Sisters gets ready for fire season

A spectacular thunderstorm rolled through the Sisters Country on Sunday evening, signaling the beginning of fire season.

Fire fighters are ready.

Last Friday, 28 smoke jumpers stationed in Redmond completed a week of training with a practice jump into Zimmerman Flat, about five miles west of Sisters. It was a tandem jump, meaning two planes circled the drop zone disgorging firefighters who parachuted into the landing zone, followed by a cargo drop from a low-flying craft.

Smoke jumper base manager Bill Selby said the crew mobilized in Redmond and hit the ground in less than 30 minutes. That kind of response time is critical in stopping lighting strike fires from blowing up into conflagrations.

"It's just a quick way of getting people on the ground," Selby said.

Selby handed out gold pins to several jumpers who had just completed their 50th drop on Friday. Among them was Erin Spring, a 33-year-old firefighter from Greenville, Maine.

"This is my ninth season fighting fire," she told The Nugget.

She decided to join the elite cadre of smoke jumpers because she "just wanted to keep going to this level."

She's looking still further down the road to when her body tells her it's time to stop jumping out of perfectly good airplanes. ("It's not the jumping," she says with a grin. "Actually, it's more the impact.")

"I'm starting graduate school in the fall to get my master's in fire ecology," Springer said.

The Sisters Ranger

District's own fire ecologist, Jinny Pitman, declined to be goaded into making predictions about the upcoming fire season. Fire assessments indicate an "average" fire season, but that doesn't tell very much about what kind of fire season the Sisters Country will actually experience.

A lot depends on a convergence of conditions - high temperatures, a dry spell, wind - which can happen any time during the summer.

"You could have the perfect conditions and all you need is an ignition source," Pitman said. "The ignition source is what is hard to predict."

Pitman noted that a wet spring may have an impact.

"We've had a lot of rain, so we've got a lot of grasses," she said. "The higher the grasses, the faster the fires tend to run."

But Pitman considers predictions mostly speculative and prefers to rely on

preparedness.

"It's fire country," she said. "I just get myself psyched up to be prepared for whatever comes."

Author Bio

Jim Cornelius, Editor in Chief

Jim Cornelius is editor in chief of The Nugget and author of “Warriors of the Wildlands: True Tales of the Frontier Partisans.” A history buff, he explores frontier history across three centuries and several continents on his podcast, The Frontier Partisans. For more information visit www.frontierpartisans.com.

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