The Medano fire is in the San Isabel National Forest. Where we worked with Alfonso previously. We are camping at a park in Westcliffe, the town we stopped at every morning for gas. This fire is not full suppression, is it a wildfire mitigation effort, which means they will allow it to burn, but try to control it and keep it from areas they don’t want burned. Yesterday the crew cut materials around a radio tower to prevent the fire from burning it. My squad worked on swamping out the cut materials, and by the end of the day even the sawyers joined us in swamping and we had a giant line of people passing branches to each other, down a ridiculously steep slope away from the radio tower. It took all day because the trees were so dense, and our specs kept changing. At first we were supposed to move every thing over 2 chains (66 feet to a chain) away from the tower, but by the end of the day when no progress had been made, it was changed to 1 chain.
I don’t like this fire as much as the last one. Reason 1: Less sleep/ I’ve had less than 5 hours of sleep for the past two night. Another reason: I am hungry. There is nothing for a vegetarian to eat. Yesterday’s lunch I traded my sandwich for a banana. I’m not kidding when I say that yesterday I ate nothing but granola bars and bananas. And at dinner I asked if I could just get the vegetable (which were loathsome green beans, possibly the only vegetable I hate with a fiery passion) the waitress told me that the fire command pays per person so I should get the whole meal and let someone else eat what I didn’t want. The mashed potatoes were covered in gravy. So my dinner basically consisted of a side of green beans, which I had to dip in Ranch dressing to make tolerable. Now I’m at breakfast, which is biscuits and gravy. So I’m eating sad dry biscuits. It will be impossible to sustain 17 hours of work without some kind of nourishing food.
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