you go to a large fire, instead of being strike team leaders and division supervisors, you're managing your aircraft on that large fire. You might be a helibase manager or a radio operator, take-off and landing controller, or whatever.

But I was able, just by doing lots of different jobs, to keep going both directions. And so in the end it was really pretty good, and it was really good to be an air ops branch director and have been in air attack, 'cause I know what that world is like, I know what those folks go through. And so it helps me support them, the air attacks on the team—it helps me support them because I understand their job real, real well.

Kern: How were you able to coordinate doing both of those? Were you able to say, "Okay, on this fire I want to do ground work"?

Zettler: No. Nope. And I have to say I had some supervisors that I couldn't have done this without, because supervisors allowed me to take fire assignments outside of my regular job, that allowed me to do different things. And then the other thing that helped was being on incident management teams. The first time I was on an incident management team, a Type II team, was in 1984. And in 1984, and then again in 1987, 1988, and 1989, I was a division supervisor—first a trainee and then a division supervisor on a Type II team, and then went to air attack school. And so each time—incident management teams were definitely the avenue to get lots and lots and lots of training on big fires. And I had supervisors that supported that. I certainly couldn't have done it without supportive supervisors—no way. One of my supervisors when I was in the FMO and my supervisor, who is now one of the Type.... Actually, he's the Type I IC that I work for now. It was, "I'll do everything I can to help you reach these goals." I could never have gotten where I've gotten without—all it would have taken is a supervisor that would have said, "No, you're not available."

It's a lot of.... You have to dedicate a lot of your time and your effort, and it's a lot of energy to do all that, but it's a lot of fun, too. Each time I'd set a goal, and then I'd get to that goal. I remember when I said, "Okay, I want to be an air attack," and it took a long, long time to get to that goal. And so then it was, "I want to do air support." And then it was, "I want to be an air ops branch director." Each time, I just set a goal. But I had the support of a lot of people to help me get there.

Kern: And so the big question is, What's next?

Zettler: What's next? You know, that's a really good question. I'm three-and-a-half years from retirement, if I chose to retire at age fifty. And so what's next? I guess there's still some things I would like to do. Maybe an aviation coordinator in area command. And that's kind of the next step above where I'm at right now. Maybe that would be good. I think in, oh, I don't know, in the fire world, like I'm a district fire management officer. I never thought I'd get this far, to be quite honest with you.

I just love doing the job I'm doing. I don't really know if I want to go any higher than what I'm in. And it's not because I'm burned out or because I'm tired of it all or anything like that: It's because I'm really happy with where I'm at right now. I'm just real comfortable with that. And I think I can affect change where I'm at right now. The next level up doesn't have near the connection with the ground that I do. And so right now my district, I have a hotshot crew, and I have engine crews, and a fire prevention program, and a dozer. I can do things that can help make a difference for those folks, getting to where they want to go, just like some people made a difference for me. And so I think I would probably like to just stay being a district FMO, and I don't know that I would really want to go much higher in the management end of things, because I'm really happy where I'm at right now.

But on the air end of things, like with the incident management team, I think area command.

Kern: And then after that?

Zettler: Probably then it's about time to retire. Let's see, this is year—well, I started in 1973, and it's 2001. And so I don't know. I think that that's a good way to end everything on a real positive note of a career. Everything I ever wanted to do, I got to do, except maybe be on a hotshot crew or be a smoke jumper. And it just, the timing—although with the smoke jumper thing, at the time, when I tried to apply to the jumpers and that was back in the late seventies, I wasn't big enough, I wasn't heavy enough. They wanted you to weigh 140 pounds. And then by the time women were being allowed to be on hotshot crews, I was already off in another direction, going on toward the helitac crew and the engines. So I don't know, but I don't think I'd change any of it. I think it's been fun. It's just been a lot of fun. I guess if I look at a career—I mean, a career should be something that should be real rewarding and you get a lot out of it, and you should leave on a high note, and not angry or embittered. That's how I feel. I feel like this has been fun, I basically spent the last twenty-seven years getting paid to have a lot of fun, and work with just the best people in the world.

Kern: Tell us a little bit about your position now as fire management officer.

