Sweat dripped down my spine as I hefted a heavy drip torch with gloved hands. Everything was hot — the sun filtering through the ponderosa pines, the fire at my feet, the long-sleeved shirt and long pants I wore to protect myself from burns. I dipped the tip of the torch downward, splashing a few drops of flaming fuel onto bone-dry grass and snowberry bushes. Flames sprang up immediately, their hot tendrils nibbling at the brush under my boots. I slowly walked down a small rise, slinging more fuel and counting paces under my breath to evenly space the drops. One, two, three, four. Light the earth on fire. One, two, three, four. Do it again.
I paused to catch my breath at the bottom of the hill, panting from exertion but trying to appear composed in front of the more seasoned fire crew I was working alongside. I’d never lit more than a few campfire logs on fire, while some members of this crew fought wildfires all summer long. My fire backpack (40 or so pounds), the drip torch full of fuel (16 pounds more) and the sense of responsibility (incalculable) weighed heavily on me. The day before, I jumped out of the way when fire touched my boots for the first time, and I’d shakily dropped fuel where I shouldn’t have. Today, it was my job to light things with precision. I needed to get it right.
Too little fuel, and the woody debris under my feet wouldn’t burn evenly, leaving kindling for future wildfires. Too much, and the possibilities were endless: killing trees we wanted to save, making my team breathe unnecessary smoke as they monitored the perimeter. Worse still, the fire could escape its boundaries and cross over onto a neighbor’s land.
Kyle Lapham, certified burner program manager at the Washington Department of Natural Resources, caught up with me and broke my intense concentration on all the what-ifs. His job that day, among others, was making sure I didn’t douse myself with fuel, trip and fall into the flames, or forget to drink enough water. After years of fighting wildfires and now helping to lead prescribed burns, he handled the drip torch with ease and saw the sweaty task ahead as a beautiful one.
“I think of it like a paintbrush,” Lapham told me as we walked back uphill to ignite another strip of brush. “You can paint big strokes or small stipples.” Treating the surrounding landscape as a canvas, I decided to mimic a painter. Tiny dots of fire all merged into one flaming front, creating a pointillist work in the wild.
As a journalist covering wildfire, I often catch myself focusing on fire’s destructiveness. I know better; I understand that while fire can destroy communities and kill people, it’s also natural, healing, regenerative and essential for both people and landscapes. Still, my mind bounces among images of hikers running for their lives, skyrocketing insurance rates, and the ever-growing list of ways that smoke is bad for humans. I wasn’t sure how I’d feel being so close to the flames, wielding the power of a full canister of fuel.
Three and a half hours and 10 or so acres later, cheeks rosy from being so close to the flames, I leaned against a pine tree and inhaled chalky electrolyte tablets straight from the bottle. Every nerve ending in my body sang with adrenaline. For a moment, I forgot my aching shoulders and the sweat beaded on my upper lip. Fascination, not fear, washed over me. I was done igniting for the day, but I’ve been dreaming of ignitions ever since.
I was done igniting for the day, but I’ve been dreaming of ignitions ever since.
FIRE IS A NATURAL PART of Western ecosystems, and many forest species crave its disturbance and the resulting regeneration. But starting in the mid-to-late 1800s, the federal government banished Indigenous fire practices and, for over a century, suppressed wildfires.
Now, in today’s hotter, drier world, forests have a huge fuel buildup, and land managers are racing to burn it away, hoping to starve future wildfires of fuel and revitalize healthy forests. But they need trained professionals to organize and manage their intentional fires.
The Prescribed Fire Training Exchanges (TREX), a collaboration developed by the Forest Service and The Nature Conservancy in 2008 to train such a workforce, started in the Great Basin. Today, TREX hosts workshops across the country, and people from 42 states and eight foreign countries have participated. I wrangled my way into a northeastern Washington training in October, burning several areas on private land just north of the town of Chewelah over the course of two weeks.
The Selkirk TREX brought about two dozen people of varying backgrounds together — foresters and firefighters, rookies and smokejumpers, employees of The Nature Conservancy, the Washington Department of Natural Resources and the National Park Service, and two citizens of the Spokane Tribe of Indians. We came from as far south as Texas and as far north as Fort St. John, British Columbia, a 17-hour drive away.
The burns put more fire back on the ground and build capacity at state and local levels so that communities can do more of that work themselves. But the program also has a loftier goal: moving agencies and the general public away from the mindset that fire is bad and always needs to be extinguished.
Not everyone needs convincing, of course. Citizens of the Spokane Tribe told us how they burn hundreds of acres on their reservation every year, and the Kalispel Tribe of Indians, whom we visited but who couldn’t burn with us this fall, said they want to burn more often than they do. Still, giving more people the opportunity helps show firsthand that fire isn’t scary under the right conditions. Every burn is another opportunity to create more evangelists for good fire, slowly shifting generational mindsets of fear and suppression.
