Ep24 High Strangeness - Fire on the Mountain - author John Maclean

[Music] welcome to high strangeness where we ask questions and explore all that is strange and unexpected in our reality welcome to high strangeness I am your host Tony and this is the place where we talk all things strange and unexpected today's episode is going to be an interview episode I'm excited as we get into the warm weather months one of the things that are strangely unexpected and very important to talk about are wildfires now I live here in Utah and it's pretty normal to have a number of these occurring across the state throughout the summer these are very dangerous and scary for most people these fires are a quick sound bite on the news or maybe it's something they see like smoke at a distance and they want wonder wow I wonder what's going on over there and that's a lot different than seeing that in the nearby Hills as you're driving on highway or have the fire approaching your home because maybe you live near Hills or a Wilderness now it's also very different than somebody who's actually fighting that fire where we'll never really understand what that's like and that's why I'm very excited for our interview VI today who's going to help us understand a little bit about how that must feel U most of us will never know that feeling and so I'm excited for today's guest but let me take a minute and just do a short introduction before we learn more about him in the book that he's going to help us talk about today Mr John M mlan is a seasoned journalist and the son of a famous writer Norman mlan his book fire on the mountains is a gripping non-fiction book that dives into the tragic events surrounding the South Canyon fire in of 1994 in Colorado John provides a detailed meticulous research to account of the fire which tragically claimed the lives of 14 firefighters now people I have read the book loved it it's it was very powerful and John does a great job putting you in the scene where you can see in your mind's eye the rugged terrain the crazy weather conditions and the changing behavior of the fire as well as the complex situations firefighting strategies and the human decisions that were made at that time so with that I would like to welcome to the show John how are you John I'm pretty good Tony how are you I'm very good I'm excited about our uh interview today like I said I read the book it was wonderful and I think uh the audience will enjoy what we talk about today learning about some of this and also your book thank you for your kind words so you are coming or with us today from Washington DC how are things over there in Washington DC it's uh very nice we've had colder than usual spring but it's kind of broken uh and we've had some beautiful weather yesterday was perfect uh high 70s close to 80s I was out on the pic River in my canoe nice and oddly enough uh Fire on the Mountain my book came up it was uh an odd thing Washington you see a lot of the same people that you see out in the field uh it's a collection point you know there a lot of Washington offices wo and so on for the forest service I got to the to the Canoe Club and uh was uh put in my life jacket and paddle into the the club canoe and a guy came up and he obviously had been counting on using the club canoe you know and he got there five minutes after I did he said ould you mind if we paddled together and I looked at him he in my age group and looked really fit so yeah please let's go we had it was kind of windy so having two guys in the canoe is a big Advantage so we're pading and it turns out we have a lot of things in common we started talking and we have Missoula Montana in common uh how odd well is that odd he's was in the forest service uh in Missoula and was set of wild and Scenic streams and one thing or another so fine so we padle a little farther we start talking about what you were talking about which is fire yeah and he said you know I was out in Missoula for a long time he said there were two really classic books written about that one was young men in fire written by this famous author and the other one his son wrote a book I read that one too far on the mountain that t that was a classic all right how do I slide into this without you know upsetting the canoe so I said yeah I wrote that second one he said so then we uh traded information and I hope we get together to to paddle again that's what it's like in Washington I mean it is not an isolated place people say it is but people come here from uh from the west midwest everywhere else uh they and share their experience and when it's good it's very good and as if you read the newspapers regularly when it's bad it's really awful that is awesome and I think it's interesting how that just worked itself out that way and you got a chance to really connect with somebody life's strange isn't it like how things like that can happen so it uh well you know that my dad's stuff uh uh river runs through it and young men on fire really have a lot of reach and I've added to the Bookshelf a lot and that is not unusual yeah uh that happens know you start talking to somebody when I'm talking about fishing and when up talking about fire those are the two