Feeling Through Fire: Part 1 - Mixed Emotions

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article is part of a Mountain Journal series exploring our emotional relationship to wildfire through a collection of people who have varying relationships with the element. Through presenting a mosaic of experiences, we hope to explore the complexity of one of the most dominant forces on Earth. Part I in this series explores fire through the eyes of wildland firefighters.

“It is a wholesome and necessary thing for us to turn again to the earth and in the contemplation of her beauties to know the sense of wonder and humility.” – Rachel Carson, writer, conservationist

On the first wildfire assignment Kate Tirrell worked as a wildland firefighter, she watched flames command the steep hillsides and deep draws near the town of Capitan in South Central New Mexico. The drama of this fire wasn’t in shooting columns of orange the height of a four-story building, or human structures bursting into a show of pure heat—all things she would witness later in her career. What Tirrell recalls of this burn was the sheer magnitude of the fire as it devoured ponderosas and pinyon pine. She harvested pine nuts from the forest floor as she navigated the topography and listened to the high-pitched crackle of burning manzanita shrubs. She was in awe.

“I have so much respect for fire on the landscape,” said Tirrell, a 31-year-old who grew up on the East Coast and wasn’t exposed to wildfire until she went to college. “Seeing the scale with which it moves … [It’s] really beautiful to be able to witness something that's just so primal.”

The fire outside Capitan, called the Pine Lodge Fire, burned more than 15,000 acres in 2019, and Tirrell has been involved with wildfire ever since, working on a Type 2 Initial Attack hand crew in Utah, then on elite Type 1 hotshot teams in Helena, Montana, and now Entiat, Washington. She is one of 11,393 wildland firefighters the U.S. Forest Service reports employing as of July 2024, and therefore one of the few people in the country who frequently witness the phenomenon in intimate proximity. The sense of wonder that Tirrell found on that first fire has permeated her entire career as a wildland firefighter, feeding her affinity for a job that can otherwise be indescribably taxing. She gets lost in vivid vignettes: witnessing a column of flame rising to the sky; feeling the release of energy as a burn runs through a dense stand of timber; listening to a freight-train-like rumble as fire scales a mountainside.

For someone like me—a Westerner for whom fire has become a constant yet has never faced a blaze head-on—the awe is palpable. When we spoke on a smoke-laden August afternoon, the distance between our phone lines incinerates and I’m standing there with her in a torching stand of ponderosas. Yet Tirrell’s wonderment is tinged with guilt, like the crisp black edge of burnt paper.

“Honestly, I really enjoy watching fire burn, even at an enormous scale,” she said. “And this is kind of a sensitive subject, because so many people have such a negative relationship with it, right? It destroys homes and communities and infrastructure and all of those things that are so heartbreaking.”

Tirrell implies a question of great magnitude: how do we find beauty in something that causes so much harm? It’s one of the contradictions baked into the concept of wildfire, a force of literal and symbolic destruction and regeneration, wonder and fear, beauty and devastation. This complexity is challenging to make sense of in a world defined by hard and fast binaries. But where logic falters, emotions can serve us.

A few hundred miles from where the Pine Lodge Fire burned in 2019, another rookie was starting his first fire season in Jackson, Wyoming. Henry Sollitt grew up in Jackson and worked four seasons on the Bridger Teton National Forest’s Engine 441 and was periodically loaned out to Utah’s Logan Hotshots, including the entire 2021 season. Sollitt recently traded his hard hat for law school, but years of being steeped in that same wonder Tirrell described has left him stained with nostalgia.  

“I was always so floored by how dynamic it seemed to the point of being animate,” Sollitt said. “There were just times where you talked about the fire in the third person. You were assigning it agency, like, ‘Oh, the fire is going to get up and do this thing,’ as though it could, as if it had the power to do anything other than act in the way that physics was applying it to.”

