LIFE ON THE lINE
Nature-built to burn then bounce back, East Kootenay forests are the foundation of our economy, ecology, and communities. For nearly 50 years combined, members of the Rocky Mountain and Flathead Unit Crews have fought fires for a living. Theirs, and ours.
SHAPED BY FIRE AND RESILIENCE — Our East Kootenay forests are tended and protected by those who know them best. Standing ready, the Rocky Mountain Unit Crew carries generations of experience in their boots and in their bones. Nicole Leclair Photo
“I was the greenest of the green,” says Jason Kipp, chuckling now at the memory of being a 17-year-old on his first day as a wildland firefighter. “I literally had zero bush experience, and the only job I’d ever had was flipping burgers at Willy’s.”
Fortunately, that naiveté did not last long, as it simply cannot if you hope to survive the gruelling task of battling wildfires in far-flung wilderness locations. Though now retired, Kipp went on to a legendary decades-long career working out of the Cranbrook Fire Zone of the B.C. Wildfire Service (BCWS)—which is basically three or four times longer than the typical tenure of those precious few who are able to surmount the danger and difficulty in the first place.
“It was a different time, that’s for sure,” Kipp recalls, noting that he got both the job offer and an order to mobilize on the same day. Yes, that was irregular even for the era, but the BCWS had made a point of doing things differently since 1992. That’s when the government launched a plan to solve two critical issues at once: on one hand, a shortage of fire-fighting candidates, and on the other, limited employment options for First Nations youth. So began a tradition of all-Indigenous fire crews whose legacy has since diminished but still exists, particularly in the north.
Jason Kipp, a status Musqueam, was a beneficiary. “I had relatives in Cranbrook who were telling me it was a pretty good summer job. And of course, I knew there would be some crazy cheques. So my Uncle Max got me an interview," he says. "But then spring came and went, and nobody called. I hadn’t even been to boot camp, so I figured it was back to Willy’s.” That was, until that fateful day, June 6, 1996, when Kipp learned that there had been a drop-out from the crew and the spot was his. It taught him a hard truth about his new life: you always know you’re going somewhere gnarly, you just don’t know when and where that will be. What’s more, it’s unlikely to even be in your own region. “Grab a bag,” he was told that day. “We’re going to Ontario.”
A couple days of rough travel later, the unit made rudimentary camp on a nameless peninsula on a nameless lake. Recalls Kipp: “They dropped us off and said, ‘We’ll be back in three days with the food.’ It felt like being in some sort of army deployment going to fight a war. I’m old enough to remember the TV show M*A*S*H, and it was like that, with the wall tents and the helicopters flying around and guys hustling equipment everywhere.”
It didn’t take long for ever-present peril to reveal itself. “We woke up in the middle of one night with a hundred-foot wall of fire roaring towards the camp. Guys were panicking, trying to cut logs to bridge over to a neighbouring island.” Luckily the firefront swerved away and incineration was averted. Sure, that might seem to us civilians like a near-death experience, but for those veterans, it was just another day at the office.
Photographer Jesse Winter (who in 2024 was assigned to cover prescribed burning on the ?aquam territory for the Globe and Mail) received the Edward Burtynsky Climate Photojournalism Award for this image of Alaskan smokejumper Carson Long working a drip torch. The photo appeared in The Narwhal last year.
Today, the BCWS employs some 1,300 wildland firefighters. Though much has changed over the years in how they handle their business, an outside observer might not notice because the principal tools and techniques remain much the same: travel, somehow, and almost certainly via bushwhacking, to the fire. Devise a strategy. Hack away trees and any other combustibles to dig a fire line. Find water. Haul hose. Pump it to the hot zone, fill your backpack tank. Mostly, though, it’s grinding, filthy labour. Your friends are the chainsaw, rake and shovel, plus the iconic firefighting tool, the pulaski, a combination axe and grub hoe which will be in your hands for many, many exhausting hours in a row.
Yet the idea that someone could be hired with zero qualifications is definitely a thing of the past. As she prepares for her seventh season in the game, Kimberley’s Madelaine Thomsen is a prime example of how wildland firefighting has evolved from opportunistic seasonal payday to among the most noble of trades. For one thing, she arrived with plenty of credentials, academic and otherwise.
“I studied environmental science at UBCO,” says Thomsen. “I had a good background in teamwork from having played on the rugby squad there. And I’d already worked at various jobs in forestry, as well as some contract firefighting.” At age 30, she is now one of four crew leaders on the 20-member Flathead Unit which, along with its Rocky Mountain equivalent, shares the base at the Cranbrook Fire Centre. And recently she accepted a promotion from the ministry, as proven performers can do, to become a year-round employee, serving as a risk reduction technician during the winter.
While the BCWS has had a female contingent for a while, Thomsen would be happy to see it grow.
“Over the past few seasons, I think there were six women in our group of 20 firefighters, but it it would be good if the ratio was 50-50,” she says, noting how having a variety of people and backgrounds contributes so much to team morale and unity. Part of the recruitment challenge might be that women are generally less interested than men in jobs like this, but there’s also the hurdle that each firefighter has to pass the same difficult fitness test every year.
“It’s called the WFX-Fit test,” she explains. “You can check it out on YouTube, and honestly, it’s no joke. They put up this big 30-degree ramp and you have to haul various loads up and down. The max weight is a 65-pound pack plus a 10-pound weight belt. And you need to complete all these moves in 14-and-a-half minutes.” Thomsen thought she was fit when she first took the test, but didn’t pass. So she went back to the gym and seriously amped up her weight-intensive cross-fit program.
“I’m fairly short and I’d been more of a sprinter type, so I needed to bulk up," she says. "I’ve passed every year since, but I admit that sometimes it makes you pretty sore for a couple of days.”