things my father and I have written books about when I was a a newspaper man for over 30 years I did a lot of other things but that's been it and you get around to it yeah you get around to a river runs through it because it's one of the two great uh uh fishing stories in American literature the other Being Ernest Tam manyways Big two-hearted River and you talk about fire and then pretty soon you get into talking about the literature of fire and I don't mean to bride but those two books a young men and Fire and Fire on the Mountain which are complimentary um I defy anybody to come up to that class uh you know try hard guys and maybe you'll top it but so far nobody has yeah all you want it's a great book and I'm sure the other one is I haven't had a chance to read that but this is great um thank you for sharing a little bit about stuff going on with you right now and um that was a great story meeting somebody like that and having that kind of situation just develop out of into where I love at well awesome Let's uh I'm excited once again to have you on here I know we're going to really have a good time talking about this subject in your book so so let me jump right into some questions if that's okay um I'd like to start off I always like to ask people to share a little bit about themselves um I'd like to you know as people get in and get ready to read your book here and things like that it's good to just understand the author and kind of like a little bit about them it creates a little bit of connection can you tell us a little about you and so that fans and readers can uh just connect with you a little bit okay I'm kind of raggedy and doll a patchwork of things U I started my uh career in journalism in Chicago as a police reporter and now that I'm getting to the end of things you know I think back about what I really enjoyed and what I didn't and one of the things I really enjoyed was covering police and courts and uh street life in Chicago I grew up around the University of Chicago where my father taught and in Montana where we went every summer so I said this is a patchwork so that going to work for uh a news agency the city news Bureau in Chicago and then for 30 years for the Chicago Tribune was very different experience of Chicago I discovered a very different Chicago much more vital one in its own way University of Chicago is one of the great learning institutions in the world I mean and in the current debate on uh free speech on the campus it is a great leader uh so not to knock it but it's it's down there in Hy park has cut off from the rest of Chicago in a lot of ways uh so when I left H Park and uh started covering uh Street Life crimes murders uh courts uh the daily happenings it was a very different experience and when I enjoyed a great deal and I want up in in Washington in the Washington Bureau of the Chico Tribune I was always too young for the assignments I got uh due to a variety of circumstances Vietnam Wars soaked up the Manpower the Chicago Tribune needed young people and promoted them very very quickly uh so I want want being the youngest city desk reporter that anybody knew about at the Tribune and then the youngest Wasing correspondent for the tribun that anybody knew about there may have been somebody I don't know I never looked it up and didn't want uh and I did the the Washington thing for about 20 years and we've been based my family's been based here this is where my kids were raised uh I went back to Chicago actually for a final tour at the time when my father was at the end of his life the last three or four years of his life I was glad to be able to do that to reconnect with him uh even though it was a difficult time for him and then we had that whole thing we had the movie Robert Redford's movie of a river runs through it um we had the the book young men in fire which was not published in my father's Lifetime and my sister Jee and I had to make a decision as whether to publish it at all I mean this seems like a no-brainer but that book went through a lot of evolutions and it wasn't at the beginning what the fine book that it was at the end anyway we had it published it came out roughly at the same time as the movie so all of a sudden things were happening all over the place and uh I was glad to be in Chicago and uh working for the Tribune I want to being the foreign editor for a while uh but that was I think the high point of my journalistic career was flying around the world with Henry Kissinger when I was the Diplomatic correspondent in Washington for about 10 11 years then you know all of a sudden I looked around and I had 30 years of the Tribune and uh the big rush with the movies and the books was over and my career was becoming repetitious and after 30 years you know it's time to get out and I quit uh what happened was there was a fire in West Central Colorado on Storm King Mountain that was a mirror image of the fire my father wrote about in young men and Fire fire the man Gulch fire which this year is coming up for its 75th anniversary and I've been invited to give the keynote trun uh in Helena on the date of the fire August 5th wow uh and my friends were tell me John you know you should write a book about