Zettler: I'm the district fire management officer, and so I'm responsible for fire management and fuels management on the Mormon Lake Ranger District. We work hand-in-hand with the Peaks Ranger District, so we're kind of joined at the hip. And so we each have our own suppression organizations, but when it comes to fuels management, everything we do is joint. Our [budget?] is joint, our projects are joint. The fuels management specialist that works at the Peaks also works for me—just is located at the Peaks Ranger District. Anyway, I supervise fire and fuels management. Our district gets about 110 fires a year on the ranger district—mostly lightning-caused. I have a hotshot crew on the district, and a Type III engine, a large engine, two small engines—two Type VIs. The fire prevention program for the Peaks and the Mormon Lake District works at Mormon Lake, so there's a fire prevention officer, and she has nine other people that work for her at the height of the season. And then there's also, we have a dozer, and there's the dozer operator that also works. In the summertime on the Mormon Lake District there's fifty-two people in fire management, with all the hotshots, engine crew members, fire prevention. And then just during the regular year, just during the course of the rest of the year, there's eighteen people in fire management.

When we're not on fires, outside of the fire season, fuel management—and that's where the National Fire Plan really came in this year, because of all the fuels management projects that it's generating. So the crews, even in the summer, when everyone's on, if they're not on fires, they're thinning. Thinning is a big thing right now. And then also, more toward the fall, and then again in the spring, is prescribed fire—burning.

Kern: Why don't you tell us a little bit, if you would, about the state of the forest here in this area, and why we've gotten to this point that we're so ambitious with thinning projects.

Zettler: The Coconino Plateau, the Mogollon Rim country, like areas all over the West where fire has not been allowed to play its natural role, has resulted in a lot of very dense stands of small trees. And it's not just the absence of fire, I don't think. I think cattle grazing comes into it, I think that a lot of different issues come into it. But the bottom line is that we have a forest, it has a lot of small, dense trees, very thick, and there's a lot of areas that way. Consequently, when fire is introduced, whether it's human-caused or lightning—although human-caused is generally—generally—a little worse, just because of the time of the year. Usually it's not accompanied with rain, and it's not accompanied with high humidities. And so because of that, we have a fire problem. When fires do start, they can, in some areas, pose a drastic problem: Montana last year.

There's also, when you have, in some areas, where these thick stands of small trees, there's a lot of insect and disease problems. And so in some areas, like the Pacific Northwest, has some areas where whole stands of trees are dead. And so when you get a fire, it's bad—it can be really bad.

And then coupled with this—it's not just the forest is getting thicker and thicker—it's also that more and more people are coming, and they're building their houses in areas right up and into, adjacent to the national forests. Or there's private in-holdings, that used to be maybe ranches, that are subdivided and putting in houses in these tracts. And so you end up with houses in the forest. Bottom line is, you end up with houses in the forest. And the forest is thick. And so it poses a situation where you can have catastrophic fires, like Montana did last year.

So with the National Fire Plan, the main emphasis, at least for us right now, is on thinning—is to thin out the smaller trees, and then treat that slash. Our objective is to thin out the smaller trees and then we treat that slash the following year, because what could be even worse is if we thin a whole bunch and then add more stuff to the forest floor, and we don't treat the slash. So we thin, and the next year we burn. We thin, and the next year we burn. And we might be doing it simultaneously, thinning and burning at the same time, but it's real, real important that we treat the slash that we're creating. And then the objective of the thinning is just to clean out the smaller trees, reduce the ladder fuels that allow fire to get into the canopies of the trees where it's much more difficult to fight, if it's moving through the tops of the trees instead of on the ground—much more difficult to deal with.

And we're focusing our treatments in urban interface areas where there's houses adjacent to, in our case it's the national forest. I think that the work that's been done by the Flagstaff Fire Department, by the Coconino National Forest—it's great. It's great. We're certainly not the best in the West. There's good stuff going on all over the West right now. There's many, many places that are showcasing their efforts, as far as what they're doing in this area. But the important thing is that we're doing something, and that we're being funded to do something, and hopefully, over probably the next five to ten years, because this isn't going to happen overnight. Over the next five to ten years, at least around Flagstaff, things should look a whole lot better than they did two years ago.

We've really, really gotten into the thinning, at least on my ranger district, the last two years. It's really becoming a focal point. We do some of it with our hotshot and engine and prevention people; some of it's contracted out to contractors. But we couldn't have done all that without the money being appropriated through the National Fire Plan—it wouldn't have happened.

And so I don't want to say the forest is unhealthy and it's decadent, and it's dying, and it's a big mess, because I don't think it's.... It's not like that. It's not good, we have a situation where we have a lot of fuel that's built up over a long, long, long, long time. And it's going to take a long time to deal with it. And even though we're treating the urban interface, there's still a lot of country that's in the back forty that's not getting the treatment. And so there's different things going on, though, as far as different forests, different agencies—the Park Service in particular with their fire use, where lightning fires are allowed to burn in certain areas and play their natural role. The Gila National Forest were definitely the leaders in the Southwest area, as far as fire use and allowing lightning fires to play their natural role. That's all good stuff. Everybody's kind of doing lots of little things to change what's gone wrong over the last sixty years.

Kern: When, would you say, more or less, the impetus to change the fire management policy—like you're saying, fire use—came about?

Zettler: It's been different for the Forest Service than it has for, say, the Park Service. Of course we have very different missions with the land, too, and so that has an effect. Where the Forest Service, the land is not just....it's used by.... We've got the range industry, the timber industry, the watershed industry, recreation. It's a whole different thing than just—it's a little different mission, I'll just say. But in the Forest Service, the earliest I can remember that we came up with allowing, say, lightning fires to play a natural role. We have what we call fire management areas, and the earliest one I can remember being part of—and I wrote the plan for it—was in 1983. And so in 1983, on the Tonto National Forest, in the Mazatzal Wilderness, we created three fire management areas. They weren't real big, but if lightning fires started in those areas, we allowed them to burn and play their natural role. And then a person or two would go in, horseback, and camp, and monitor the fire, and monitor the fire's activity.

And so from there, like the Gila has been the great leader in this. I can't speak for the Gila—it seems to me that they really started the fire use, or what used to be called prescribed natural fire, or PNF, it seems like that probably started in the late eighties, and evolved to what it is now. And when we get into fire use, like on the Coconino, we don't have any fire use areas right now where we can allow lightning fires to play a natural role. But, what we are doing, in our current—for each project we do, we have to have an environmental analysis. And so what we're currently doing in some of our EAs, or our environmental analyses—an analysis usually takes anywhere from, I don't know, we hope one to two to three years, no more than that. But we're analyzing for fire use, so that we can put some fire use areas in place on the forest. That's not appropriate for all areas—certainly not for most urban interface areas—not just because of allowing fire to play a natural role, but if something changed and the fire took off and burned houses, it's not just that—it's that when you have a fire that's burning, it draws people. And for safety reasons, you wouldn't want it right up against where neighborhoods....

Smoke is another thing. Just the impacts to the public on smoke, that there's some areas that are real viable areas—back forty country where that's a real appropriate tool.

Kern: When you say back forty, what do you exactly mean?

Zettler: Country that's not in urban interface areas—country that's less populated. It's more open, it's more remote country.

Kern: Why is it back forty? What's the forty?

Zettler: A term, I guess it came from when farmers would go out and plow the north forty [acres] or the back forty—maybe that's where it came from.

Kern: And so the Gila Forest you're saying is very advanced in their fire use programs. Are they in a more isolated area?

Zettler: Yes, nearly all their forest is dedicated wilderness. We have the Kachina Peaks, they have nearly 3 million acres, that's dedicated wilderness areas. So that makes it a little bit different, and it's not like areas that are Oak Creek Canyon, Flagstaff, that type of thing.

Kern: You had mentioned before when you were speaking about your position as fire management officer, that you enjoy the ability to employ change for other workers. What are some changes that you would like to see, in terms of your district or fire management in general?

Zettler: Oh, opportunities. And right now there's more opportunities than there's ever been: training opportunities, job opportunities. We're trying new things that we haven't done a lot before, like I've got two things going on in the district right now. One is we just hired an employee through a program called the Apprenticeship Program. And the idea was—and this money came through the National Fire Plan—the idea is that we take someone with very limited experience, if any, and they apply for an apprenticeship to learn how to do fire management. And so we hire them, and then for 4,000 hours they work on our district. And in that 4,000 hours, we train them in different aspects of fire and fuels management: hotshots, engines. The person that I'm getting, I hope to send them over to the Kaibab National Forest for a season for sixty or seventy days to work on the helicopter. And so that in three or four years, they're going to have a lot of training, they'll have done a lot of different things. But it was an avenue to take someone that had the desire, had the interest, and help them get going.

