Things have been cookin' down here in south Texas. We just had a group of firefighters from the Bureau of Land Management in Utah and Oregon come down for training with us and we put fire on just under 5,000 acres in about a week. It was a long week, filled with long days (and lots of overtime!), but thankfully the weather took a slight turn for the worse and gave us a little break to catch up. The group was great and we had a pile of fun on and off the fireline. Even though the training was technically for them, we learned a lot about the way we work and also picked up a lot of good info on fire suppression from the folks who spend a lot more time fighting fire than we do.

Here are a couple photos and a video from one of the recent fires. I have a fantastic video but for some reason the upload fails every time I try putting it on You Tube, so this one will have to do.


We spend a lot of time lighting the downwind side of the burn unit so that the fire slowly backs into the wind, creating a "blackline" that will prevent a faster racing "headfire" from crossing our firelines. The pic above is the headfire being lit off an ATV. After spending hours creating the backfire and blackline the fun part comes with lighting off the headfire that will burn up most everything in its path within a few minutes.





Life in general is going pretty well too. Not a whole lot going on. We recently tried out a tiny little BBQ shack on the side of the road out in the middle of the next county over and found it to be some of the best food I've ever eaten. Thankfully we pass the place all the time heading to and from ranches we work on so a few of us have made a point of getting out there as often as possible. The guys down from the Northwest thought the trip past the place was the non-fire highlight of the trip.

I never would have thought it, being such a tiny town and all, but Bill Clinton came through stumping for Hillary a couple weeks back. They only announced that he was coming the evening prior and it was mass chaos for such a little town to pull their act together to host a former president, but they did it, in true South Texas fashion it turns out. The speech was supposed to happen in the town square park, with room for up to 800 to a thousand people. Unfortunately it spent all day raining, so they decided to move it into the town's theater that seats about 300 leaving a whole pile of people outside in the rain wanting to get in. I went down to see if I could get in and was within the last 10 people let into the theater before it hit capacity. We waited there until about 5 minutes after he was supposed to start speaking, when the organizer came in and said that it had stopped raining and because there were an additional 500-600 people outside in the streets they were going to move it back outside. Not only did they move it outside, but they scrapped the whole park/gazebo/podium plan and instead hoisted the ex-president up on top of the tool box in the bed of a Dodge Ram pick-up right in the middle of an intersection. When it was over Clinton spent about an hour and a half working the rope line, shaking hands and kissing babies. I brought my photograph with him that was taken when he participated in one of the last events I worked on in New York. Thankfully Clinton's body guy was the same one I worked with a couple times and after a quick conversation made the re-connection with him and was able to get the picture signed. His people collected a lot of stuff that people were handing across the line to have signed and I couldn't believe it, but it seemed like pretty much everyone got back what they had handed over to be signed.

Overall it was a good time. To a degree it made me yearn for the fast paced event work, with stuff changing all the time and dealing with the security and logistics, but the next day I got to go and light fire to 1,300 acres and you just can't beat that.

That's about all for now.