This makes sense. Fire is a spectacle, one that our brains have programmed reactions to. While scientists still seek explanations to the effect fire has on our brains, some studies have explored its hypnotic allure and its ability to lowers our blood pressure and our stress hormone cortisol. Still other research has examined its evolutionary imprint on our brains. In other words, the sense of awe Sollitt and Tirrell describe may be in part built into us as much as our instinct to flinch when an ember lands on our skin.

But Sollitt expresses a familiar hesitation when he recalls the wonder fire inspires in him.

“At every moment, I was just floored by how beautiful everything was around me, even in the objective chaos and destruction that I was witnessing,” he said. “We were working night shifts, and every night, it was spectacularly beautiful to see this landscape as it was burning, which is pretty terrible, I guess, to say, but there is this insane beauty.”

These mixed emotions also make sense. A study published in Science at the end of 2023 revealed that the number of houses burned in wildfires in the U.S. has doubled over the past 30 years; 55,000 homes have burned since 2012. In Lewiston, Idaho alone this July, a single fire burned 150 structures. Wildfire smoke, which according to the National Park Service is the largest source of particulate matter in Greater Yellowstone, continues to threaten human health, especially for more vulnerable populations. And researchers are increasingly trying to quantify the toll wildfires are taking on mental health.

Wildland firefighters aren’t strangers to competing ideas. The job alone pits many truths against one another.

“[The intensity of the work] brings a lot of anticipation … for me,” Tirrel said. “Being away from home, being away from all of my comforts and my hobbies and my habits, and just kind of stripping my life down into just surviving and getting through fire season.” In June, she posted to her Instagram account, appropriately called @lady.hotshot, elaborating in an a poetic list of laments that if titled could be called “Just One More Season.”

“I pick my nails and teeth with the same knife,” a section of the post reads. “My hair matts and knots on my neck, and when I finally shower after 16 days the water runs black.” But the rant turns on itself at the end into an eventual confession: “The truth is, I’ve never been happier. In the filth and fatigue I feel at home. With the crew and the folks who feel like family, I keep getting pulled to return.”

Sollitt echoed this, emphasizing the romanticism that glosses over the feeling of “having to leave in 48 hours to hike around a 100-degree hillside … Again.” But still, he too confesses: “I think it’s the best job I’ll ever have.”

One of the challenges loaded in the work, Sollitt explained, is the periodic reckoning with the futility of it. And herein lies yet another contradiction: In the business of managing wildfire, the fire has a way of getting the last word.

“I'm not going to say that the work that we did out in the field didn't make a difference, because I believe that the strategies and tactics that are employed in certain situations absolutely do what the fire managers and people on the ground are planning them to,” Sollitt said. “On occasion, we were able to draw the lines and establish the boundaries of the fire and it would stay within those boundaries, which is the whole point of suppression and management, and it was pretty remarkable to be a part of. And it was always pretty remarkable to see that there were instances where our ability to control the fire felt very, very distant and futile.”

Tirrell described this tension like a tease, where “sometimes fire plays nice,” but that you can so quickly be reminded of its potential to step outside a controllable space.

“I think that's what's so humbling,” she said. “You can think of all the factors and preload your brain with all of these different possibilities in the fire environment, and you can get pretty good at predicting. But there's just this element of sometimes fire just does what it wants to do.”

For these firefighters, awe and respect converge into an emotion that threads through all the contradictions: reverence. Reverence holds space for the emotional complexity that burns within us, whether inspired by wildfire or any other mixed bag of our time.

“I have a lot of emotions, and in the past I’ve had a hard time allowing myself to experience all of them,” Tirrell said. “I think through this job, and through interfacing with the landscape and fire in all these ways, I've done a lot of growing. And in that growing, it's like my container for experiencing emotions has gotten bigger.”

The magnitude of the awe that struck Tirrell years ago watching her first wildfire engulf a landscape is mirrored within her.

“Fire is sacred,” she said at the sunset of one of her rare days off before heading back into the field. “And our relationship to it can be as well.”

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