Inside the Life of a Woman Hotshot Battling Blazes in the American West

Newsweek

a day ago

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With wildfires getting more severe and unpredictable, the work of firefighters is increasingly significant—and dangerous. January's Los Angeles County fires caused up to $53.8 billion in property losses and billions more in economic and tax hits to the economy, according to a February report from the Southern California Leadership Council and the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation. Often referred to as the "special forces" of wildland firefighting, hotshot crews tackle the most difficult and remote wildfires. Most people who come to a hotshot crew have a few fire seasons under their belt; but when Kelly Ramsey joined her hotshot crew, she was the only rookie to both the crew and to fire—and the sole woman, as well as the first in nearly a decade. To many of the men, she was the only woman they'd ever worked with. In this exclusive excerpt from her book, Wildfire Days: A Woman, A Hotshot Crew, and the Burning American West (Scribner), Ramsey talks about fighting the 2020 North Complex Fire in California.
BACKBURN. Intentionally burning the forest in advance of an oncoming wildfire, as Ramsey is doing with a drip torch near Quincy, CA, can help create a barrier of burned vegetation to stop a wildfire's progress.
BACKBURN. Intentionally burning the forest in advance of an oncoming wildfire, as Ramsey is doing with a drip torch near Quincy, CA, can help create a barrier of burned vegetation to stop a wildfire's progress.
Parker Kleive
The day after Labor Day, we woke to the wind. It threw dirt on our tarps and whipped hair into my mouth as I zipped my bag. The morning was sunny, which should have been a warning. Sun means the inversion has lifted—a temperature inversion happens when warm air "caps" cooler air, trapping smoke in the valley overnight, dampening fire activity. Once the temperature rises, the fire awakens.
We stood in a circle to brief.
"The East Wind Event they've been talking about arrives today," Van said. He had gone to morning briefing with all the other superintendents, where they'd learned about the weather situation. "As you can see, it's already here."
Red flag warnings stretched from California to Washington State. The wind was historic, a once-in-a-hundred-year phenomenon. Incident management teams along the West Coast were on edge. They would have increased staffing, but there was nobody to add; everyone was already committed, and short-staffed at that.
"You really need to be heads-up today," Van said.
"Lotta trees could come down," Salmon added.
We broke the circle, trudging through deep dirt. I could feel the wind inside my yellow, and I shuddered.
"Come on, load up," Fisher called, and fired the engine. I collected my hairbrush and stuck a boot on the bumper and pulled myself up, and the back door of the buggy clanged shut, a lid closing. "All in!" Trevan yelled, and we were wheels rolling toward the black.
We hiked in on the same dirt-powder line. Cloud of dust, choke, cough.
We reached the black and spread out along the line. Everything here was holding, and we were set up with a hose lay and engines pumping water from either end. We moved as a group, finding hot spots and digging as the wind picked up.
'Head on a Swivel'
The wind howled and roared, bending the trees. Big old conifers creaked and popped. Some were burned out at the bottom, some were cat-faced (with a burned hole or hollow, like a cave), some crispy carbon sticks all the way up. It didn't feel safe.
Boom! A massive tree fell, somewhere out of sight. The big ones sounded like bombs. The ground shuddered, meaning it hadn't landed far away.
Boom! Another tree. Everyone's head was on a swivel. "Head on a swivel" was a shorthand phrase of Van's, but that's also what it looked like: a tree fell, and our heads snapped around, our expressions asking where and how close.
Boom!
"That was too close. Too f****** close." Luke looked unnerved.
A crew got on the radio and said they were pulling out. Too many snags comin' down, the crew boss said. "The wind's too high, and we don't feel safe to continue." They said they were hiking out. Division said he copied.
"You think we'll leave too?" I asked.
"Oh, hell no."
"No way. Hotshots gotta be the last ones to leave."
"Don't worry, Rowdy River'll do it!"
"Perfect time to get after it."
"Find the boys an outlet. We're gettin' plugged in."
Bitter sarcasm was our only resort. The eerie wind stirred the stump holes and swirled embers into the air. Where we were, the wind threatened to coerce a dead fire back to life. But elsewhere, where we couldn't see, the risk was much worse.
Salmon, who was posted on the ridge as lookout, came on the radio. "Hey, uh, this thing is making a decent run. It's starting to put up a pretty good column."
Van confirmed that he was seeing the same thing from wherever he was hiding out. We kept digging. Then Air Attack came on the radio.
"This is making a big push," Air Attack said. "The fire has jumped the Feather River drainage and is making a big run to the south. It's moving fast. I'm seeing—I'm seeing a campground and some structures here, in front of the fire, and you need to send people out there to evacuate anyone in this thing's path. Tell everyone to get out of the way. It's—it's not stopping."
My skin prickled. We couldn't see any of it—the column, the fire pushed by these winds, jumping the river and racing toward a campground—but even I had been doing this long enough that I could picture the flames, and the urgency in Air Attack's voice made my blood run cold.
