#GAReads | The First Women on Hotshot Crews
Baker River Hotshots monitoring their night time burnout. Burnouts provide an often critical protective buffer for an advancing wildfire.
“The First Women on Hotshot Crews”:
For the past two summers, I’ve worked as one of four women on a U.S. Forest Service hotshot crew near Mount Hood, Oregon. Early last season, while we waited for a fire assignment, I was tasked with building shelves for 40 old crew photos dating back to the mid-1970s. As I took the pictures off the wall, I noticed a few women in early images. With their clothes and faces covered in ash, they were hardly distinguishable from their male colleagues, besides the occasional messy braid or ponytail. Though decades separated us, their expressions were familiar to me—their eyes creased with joy and exhaustion. I could see myself in them and in the tired, genuine smiles that can only result from days of hard work.
When the 2019 fire season ended, I tracked down some of these women and their peers, the first women to hold positions on hotshot crews in California and the Pacific Northwest.