Another thing is a co-op. We're working right now on getting a college forestry student—he currently works for us, and he's a forestry student—and we're working right now to create a position where he can go to forestry school and come to work for us in the summer, and do that each year until he graduates, and then we place him in the Forest Service.

You met Dave. Dave has a very strong desire to go up in the Forest Service and do a lot of different things. Well, last year I helped Dave go and spend the summer on the helitac crew on the Kaibab to get the helicopter experience. That's the best part of this job, when you can help other people reach their goals, help other people get trained. Support programs, like the apprenticeship program, where someone can come and you can help them start a career. That's what I mean when I say you can affect change. You really can, because the people that work directly for me, I can have a lot of input on helping them get into training. Supporting them, I guess, is more like it. Supporting them for training classes, for fire assignments, for training assignments. And instead of maybe, I don't know, you know, at the next level of management, you're not as connected to those folks on the ground. And so I would miss that. I would miss that. Some people say, "Oh, supervision's a nightmare." See, I think it's the best part of my job, because it's getting to work with the people.

Kern: And the apprenticeship position, would that individual, that position, would they be trained well enough or with enough hours to actually be a hotshot, to be on an engine crew?

Zettler: Absolutely. Absolutely. And that's the intent, to help them get trained and get started. Probably at the end of their tenure with us, they'll be qualified to be an assistant engine supervisor, maybe a hotshot squad boss. But the intent is to get them trained enough to where they can go to that next step, that entry level, where most of our employees get appointments, and get them into that position, and then they're off and running.

Kern: And so they would do that in the course of a year?

Zettler: Four thousand hours. We're thinking that it's probably going to take about three years. They're also, when they're not on the hotshot crew or the engine crew, like during fire season, then they'll be tied to our fuels management projects. They'll learn to write burn plans, they'll learn different aspects of fuels management. And so the whole idea is to help this person with a desire to make this career, help them get goin'.

Kern: I want to ask you, what are some of the—you've mentioned so many—but what are some of your favorite parts of your job?

Zettler: Right now it would be working with the people that I get to work with. They're the best, it's wonderful. Another part of my job I really like—this is going to sound really crazy—but it's that I manage the budget. That's really good, I really like that. It's kind of like, "Here's your money—now do something." There are certain things I'm required to do: I have to make sure that my engines are staffed, my hotshot crew is hired and what not. But it's also helping out other functions on the district. And it's not all just fire. I have a lot of people—in the summertime especially—a pretty big work force, with the engines and the crews. Well, other functions like Hydrology, who maybe needs some pole fences put up around a meadow; or Wildlife maybe needs some help with an antelope project. Oh! there's just a host of other functions. Like the silviculture group always needs help with thinning. Well, that's a neat part of that, because I can help other people with their stuff too. And so I share people readily with other functions. But there's kind of some trades, too, like they'll help.... Maybe I have some folks that I didn't have quite enough money to keep them working year round, but by taking on some silviculture projects and a hydrology project, I'll get the money from that—then I can help two or three of my employees that would normally have been maybe laid off for three or four months in the winter. They get to work all winter, and then we do these projects. So it helps my employees, which makes me feel good; but it's also getting another functional area's work done for them, instead of them going out and having to find someone else or contracting or whatever.

Kern: So if you are to retire anytime soon—which I can't really see that happening—but if you were, what are you going to do with yourself?