Meanwhile, a woman may be as strong and competent as it’s possible to be, but attitudes are slow to change. Thomsen still meets people who simply can’t believe that women do this job.
“Some local resident drives up looking for information and approaches the biggest dude on the crew. And I’m over here thinking, ‘Hey, man, you’re talking to my rookie!’”
FIT AND PHYSICAL — Sarah Mabee-Hall, Madelaine Thomsen, Gabriella Hazaras, and Sydney Sunderland. Thomsen is a former university rugby player and now a resource technician for the Rocky Mountain Unit Crew. Nicole Leclair Photo
Burly and bearded, nobody would doubt that Rhys Wiechula is a fire-fighting boss. Entering his 14th season, Wiechula steadily climbed the ranks to wildfire technician and is now in charge of both Cranbrook units, a year-round position that sees him involved in a host of duties from front-line deployment to remote command in front of multiple screens. The amount of coordination demanded is immense, and it’s not merely the front-line infantry. There are also, for example, helicopters, bulldozers, camp logistics, and vehicle fleets to manage.
Wiechula came to the trade from what is still a reliable source of recruits: tree planters. In other words, people who take ironic delight in referring to an especially gruesome 17-hour day as a “sufferfest.” Folks who don’t use fire emojis lightly. Although his first few seasons were comparatively quiet, that soon changed.
“Twenty-seventeen was a turning point,” Wiechula recalls. “A lot of us hadn’t been around for the 2003 Kelowna fires, and it felt like a wake-up call for the whole organization.” That year, fires from the Cariboo to Ashcroft set B.C. records for the most evacuees—65,000—and the largest single fire. Such widespread threats to highways and communities sparked a multi-agency acceleration of efforts to both prevent and defend against fiery catastrophe. With some bad seasons since—last year was our fourth-worst in history—the urgency has only grown.
ELEMENTAL — Comprised of grassland and a fibre mix including tamarack, ponderosa pine, Douglas fir, and lodgepole pine, Columbia Valley forests are meant to burn roughly every 14 years. For centuries, fires like this prescribed burn near Cranbrook were intentionally set by First Nations. Flames would clear deadfall, thin brush, grass, and low-hanging branches. Healthy grasslands and revitalized forests would regenerate within a year. Jesse Winter Photo
Wiechula has been in the thick of it. “The growth in programs and overall professionalism has been huge. We implemented so many changes since then, like active collaboration and training with the six community fire departments in our region, and increased emphasis on infrastructure protection.” A vital term entered the everyday lexicon: the WUI, or Wildland Urban Interface, which is priority number one in any fire scenario. The province has also seen the wisdom of creating more full-time positions. “Our summers are so hectic, it’s nice to have that space in the winter to develop and improve systems we can use the next year.”
Much of it also involves advanced learning. Wiechula attended a conference in Vancouver last winter on the emerging science of modelling fire behaviour. “Data taken from wildfires over the decades,” he says, “has produced numerical models that can now accurately predict fire patterns given particular fuel types and environmental conditions. Having a good idea of where a fire might be in two days is obviously very useful.”
Expect more science applications in the near future. This September will see the debut of the world’s first university program dedicated to wildfire science at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops. Meanwhile, collaborations with other government agencies as well as NGOs (non-government organizations) are expanding. For example, Nelson-based Living Lakes Canada has been working with the BCWS on a program of mapping all potential water sources for firefighters, many of which are concealed.
The work yielded its first real-world application in last summer’s Argenta and Johnson’s Landing fires. They were able to provide accurate locational maps to BCWS phones and tablets in an area where it is notoriously difficult to find water in conventional ways. Notably, too, the surveying work had been assisted by the volunteer-driven Argenta Safety and Preparedness Society, which also contributed to the effort once the lightning-strike fire actually took off. This underscores the fact that the public has its own role to play in wildfire mitigation (see the sidebar in the print or online publication for what you ought to be doing - link below!).
Technology is also rapidly evolving. Whereas once there was only one radio per crew, now everybody carries one, plus a smartphone and satellite-enabled personal locator beacon. Recent additions include a mobile StarLink internet receiver for each unit, an obvious game-changer. Drones are being tested; while they can’t accomplish what a helicopter can, they are showing promising results in remotely triggering controlled burns.
SMOKE SCREENS — Wildfire assistant Adam Osuchowski in the Cranbrook Zone wildfire coordination officer seat. The Cranbrook Fire Zone reaches from Yahk to the Alberta border, and from the U.S. border to Elkford and Wasa. Nicole Leclair Photo
So what does the 2025 fire season hold for British Columbia? Difficult to say, but rest assured that every day that passes there are experts increasing their understanding of where the threats are likely to appear. Meanwhile, blazes or not, wildfire crews rarely rest. Do you think heavy rains across the zone are an excuse to sleep in? Forget about it. You’re still up at dawn for a hard-core 90-minute workout before spending the day maintaining equipment. Obviously, this life ain’t for everyone.
But if you’re a strong 20-something (yes, it’s a young person’s game) with an itch to do something worthwhile with your life, there are few better paths. It therefore bears noting that the BCWS now recruits year-round. Imagine, you can make as much as 60K a summer, or even more if you’re willing to train up to joining the special forces of wildland firefighting: small initial-attack crews, including fixed-wing parachutists and those who rappel from helicopters. Yay! Hard work plus danger!
Not only will you build character and make friends for life, you will put yourself at the front of the line for each and every employer to come. And, bonus—you’ll have a golden opportunity to spend a few winters exploring Asia or Central America, as many firefighters do.
Just remember to do a lot of surfing and rock climbing to keep that iron core intact. You’ll thank yourself next spring, and so will everyone else in B.C.
~ Kevin Brooker
Find this full-length story and more in The Trench’s Spring/Summer 2025 edition: