'I got the bug' a pioneering wildfire fighter on the thrills and threats

Sara Sweeney never planned on becoming a firefighter. The 21-year veteran of the US Forest Service is the woman to head her elite Arizona-based unit, and one of the few female leaders in a job that’s 96% male. Sweeney and her crew spend most of their year traveling to battle the country’s biggest blazes, most recently the Bobcat fire, which has torn through roughly 114,000 acres in southern California. But when she was growing up in Washington DC, wildland firefighting wasn’t exactly on her radar. The idea of fighting fires was first put to her by a volunteer firefighter she met while hitchhiking at 19, but she initially balked at the idea. “The way he described the work, I remember thinking, ‘Oh my God, why would anyone want to do that?’” she says during a two-day reprieve from the front lines. It would only take a few more years, and a lot of intermittent outdoor labor, before she’d find her way to a signup sheet. “I picked corn. I bucked hay. I made snow. I worked roofing. I did construction,” she says – and then, she learned about smoke jumping. That’s when firefighters parachute into dangerous and rugged terrain. The idea was enticing.“I marched my little butt down to the local district office and was like: ‘I want to fight fire!’” she says with a laugh. “And they were like: ‘Oh, do we have a job for you! Here is a packboard and a jerrycan. Go hike up that hill.’” She would spend a few years on a brush disposal crew, wielding a chainsaw and helping on prescribed burns before battling her first big fire, in the Fishlake national forest in Utah. “Then I had the bug. That was it,” she says. Aside from the three seasons she spent rappelling from helicopters into wildland fires with a crew in Washington state, Sweeney has dedicated her career to serving on what are known as “hotshot crews”, like the one she now leads. Her Mormon Lake Hotshots, a crew of 21 based in Flagstaff, Arizona, is one of 110 hotshot crews across the country. Aptly named, these highly trained crews are typically deployed to the hottest parts of the biggest fires. The work is hard and dangerous. Charles Morton, a 39-year-old member of a California hotshot crew, lost his life last week while battling the El Dorado fire near Los Angeles.