Jasper McGill is a senior majoring in philosophy and theology at Colby College who has spent the past two summers in Potlatch, northern Idaho, fighting wildfires with the Palouse Hand Crew. McGill decided he wanted to do this during his sophomore year. “I’d spent a summer doing other work and decided I wanted to do something out of state,” McGill said. “Mostly, I wanted to get out of Maine.”
He had wanted to fight wildfires the previous year, but, due to the application process’s bureaucratic nature, he had to wait. “It’s a weird mix of very old-fashioned hiring, where you call people and talk to them,” McGill said. “It’s a federal job, so you also have to get through the automated screening. After that, I made a list of 20 places I would work, called them, and got offers from two.”
McGill’s first day on the job was memorable. “I loved the first days of work, and the first was my favorite,” he said. “I remember realizing that I was in a completely different world of how authority worked; it’s very militaristic. There’s a chain of command. There is a large contrast behind the type of exhaustion between college and fighting wildfires: 12 hours of labor is very different from intellectual work at Colby. Quite honestly, I find the intellectual work more exhausting half the time.”
This first day, however, was an especially exhausting one. “I remember being way in over my head and kind of scared,” McGill said. “On my first crew PT hike, I was heavily second-guessing my choices. A lot of the training is about how much pain and discomfort you can tolerate. On my second day, we hiked about three quarters of a mile and gained about a thousand feet of elevation. I was carrying a 45-pound pack and a 25-pound chainsaw. We did that hike in about 22 minutes. ‘Sufferfest’ is what they would call it.”
One of the most challenging days came in the middle of this summer. “It was a fire of about a thousand acres outside Missoula,” McGill said. “We hiked up a line a bulldozer had pushed in, and every step you took, you were sucking dust. The fire was too hot to put out directly, so we were cutting a line down a ridge, hoping to stop it when it got there. On a saw team, one person cuts the brush and the other clears it.”
On this day, every other saw team got called away but McGill’s, so he was left cutting for 9 hours. “We got through a mile and a half of line,” he said. “The rest of the crew came behind us burning off as we went. Normally, you finish preparing the line before you burn, but we were in a huge rush because the fire was about to jump the line.
“At that time, it was one of the most difficult days,” he continued. “I remember being very unhappy about how much I was getting yanked around. In retrospect, it was one of my favorite days, and my favorite day for bonding with my saw partner.”
Even though many days are brutal, McGill keeps going back. “I enjoy the camaraderie, the general outdoor skills, and being able to spend the summer outdoors and get paid for it,” he said. “Some people love it and can never leave, it clicks for some people and for others it just doesn’t. I don’t think there is really an answer to why. It’s addicting once you’re in.”
~ Dallas Watson `28
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