this uh this storm king fire because it's so much like your Dad's fire I still working at the Tribune when that happened and an editor came over and he said John you should really be writing this story I said well we're 3 or 4 days into this now and 13 people have been killed and uh the AP and the Rocky Mountain news and The Denver Post are all out there and they've been all over this thing if I go out there you're going to slap a mlan by line uh to get the hit with young men on fire on a story that basically uh other people have reported I can't get ahead uh in 24 hours uh why don't I wait why don't I wait until the anniversary of the man Gulch fire and go to man Gulch and if we're all saying oh this is just like the man Gulch fire let me go find out if it is you know I can get my dad's research uh partner lared Robinson to go I can get couple other people for uh uh their thoughts and Reflections and we'll go into The Gulch and talk about this and I'll do a story that's so I did and uh the story came out was a long story in the in the feature section and a bright young editor had put on the headline Fire on the Mountain and I really liked that I thought that's great and I thought well I've also done my job it's over uh now I can go on and somehow finish out my journalistic career and do something else in life and then I called up the family of the smoke jumper in charge Don Mackey they lived at the mouth of blet Canyon and blet Canyon is a major uh Geo GE geographic feature in one of the stories in the back of my dad's book A River Runs Through It uh he and a forest service crew go into blet Canyon and he comes out of blet Canyon uh it's a good story I thought you know this is just getting too too many hits and the family I liked them Bob and Nadine Mackey they wanted to talk they wanted to talk about their son and their son was a remarkable person he was a modern day Mountain Man Don Macky uh he was a hunter he wasn't a fisherman uh a Trapper uh a collector of traps uh an extraordinary hiker uh and he had been cast into a position on the the South Canyon fire that he should never have been in he was a superintendent position and the only reason he got it is he was first out of the the smoke jumper airplane that's what they do up in Alaska to give to guys's experience you're first out you run the fire even though you've never run one before well in Alaska you know you're burning a 100,000 acres of black Spruce and nobody cares uh maybe you put uh uh wraps around one old loggers or one cabin out in the tundra but that's it that's those are the only values of the state you down the lower 48 the game is very different and that fire was in sight of an interstate highway and uh on both to the east and west there were uh developments Suburban like developments and while the actual local the mountain itself was very wild uh and rugged it was in the Wildland Urban interface so you did things that you know a little more aggressive than you normally are you didn't want that fire getting down and burning 100 houses Don made a decision to on how to fight the fire and it was disputed um by people who were with him there smoke jumper friends that included his brother-in-law who was a fellow smoke jumper but in the end everybody decided that if if you're going to fight the fire at all if you'd fight it the way Don set out to do it which was build a Down Hill line and try to capture the fire underneath before it dribbled down the side of the mountain and choke it off and about 1:00 in the afternoon the fire blew up uh don was with a group a large group uh at the end of a fire line uh he sent friends of his Missoula smoke jumpers up to the Ridgetop to safety but there was a group back on the fire line uh that he had put In Harm's Way and he went back to what they call clearing the line Tony which is you make sure that everybody's off the line and he died with them well it was a tough decision and I talked to his dad about it and I talked to other people about it and I wound up with his father Bob Mackey standing virtually in the bootprint that Don made at the time he made that decision as to whether or not to join his friends to go up with his friends they expected him to join them uh to safety or to go back and clear the line and because of that decision and talking to his family about it I decided to do a book and I quit the Tribune uh got a book contract and uh next spring I jumped in my Jeep and went out to Storm King Mountain took me five years to do the book uh and I kind of held my breath I mean I I wasn't wasn't old I was 52 years old I had a lot of working life ahead I kids in school and college uh and that thing had to it had to take so I worked very hard I had a wonderful editor and it worked so I've been doing books ever since that is great thank you for sharing that kind of information you you covered several of my questions right up front that wanted to ask and I just was very interested about how you even got to the point to write that book and you covered that wonderfully thank you very much for that um one thing I'd like to do if it's okay with you is to spend a couple minutes uh understanding a little bit about the environment around fires uh activities uh people that are uh part of the process to stop the fire I suspect most people are like me they they know very little about it we hear it on the news we see it and we just go oh my gosh and then we hear when something bad happens we don't really know a whole lot about what's going on but through the course of your book I was the reader will get exposed to certain things and I'm curious if maybe you can share a little bit about it like BLM Hot Shots smoke jumpers hell attacks like these are these are terms I hadn't heard before read reading your book could you spend a minute maybe helping us understand that uh the wild onire Community is a very particular Community uh it's it isn't closed I mean it's not uh elitist at all but it has its own nomenclature as you pointed out BLM usfs and and all these strange names Hot Shots and so on there's there are gradations of of um expertise in fighting fire and the fire crews are not what they were in the 60s and 70s which is kind of a get together and if you got a pair of boots and uh work shirt uh you're good to go it's become very professionalized uh the hot shots are 20 person groups um held together for a season uh the superintendent and perhaps his captain uh which is really the Foreman's job uh may have a seasonal 20 12mth year jobs uh but the others are in for the season out at the end of the season and it's very hard to make a whole living out of that they're not terribly wellp paid and it's kind of like a little family of 20 people uh 5 to 10% are women uh it's mixed uh they go out in the field and sleep together next to each other they're uh close uh they count on each other they their lives depend on each other most of the time those 20 people have got their butts in the air and their noses to the ground building fire line and they count on their superintendent to not be uh building fire line but be standing somewhere where they can see everything that's going on and to keep them safe and get them home safe at the end of the day spoke Jumers uh are a step different from that and of course if they think themselves step above that and some ways they are they are more skilled they are for one thing skilled in jumping out of an airplane uh the hot shots will say well once we get on the ground everybody's the same that's not entirely true uh smoke jumpers are much more individualistic Hot Shots work as a team 20 people they're tied together that way when and you find out when things go to hell uh because all of a sudden smoke jumpers every man himself and woman again the same percentage 5 to 10% of women uh and the Hot Shot doesn't like that they they kind of go like a cvy uh they operate that way smoke Choppers uh more individualistic and then you have the type two Crews what they call the type two Crews which are the crews that are pulled together say at a ranger station and they will be spending a lot of their time building Trail and clearing trails and doing odd jobs around the uh in the ranger dist District uh including burning prescribed Burning uh they're not you know incompetent Cannon F they're they're good people I mean it's good job to have uh we've got a crew like that around us at Cy Lake in Montana where I have a cabin and uh boy they put in a lot of work hours they get a fire they go you get type two cruise on it um so you have to have an structure on top of this to decide well are we going to send the type two Crews or the hot shots or the smoke jumpers this time or maybe we need a helicopter crew to come in there which is entirely different thing you know it is a lot of people but they can get into Back Country faster than anybody get on the ground with with people uh so you have a super structure and for a lot of time that was spread out all over Hill on half of Georgia but is now concentrated at niy which is National Interstate fire Center National inter agency fire Center and you have all the agencies that deal with fire and there are a lot of them uh fish and wildlife is one of them for example I mean it's think of them and there they are the forest service is a big one BLM Bureau of Land Management is a big one uh most people don't have as much contact with the BLM because they take the lands that only God and the BLM love gets the leftovers these huge open tracks uh the forest service gets the forests the National Park Service the parks and so on so all these people are in the same place at nipy uh and a fire call will come in and then they decide what to do and they look for among other things air resources you know there's a whole air fleet that uh deals with fire now uh all the way from great big ones for the jumbo Jets down to small planes so what are you going to put on the fire and this is coordinated and it's pretty well thought out and it's an enormous operation when you say most people don't know about that's true but when you start finding out about it there's an awful lot uh to find out about yeah and the fire itself you know has a lot of say in this but consider the kinds of things that uh that they have to consider right away is this in a place if we let it burn it doesn't do any damage or is this a place where if we let it burn it's going to