Zettler: This is great. I went to—the Forest Service sends you to a seminar called Retirement School. And it's good, it was very, very good. It's to help you plan for retirement. And it's good to go, they say, ten years out, five years out, and then just before you retire. So I just recently went to this retirement seminar, and one of the first things that the instructor, the leader, said, was, "I want you to write out what you're going to do after you retire." And I write and write, and I had forty-seven things. He said he'd give us five minutes. So I had forty-seven things on my list. Some other people had like three. And I thought, "Wow, maybe I...." And so I was looking at them. Okay, so you want to know what I would do after I retire? Okay. I want to learn to grow hay. I want to be like a rancher. I'd like to get horses—my husband and I together. He retired from the Forest Service, and so he's kind of been working at another job until I can retire. It's get a ranch, grow hay, raise horses. I want to learn to fly, I want to get my pilot's license. I love to garden and I want to learn to quilt. I'd like to become a gourmet cook. And on the side we sell antiques. I'd like to continue doing the antique thing. I'd love to write a book. Everybody probably always says that, "Oh! I'd love to write a book." But I would love to write a book about just experiences of being a female in the early years of fire—just some of the funny.... I mean, it's not negative, it's funny.

[I want to tell you a funny story.] (Kern: Yes!) I was in Montana—this is good—I'm in Montana and I'm the only girl on the crew, there's only five women in the whole camp. (Kern: Out of how many?) There were about 500. We're on the Bear Fire. And it was just out of Missoula. Anyways, cut line all night, we're still cutting line the next day on the side of this mountain. I had to go to the bathroom so bad, and so I kind of ease off from the crew, but I could still kind of hear people and see people. I decided I'd better go further. So I go further, until I see a moose. I saw a cow moose, and she had a calf, and they were kind of over here in a lake. And so I thought, "This is good, there's a moose, there must not be anybody around." So I do my whole thing, and I stand up, and there is like six people sitting on a log up here, and they're all clapping. That was a good one. See, that's the kind of stuff. I mean, it's funny. You know, at the time, it was like, "Oh, wow," you know. But it's funny, it's good stuff. So I'd like to write a book about all that funny stuff. And I've kept notes through my whole career of just funny situations that have happened.

Another time, I was leading a crew into a fire on the Tonto. It was desert, I was hot. It was in the evening, and we were hiking down a sand wash to a fire that was on down. And as we were going down, it was real thick with desert broom or bush, and I thought, "We probably shouldn't be down in the wash,"because that's where the snakes are. And so we kind of got up on the side hill, and we're side hilling along, and everybody's walking behind. We're going along into this fire, and it's dark. So we have our little head lamps on. You've probably seen that, so we have our head lamps on. We came to kind of a rock outcrop that we had to go over. And so you're always warned, in the desert you don't ever put your hands where you can't see your hands, because something might be there. So I put my hands on either side, I kind of handed my shovel back to the guy behind me, and I put my hands on either side and I kind of pulled myself up. And I was nose to nose with a Gila monster. (laughs)

Kern: What's a Gila monster?

Zettler: Oh, it's like a big lizard—a big Arizona lizard. They're protected. They're deadly if they actually could get a bite on you, but they don't bite real readily. I imagine if you picked it up and let it glom onto your hand, they have a deadly poison, but they are pretty harmless, I'd have to say. This one was about this long. He was pink and black, about that big around. Big lizard, looks kind of like an iguana thing. Anyways, we're nose to nose with this thing. And for whatever reason—I have no clue what compelled me to say this—but I went, "Mom! Mom!" And here you are trying to lead like nine guys behind you. Your credibility just went right down the drain.

There's a ton of that stuff, though—there's just a ton of hilarious experiences. Maybe they're not hilarious to others, now that I think about it, but it's just that kind of stuff. So I'd like to write a book—at least for me, to make sure that I never forget all this stuff.

I can think of a million things to do. I would miss this. I mean, this has been my life, and so I would miss this, but there's also like Chapter 2 in the whole thing, and this was Chapter 1.

Kern: Is there some type of women's organization within the Forest Service?

Zettler: Not that I know of. Nope, there's not—not that I know of. There might be in some areas, but in the Southwest Area, not that I know of.

Well, I'll tell you something. There's another FMO, there's two women FMOs in the Southwest Area, and the other one is on the Gila, of all places. And so anyway, she's over on the Gila, and we're good friends. And when she used to live in Flagstaff, we did start a women-in-fire organization, and we called it the Bra and Panty Club. (laughter) It was a really small group, but it was the women that were in the Southwest Area in the Forest Service. Probably not an appropriate name, but we did call it the B&P Club.

Kern: And what would you guys do?

Zettler: You know, probably more than anything is if one of us knew about an opportunity coming up, whether it's training or a job, a seminar or whatever—anything that was an opportunity—we would share it with each other. We set up a little mailing list and we would share, "Hey, this is coming up. You might want to go." And, "This was really good. I went to it. You might want to do that." And we still communicate with e-mails and whatnot. But the B&P Club kind of faded into the sunset.

Kern: If you have a young woman who's starting off in the Forest Service and maybe she's at that point where she's not sure if she wants to make it a career or not, and she comes to you for some advice, what would you say?

Zettler: I would just say be a team player and give 110 percent, and you'll be fine. I am convinced that there's room for everybody. There's room for everybody to play. But if you come and you want to change everything, if you want everything your way, if you whine or complain a lot, if when it's time to work hard you don't, it's not going to work. And I don't care if you're male or female. And so I would just say it's the best career in the world. I don't know of any job—I can't think of anything I could have done that could have been so much fun, so exciting, so adventuresome, make good money, have great benefits, good retirement, meet great people, but you just have to be a team player and you have to give 110 percent. And it'll all be fine. That's what I would say.

Kern: What about the aspect of how the career affects your personal life? If someone was saying....

Zettler: I would say that if someone.... I know it's been done where women.... I know a woman in California who's highly successful, and managed to raise three kids, stay married, have her husband, and make a career of the Forest Service. But it was incredibly difficult on her. She did it. I wouldn't discourage anybody. I mean, I wouldn't say, "Well, if you want to have a family, don't do this job." I would just say, "Go into it with your eyes open, and know that it takes a lot of commitment, a lot of time, and that you're not always home. And that your mate, your children, your family, can live with that. Can live with 'I'm going to work this morning and I'll see you in fourteen days,' and 'I'm home now for a day, and I'll see you in fourteen more.' And that that can go on for about six months out of the year. It can be a pretty demanding job. But if you can work that out, and you're willing to do that, it's the best." That's the advice I would give. Whether you have a family or children or not, you need to go into it with your eyes open, and know that while it is for everybody, it's still very male dominated. It is—there's more men than women—that's just the way it is—at least fire management. But it's not a bad thing. I mean, none of it's a bad thing.

Even a lot of the things I went through—like getting hired as a GS-1 when my cousin was a GS-2—it wasn't fair, but it wasn't bad. It wasn't a bad thing. It's that kind of stuff. It's that stuff that's difficult to deal with, that helps you get through stuff. It helps you get on up the road, it makes you a lot stronger, it makes you a lot wiser. And it's kind of like when you asked about confronting people, and was that hard. The very first time it was real hard, but the more that you deal with issues, gosh, the better you get at it—like anything. And so overall, that helps you be a whole lot better at what you do, because you're able to deal with issues. The higher up you get in this organization, like any bureaucracy, the higher up you get, the more issues you have to deal with. And that's not a bad thing, it's a challenging thing.

So those are the things that I would tell someone. But I would encourage any woman that likes to be outside, that likes hard work, that doesn't care if they get filthy dirty and they stay that way for a long time. If you're spiked out in a camp, in a spike camp on a fire, you gotta be prepared to be dirty. And work long, hard hours. As long as they get into it with their eyes open, and knew what they were getting into, I'd highly recommend it.

Kern: After that pay issue you mentioned with your cousin before, I'm hoping now that that discrimination doesn't happen.

Zettler: Doesn't happen. Things are in place now to make sure that doesn't happen. I say it doesn't happen: It might happen somewhere. On my district it doesn't happen. Everyone, entry-level people are all hired—we try to start them at the GS-3 level, and they need to have so many months of experience to go to the 4 or go to the 5. They also are hired based on a position description. And when I first started, they didn't have position descriptions for what we did. And so now we have a description of the duties that a person's going to perform. And so they're hired based on not who they are, but what that position description says they're going to be doing. And that didn't exist for many, many years when I first started. And so that helps put that in check.

Kern: Just to kind of wind it down, I wanted you to talk a little bit about how you said you had gone to Congress and there was an issue about pay that you were real proactive with.

Zettler: That pay issue, that affected all kinds of employees.

[Volume fades to zero. END OF INTERVIEW]

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