Fire is hypnotizing; if you’ve ever sat around a campfire, you know this. But the painstaking care that prescribed fire requires extends beyond the actual burning. It can take three to five years to complete the necessary planning, approvals and environmental analyses to burn on federal land. Even our small private-land burns required detailed preparations, including thinning excess branches and creating defensible space around a house and garage, work that the landowner had already mostly completed; borrowing local firetrucks and firefighters; trucking in extra water; notifying local law enforcement and seeking approval from air-quality regulators. Safety and containing the fire are always the priorities.
A lot of our work came down to demarcating a box and then keeping the fire inside of it. If there weren’t natural boundaries around the area we wanted to burn, we made them by digging line, our hands and shoulders swinging shovels and Pulaskis to scrape a firebreak down to the dirt, starving future embers of fuel. Once the work was complete, we waited for an appropriate weather window. Fire managers look for a Goldilocks zone of temperature, windspeed and humidity: Not too hot, not too cold, not too wet, not too dry, not too windy. Just right.
Once the weather cooperated, often by early afternoon, our team fanned out across the landscape — a grassy field choked with knapweed one day, a bowl-shaped section of ponderosa pine forest the next. Our tasks varied: spraying down trees with water if flames started to lick up into the canopy, wetting brush on the other side of our containment lines to create inhospitable landing spots for any wafting embers. Others used the drip torches to create a blackened buffer, meticulously painting lines with fire that paralleled the firebreak’s edge. Fire on the outskirts moved toward flames in the middle, helping contain the blaze and widening the firebreak in the process.
I gawked at the others’ confidence and marveled at how their movements ebbed and flowed with the flames and with each other. I felt like a kid donning grownup clothes to play dress-up. My special fire-resistant yellow shirt reached mid-thigh until I tucked it in, and a borrowed leather belt held up my flameproof green pants. Seasoned firefighters offered me caramels, Jolly Ranchers and every nicotine product known to man as we worked, a welcome distraction from the smoke tickling the back of my throat and the black fire beetles, drawn to the smoke, pelting my face and neck.
FIRE ETCHED ITSELF INTO my psyche as the second week wore on. One evening after a long day of burning, I slumped in the passenger seat of a cherry-red Washington Department of Natural Resources truck, staring at the highway shoulder illuminated in the headlights. My mind blank from exhaustion, I envisioned flinging flames along the road, long strips to smooth the edge and little perpendicular dashes to pull heat away from the border. Was I hallucinating? Or was I a real fire practitioner now? I blinked, but the image kept returning as we drove. Bits of ash and dirt were just as stubborn, wedged behind my ears until I showered and muddying the white shower walls before they slipped down the drain.
Trying to mimic natural processes in the 21st century West, with all our boundaries, homes in the woods and air-quality regulations, is hard work. I wondered how all this effort for a total of 30 or so acres could begin to translate to the massive scale of prescribed burns needed to revitalize forests nationwide. But restoring fire to the landscape is a long game. Any acre burned alongside other people, learning to accept fire along the way, is progress. Like dots of fuel or splotches of paint, controlled burns across the country add up to a bigger picture: more good fire, healthier forests and safer communities.
Each day, I knew which way the wind was blowing; I knew how fuel was carefully portioned to keep the fire slow and steady. I understood the work we’d done to get an area ready to burn, because I’d dug containment lines with my own hands, my teeth crunching on the moondust we stirred up. Unlike a wildfire, which often sparked and spread during the driest, hottest, windiest days, these flames were set under careful conditions to achieve exactly what we wanted them to, ideally nothing more and nothing less.
Restoring fire to the landscape is a long game. Any acre burned alongside other people, learning to accept fire along the way, is progress.
Instead of stepping back, I stepped forward, wanting to experience the fire as it bent and surged toward itself. What I saw contrasted sharply with the out-of-control nature of wildfire: Prescribed fire is the hardworking, underappreciated sibling. It shares much of wildfire’s fundamental DNA — fuel, oxygen and heat — but reveals beauty, precision and sooty elegance. A month or two after the burn, I saw a picture on LinkedIn of a man with a baby strapped to his chest on the front line of a prescribed fire. That makes perfect sense, I thought.
Trial by fire slowly transformed into trial by dust in the final few days of our training. We lit fire intentionally; we extinguished it intentionally, too. We lined up in a grid pattern and thoroughly searched the areas we’d burned after they cooled, scanning for smoke and feeling the earth with the backs of our hands to detect warmth. We zeroed in on white ash pits, stumps and roots notorious for holding heat, then dug into hotspots and sprayed them with water, turning the ground into a brownie batter of sludge.
I found the process of extinguishing meditative, the world stripped down to the ash in front of me. Dig, douse, stir. Do it again. I pondered what the crunchy ground would look like come spring. I pictured the forest awash with the verdant green shoots of new growth, birds flitting through the tree branches. Unlike a pointillist painting, a recently burned ponderosa forest doesn’t dry and end up preserved in a frame. Fire isn’t the finishing touch. It’s the start of something new.
This story was supported by the University of Idaho’s Confluence Lab’s Artists-In-Fire Residency.
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This article appeared in the February 2025 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Lit up.”
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