Author Kelly Ramsey portrait
Author Kelly Ramsey portrait
Lindsey Shea/Courtesy of Scribner
'Intergalactic Columns'
He came on again to say that this wasn't the only fire seeing explosive growth. "I've flown everything from here to Redding," he said. "And I hate to tell ya, but it's just columns everywhere. All of California is columns, far as you can see. Intergalactic columns."
"Intergalactic?"
"Did he really say that?"
We'd never forget it—it was a joke for the ages. We'd later get to a fire that was putting up a column and someone would intone, Intergalactic, with a wink, and people would laugh, and I would feel a chill. Because that is how a single column looks, like a rope from earth to space, and to imagine them spread over the breadth of this nation-sized state was to picture...the apocalypse. Alien invasion. Armageddon. With one word, Air Attack had conjured a vision of the end times. And he wasn't wrong.
We kept working our way down the line, mopping up.
Opening my pack to grab a snack, I saw I'd missed a call from Jossie, the friend in Happy Camp who was watching our animals.
I called back. "Everything OK?"
"I'm at your house," she said in a rushed voice. "I have the dogs. Is there anything you want me to grab?"
Huh? I was so confused, the best response I could summon was, "What?"
"There's a fire in Happy Camp. I thought you knew."
"What? No, I didn't know."
Ice. As if someone had poured a bucket of it over my head. Cold water flowing over my body and entering my veins.
"Yeah, it's right outside town, they're evacuating everyone. I have to leave, and I've got my dogs. Do you want me to take yours?"
"Yes," I said. "Please."
"I tried to get the cat, but he ran away."
"That's OK. Cats are smart. Tommy will hide." My voice caught in my throat. Poor Tommy, the scrappy stray I'd bribed into our home.
"What about Sam?"
F****** Sam. There was no loading a large goat into Jossie's small SUV. "Um. Why don't you let him free in the yard, so he can escape? I guess."
Poor old Sam.
"OK, I'll do that. Is there anything else you want from the house? Any important papers or anything?"
My throat was closing. The trees around us, columns of carbon, creaked in the howling wind.
"No, just the dogs." It was almost a whisper. "Please take the dogs."
June 7, 2021 on the Telegraph Fire outside Globe, AZ.
June 7, 2021 on the Telegraph Fire outside Globe, AZ.
Parker Kleive
Smothering Smoke
The sky had gone orange. The atmosphere hung low, bloody and dark, as if someone had steeped the sky in an amber tea, the smoke like cloudy billows of just-poured cream. We were all taking videos, because it was insane that morning could look like the middle of the night.
We'd left the North Complex, headed home. Miles upon miles spooled out under the buggies' tires, wildfires in every direction. Everywhere we turned, roads were closed. We had to reroute because I-5 was shut down: a fire near Ashland, where my friends lived. Cold prickled my neck. We took a back road, a two-lane highway between orchards, their gnarled limbs menacing under the heavy sky.
Happy Camp wasn't the only tragedy in California. A headline about the North Complex read: "Tiny California Town Leveled By 'Massive Wall of Fire'; 10 Dead, 16 Missing, Trapped Fire Crew Barely Escapes Blaze." The North had grown explosively, barreling southwest and consuming the town of Berry Creek, leaving only three houses out of 1,200 standing. Meanwhile, in the western Sierra Nevada, almost 400 campers were trapped when the Creek Fire blew up; the Army National Guard rescued them in Black Hawk helicopters. By October, Governor Gavin Newsom would request a federal disaster declaration for six major wildfires in the state.
The windstorm had also fueled five simultaneous megafires in Oregon, damaging 4,000 homes, schools and stores, killing several people, placing 10 percent of Oregon residents under an evacuation order and incinerating more of the Oregon Cascades than had burned in the previous 36 years combined. The Almeda fire leveled, among many other structures, my friend's mother's Polish restaurant in Talent.
In Washington, the towns of Malden and Pine City were mostly destroyed. The Cold Springs Canyon fire grew from 10,000 to 175,000 acres overnight, an insane rate of spread. The Pearl Hill fire jumped an almost unheard-of 900 feet to cross the Columbia River. Smoke blanketed British Columbia and the Western U.S. and, funneling into the atmosphere, drifted and spread to cover the continent. Air quality advisories were issued as far east as New York. College students hid in their dorms in Berkeley; older people sheltered from the dangerous particulates outside. We were a nation huddled, terrified. The smothering smoke implicated each one of us for our part in making a hotter world, enabling such a catastrophe.
This was a disaster. There was no other word.
The Slater fire had blitzed north through Happy Camp and crossed over Grayback. It had jumped Indian Creek east to west, then the wind had shifted and it had jumped back again. The fire had gone everywhere at once and made a 100,000-acre run up Indian Creek and over the ridge into Oregon. That ridge, where an undivided stand of Brewer spruce grew. Had grown? The canyon where so many homes...had been.
Wildfire Days book cover
Wildfire Days book cover
Courtesy of Scribner
▸ Adapted from Wildfire Days by Kelly Ramsey. Copyright © 2025 by Kelly Ramsey. Reprinted by permission of Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC.