experience than an entry-level wildland job. Over the years, the structural department hired thirteen Crew 7 alumni. Marsh made the most of his competitive advantage. His staff became progressively stronger as he poached men from other hotshot crews looking to make the leap to structural firefighting, and he took risks on young applicants with no fire experience at all.
Some of his best firefighters came to him just out of high school, promising that as athletes—linebackers, bull riders, wrestlers, and runners—they’d already proven that they had the toughness required of hotshots. Marsh recognized that their sports training was a good physical foundation but far from a guarantee that they could handle the marathon of a fire season. When he hired, he told the rookies, “You’re no longer an individual. Whatever you do affects twenty other guys.”
If the new hires could handle it, Marsh shaped them into firefighters with a few months of hard work. He hammered into them the fundamentals: how to swing a Pulaski, run a chainsaw, spark a backfire,and work through the pain. Marsh had helped with hiring and training long before he became superintendent, and by 2006, when Crew 7 attained Type 2 status, he was supported by eight or nine men who believed fully in his vision. Still, whenever the crew was sent to a fire, Marsh was once again forced to prove himself—this time to other crews.
“We were the redheaded stepchildren,” Maldonado said. “They didn’t want us at home, and they didn’t want us on the fire line.”
For one thing, Crew 7 looked different from other fire crews. Instead of buggies, those burly custom people movers, Crew 7 drove white twelve-passenger vans. The rigs weren’t capable of handling the wear and tear from twenty young men with fierce addictions to chewing tobacco and little allegiance to sanitation. If buggies get nasty—they do—then the vans were leagues worse. The fire gear was stored in the back, and the seats were so full of dirt that clouds of dust would puff up when the men sat down. The air-conditioning in one van didn’t work at all. As a joke, the unlucky squad assigned to the hot van tucked canned tuna fish into the functioning cooling vents of the other van—the smell was putrid. When Crew 7 rattled into fire camp, the other hotshot and handcrews immediately took notice. Most cringed.
“Hotshotting is a good old boys’ club, and new crews are never welcomed, especially when they’re from other agencies. Whatever Marsh went through wasn’t unique,” said Jim Cook, who was the superintendent of the Arrowhead Hotshots, out of Kings Canyon National Park, in the 1980s and 1990s. Arrowhead was among the country’s first Department of the Interior crews. “But the shit you get as an upstart isn’t for performance. It’s for tipping the world sideways.”
When Cook started Arrowhead, the established hotshot superintendents were far from welcoming toward new crews. Back then, many crews still had ties back to the hotshots’ predecessors, the Civilian Conservation Corps fire crews and the forty-man fire teams that sprang up in Oregon in the late thirties. Though these teams were effective, research on line-construction speed, logistical ease, and thesimple management challenge of wrangling forty young men prompted the crew size to be cut to twenty firefighters. The first hotshot crews—the name referred to the fact that they were always given the most intense assignments—emerged in their present form in the late 1940s, after many years of wildfires threatened thousands of homes in Southern California. By the 1960s, the Forest Service, the agency primarily responsible for the creation of hotshots, had stationed nineteen crews near major western airports so they could be flown anywhere in the country within twelve hours. The maturation of President Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System nullified the Forest Service’s need to fly crews to fires. Good roads made it
Some of his best firefighters came to him just out of high school, promising that as athletes—linebackers, bull riders, wrestlers, and runners—they’d already proven that they had the toughness required of hotshots. Marsh recognized that their sports training was a good physical foundation but far from a guarantee that they could handle the marathon of a fire season. When he hired, he told the rookies, “You’re no longer an individual. Whatever you do affects twenty other guys.”
If the new hires could handle it, Marsh shaped them into firefighters with a few months of hard work. He hammered into them the fundamentals: how to swing a Pulaski, run a chainsaw, spark a backfire,and work through the pain. Marsh had helped with hiring and training long before he became superintendent, and by 2006, when Crew 7 attained Type 2 status, he was supported by eight or nine men who believed fully in his vision. Still, whenever the crew was sent to a fire, Marsh was once again forced to prove himself—this time to other crews.
“We were the redheaded stepchildren,” Maldonado said. “They didn’t want us at home, and they didn’t want us on the fire line.”
For one thing, Crew 7 looked different from other fire crews. Instead of buggies, those burly custom people movers, Crew 7 drove white twelve-passenger vans. The rigs weren’t capable of handling the wear and tear from twenty young men with fierce addictions to chewing tobacco and little allegiance to sanitation. If buggies get nasty—they do—then the vans were leagues worse. The fire gear was stored in the back, and the seats were so full of dirt that clouds of dust would puff up when the men sat down. The air-conditioning in one van didn’t work at all. As a joke, the unlucky squad assigned to the hot van tucked canned tuna fish into the functioning cooling vents of the other van—the smell was putrid. When Crew 7 rattled into fire camp, the other hotshot and handcrews immediately took notice. Most cringed.
“Hotshotting is a good old boys’ club, and new crews are never welcomed, especially when they’re from other agencies. Whatever Marsh went through wasn’t unique,” said Jim Cook, who was the superintendent of the Arrowhead Hotshots, out of Kings Canyon National Park, in the 1980s and 1990s. Arrowhead was among the country’s first Department of the Interior crews. “But the shit you get as an upstart isn’t for performance. It’s for tipping the world sideways.”
When Cook started Arrowhead, the established hotshot superintendents were far from welcoming toward new crews. Back then, many crews still had ties back to the hotshots’ predecessors, the Civilian Conservation Corps fire crews and the forty-man fire teams that sprang up in Oregon in the late thirties. Though these teams were effective, research on line-construction speed, logistical ease, and thesimple management challenge of wrangling forty young men prompted the crew size to be cut to twenty firefighters. The first hotshot crews—the name referred to the fact that they were always given the most intense assignments—emerged in their present form in the late 1940s, after many years of wildfires threatened thousands of homes in Southern California. By the 1960s, the Forest Service, the agency primarily responsible for the creation of hotshots, had stationed nineteen crews near major western airports so they could be flown anywhere in the country within twelve hours. The maturation of President Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System nullified the Forest Service’s need to fly crews to fires. Good roads made it
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