Battle Against The Worst Wildfire Season On Record In The US State

A dispatch from the front lines of the battle against the worst wildfire season on record in the US state of California.

- Robert Langellier

8 September, afternoon

Almost 13km to the southwest, a plume of smoke stretched into the clean western sky, rising like bread. It looked like a cloud creating itself. A calm settled in among the Truckee Hotshots as we watched from a hilltop at the northern edge of the North Complex Fire. This was my first season and seventh fire on a US Forest Service hotshot crew, a unit trained to fight the hottest and most remote parts of wildfires. We thought we were witnessing a typical blowout, when a fire crosses containment lines. “Well,” one of my crewmates said, “tomorrow’s going to suck.”

Then the column collapsed.

That day, dry winds blew across California and beyond, wrenching fires loose and sending them ripping across the forest. The entire West seemed to be going up in flames at once, from the August Complex in the Mendocino National Forest, where 37 fires were coalescing into the largest fire in state history, to the catastrophic fires in Oregon and Washington.