Gale and I stood at the top of the rise, drip torches at our feet. Below us, the spine of Titus Ridge snaked downward, its Douglas fir-covered crest sloping down to the foaming rapids of the Klamath River. On the south side of the divide, the fire smoldered in the depths of a drainage. Scattered puffs of smoke rose quietly, looking deceptively peaceful, like the warm chimneys of a distant town. The fire was behaving, biding its time—but not for long. To the north, just a few forested miles away, lay a town of 1,000 people called Happy Camp. My home.

“This is bonkers,” Gale said. “Eight miles of line, and we’re left at the top with three torches.”

I grinned. He grinned. We both knew he wasn’t complaining.

“Ready?”

I picked up my torch. “Always.”

In late August of 2021, we’d been assigned to the McCash Fire, a 33,000-acre beast that first creeped, and then roared, from Ukonom Creek northward through the thick timber and sheer gorges of the Klamath National Forest. Our hotshot crew, based in nearby Six Rivers National Forest, had spent nearly four months on the road battling wildfires from the deserts of Arizona to the dense, primeval woods of Northern California. We faced at least two more months of nonstop emergency.

A busy fire season meant back-to-back 14-day assignments: removing trees and brush with chainsaws, digging miles of fire line, laboring in the dirt, and lighting backburn after backburn. We didn’t call it a backburn, though the word was technically correct—backburn, burnout, backfire, blacklining, all variations on fighting fire with fire. You’d ignite a section of the woods deliberately to deprive the approaching wildfire of fuel. Because we lit the forest so often, the canisters of diesel and gasoline comfortable in our gloved palms, we simply called the activity what it was: burning.

I often thought of fire as “good” only when it was preventative—pile burning, prescribed burning, and Indigenous cultural fire, all of which could reduce fuels, spur the growth of edible plants, provide forage for wildlife, and reduce the chance of future wildfire. But a backburn—even one that didn’t smolder politely in the underbrush, as a planned Rx fire would, but instead romped, raged, and torched unpredictably—still tipped towards the beneficial side of the scale.

The Incident Management Team had for days monitored the McCash’s progress as it slunk toward Titus Ridge. They hemmed and hawed; would it gutter out in the drainage? Maybe rain would come and dampen the blaze to black drifts of wet ash.

But on the fourth day of our assignment, the McCash crouched in the chasm below the ridge, lined up for a run. This meant that if we didn’t do something, it would catch the bottom of the slope and go racing uphill. Flames tall as houses would slam the top of the rise and curl over the ridge in a screaming wave. If the ridge didn’t hold, the fire would head straight for Happy Camp.

Not only did I personally dread a wildfire coming for my house, dogs, and annoying goat, Sam, but half the town had been leveled the year before by the Slater Fire, one of many blazes fueled by 60-mile-per-hour winds that had incinerated communities all along the West Coast in the so-called Labor Day Firestorm. The grieving residents of Happy Camp couldn’t handle a repeat performance.

So the management team turned to us. We were semi-local, known as “a burning crew.” They asked for a Hail Mary pass: light the seven or eight miles of line between the Johnsons Hunting Ground trailhead and the Klamath River before the wildfire hit the ridge.

Under normal circumstances, a hotshot crew can feasibly burn no more than a mile in a single shift. Multiple crews collaborate on lighting, and an array of engines, water tenders, and support staff spread out along the line, ready should embers cross the road. Helicopters are also on standby, ready to let loose buckets of rain.

"The proposition—cover ten times the ground you’d normally light, without support—sounded insane. But it was the only option, a desperate gamble to check the encroaching flank.”

This time, we’d have no help. Just the 20 of us and a long, spiny wrinkle on the surface of a burning planet. The proposition—cover ten times the ground you’d normally light, without support—sounded insane. But it was the only option, a desperate gamble to check the encroaching flank.

We said yes. We had to try.

“Save Kelly’s goat!” the guys joked as we filled our torches. I laughed, thinking, Seriously. Please let us save this dumb animal.

We dripped blue flame from the tips of our torches along an old forest road. We lobbed incendiary canisters down the slope into thickets of ceanothus and manzanita, watching them explode in sparks. Flares launched from pistols—the pop of a gunshot, a breathless pause as the flash sailed in a high arc over the trees, and the sizzling pfffffft of contact. Gradually, flames licked the ridge and carpeted its western flank in glittering orange. Smoke formed a castle above us, a second billowing mountain range in the sky.

Most of the guys took this in with a disaffected gaze. They had long ago accepted destruction as part of the job. For me, though, this vision of death always stung. I’d chosen the Forest Service because I was a backpacker and an environmentalist. I was here out of a love for trees. Seeing them torched to black matchsticks made me want to weep.

“I reminded myself that we sacrificed these acres to save the thousands, maybe millions, of acres at our backs. This wall of Roman candles was, in a sense, good fire.”

I reminded myself that we sacrificed these acres to save the thousands, maybe millions, of acres at our backs. This wall of Roman candles was, in a sense, good fire.

Incredibly, we pulled it off. We burned from early morning until well after dark, when we stood on the far bank of the river watching shimmering flames cover the ridge like bright cities on a blackened plain. After a few hours of sleep, we returned to check our work. The blaze had slopped over the road in a saddle, so we spent the day digging hand line around a 20-acre spill of downhill-flowing fire. When we’d contained that piece, we saw that otherwise, our barrier had held.

It felt miraculous. In a line of work where we suffered more losses than wins, and where I wrestled with the smallness of our victories relative to the mass destruction of wildfires, the legendary burn on the McCash was a bright spot in the dark. The fire would grow to the east and south, reaching nearly 100,000 acres by its late October end, but our northern perimeter never faltered. Happy Camp was safe.

Keep an eye out for Ramsey’s first book, a memoir about fighting wildfires in the West, forthcoming from Scribner in 2025.

About the Author

A writer whose work has appeared in The Washington Post, Sierra, and American Short Fiction, Kelly Ramsey has worked
as a wilderness ranger and wildland firefighter for the U.S. Forest Service. Follow Ramsey on Instagram at @kellylynnramsey and read her newsletter at plantperson.substack.com.

Cover photo of Ramsey with fellow hotshot Edward Klemencic on the Plumas National Forest, by Kelly Ramsey.

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