take out a town uh and kill people and what do you do so these are important decisions uh and they are made now uh in a considered way at the time of the South Canyon fire they were just establishing nify just getting started so that gives you a parameter here that was 1994 wow and so um thanks for describing and explaining that that's very helpful helx hel tax did I say that right is that um the guys who drop in the the smoke jumpers or do are they the ones that do they drop water or like I've heard the term before mud yeah mud is is is different um okay a hellack crew can either arrive by having the helicopter to land and they jump off or if that's not possible let a rope down and they can go down the Rope they know how to do that uh helicopters also are used to drop water and if you ever watch one of these fires it's really interesting because they have a bucket uh underneath and they'll swing buckets swinging underneath the helicopter they go and they drop on the fire and then they go off to uh a place to replenish their water supply and there are these big kind of swimming pool things that are set up impromptu uh and then you have trucks come in and fill the swimming pool and then the helicopter comes down uh with a Bambi bucket and grabs 90 gallons of water or there's a lake uh nearby and they can go dip from the lake and that can get very fast then you have a a scooper plane come in and he can scoop from the lake and uh in the great mythology he can scoop up a couple of scuba divers and drop them on the the fire never happen but they do need people to get out of their way uh so there's a lot going on the helac crews uh there's a a bad example where they weren't used and should have been on the Yarnell hillfire it killed 19 firefighters a while back where the there was a helicopter crew there the day before and they weren't properly used I probably could have gotten the fire um so they're around uh they're capable uh they're highly specialized and when used properly are extremely effective yeah and in this um scenario I'm remembering correct me if I'm wrong I I feel like there were two individuals that were helac uh passed away was it that's right Brownie and Tyler I think is what it was right Brownie and Tyler Rob Bron and and Rich Tyler um they uh were used to fery uh Hot Shots up onto the ridge the smoke jumpers all right this South Canyon fire is a good example of all this kind of working together uh the first people to arrive on that fire were a type two crew from uh nearby and they hiked in a long way from the back uh and flought it one day and didn't get it okay you know no fall of theirs um the next day they sent smoke jumpers and they came in and they dropped onto the fire and then they sent a hot shot crew the primeville hot shots and they drove to the fire to the below the fire and then they were fed up to the Ridgetop by helicopter so you have a lot of moving Parts uh going on and the two hell attack bronan and Tyler operated as a separate unit uh when things went gunny sack uh you had a lot of people on the fire line I talked about that was one unit and they had their own fate and brownan and Tyler were up on the top of the Ridge and they went off on their own and tried to get away from the fire by getting into the head of the Gulch and circling around and they were caught uh there and killed separately but it took him a couple of days to find them which is remarkable because that it isn't it isn't that remote I mean Glennwood Springs the town of Glenwood Springs is right there as I said the interstate highway is right there uh but I think that there was I know that there was a certain reluctance to be very aggressive about that because the people were in shock uh with what had happened they wanted to find them but it the search and rescue was kind of botched the first day it happened crazy um one more General fire question and then and then I want to dive right back into the book and things like that um the you know with a with anybody doing anything um achieving a task whether it's a physician or an electrician there's always a toolbox right um there's something they use can you help paint for our viewers like what what would consist or what would exist in a toolbox of these fire Fighters okay basic firefighting tool is called a palaski it's named for a for service ranger uh who was nearly killed in the Great Fire of 1910 the big blow up of 1910 uh he led his men into a cave uh not all of them survived some of them suffocated he survived and he went his eyes were very badly damaged uh but he spent the the rest of his career developing this tool so you take an axe handle at the end of the axe handle you need two different tools really you need uh kind of a hole so that you can dig fire line fire line is a clearing about 18 Ines wide in most circumstances down to Mineral soil that stops Flames from going across it so you build one of these around a fire and monitor it so that anything that jumps the line you can catch uh and that's the way you fight fire with a fire line basic same so you want to dig but then as you're digging along you get to a root or you get to a tree and so you need an axe so on one end of the plasy is an Axe and on the other end is a hole and this sounds like what could be simpler except you're going to be using this thing sometimes for 12 or 14 hours and if it weighs a ton and it's clumsily made you're dead you can't handle it so he had to get this thing so it was kind of a whiffy that's the word I use for it so it's it's kind of a whip and he did it and it's a it's a thing of beauty the original one is on display at wall Idaho which is a town that was uh whacked by the Big Burn of 1910 and uh he' done it on for service time so he didn't have a personal uh p on it uh but they really screwed him they on his eye damage which came from the fire they never you know it wouldn't happen now you just sue him and get a million dollars but they didn't pay his bills and they didn't treat him right and it just it's a very sad story yeah how that went but he was a very great man we all honor him and the tool has stayed the same I have three or four of them I carry one in my vehicle uh and always have it's nor nously useful yeah uh you know you get into a back country and you got a little uh log across the road you can't get through get the pl P chop it out of there and other uses so it's a great thing that's one tool yeah then everybody you know said well I can make a tool too and so you get different things and with different uses all the way from grass fires where you have a flapper which is a big rubber thing and you flap uh the grass and put the fire out uh down to things that look like rakes and hoes uh and you know the boys and girls get busy in the shop when they're not fighting the fire what do they do they they make things they make things that work for them so you see a whole Spectrum uh of different firefighting tools then you get to uh the people who aren't the Ground Pounders people who are engin they call them engine slugs which isn't fair been around a lot of these guys and they are in fine shape thank you very much U but they have a different thing they have they use water uh interesting how they do it they don't just sit there like a structured firefighter and spray water on the fire use it very judiciously to knock things down uh and then you can move in uh and attack on the ground but that's a whole different set of things uh and a different set of displ iines I mean you have to deal with an engine that is pumping a lot of water which is like a structural uh fire engine you have to know the what the hoses should be what the nozzle should be what the pressure should be how much water you've got left and that kind of thing it's a different game uh and a very affected game that's that's interesting thank you properly yeah little caveat at the end of every one of the yeah because as I'm like in my mind's eye as I'm reading the book I'm thinking and envisioning like the the backpack and the different things you know and I'm thinking to myself some of these firefighters you know and you said you know like you said the hasat are a team so maybe they distributed some of the tools between them I'm not sure but I kept thinking I'm tired just thinking about what they the kinds of things they probably had to carry up there and they're going up this crazy Terrain so it's it's just interesting well think of the basic test that the final test for smoke Jumers which is to carry a 100 pound pack three miles in a stated amount of time I it just what wow I you have to be an absolutely fabulous condition to get into this and you know you can work your way into it type two Crews the standards aren't quite as high and you know Hot Shots and so on smoke jumpers are the ones that are the most demanding but uh there's a whole community that that does this and uh it becomes an important part of their lives and they make the money in the summer to send themselves to Community College uh in the off season and they wind up doing interesting things in life other than fire some people make a profession on a fire and and find different jobs in it but it's a pyramid I mean big bottom on the pyramid lots of people involved fewer and fewer as you go up and bottom like a lot of professions I want to dive back into the book before I do that I thought of one other question real quick um and I'm afraid to that I'll forget about it later quick question what are one or two things that you think people don't your general person doesn't know about these wildfires we need more of them [Music] uh there is a terrible problem today that uh and everybody has written about it and talked about it and you can kind of list the things there are a lot of area that is ready to burn uh the two big changes that I've talked about for 25 years um have been climate change which has made the forest drier and more combustible and the presence and acceleration and development of the Wild on Urban interface which means houses close to areas that are going to burn so that you fight harder for those and you do more for those um you would add to that that uh logging has been it had been stopped but it's really been curtailed um for example my cabin is in C Lake Montana and there's a small Resort town there that is supported heavily by the pyramid Lumber Company one of the last Sawmills around and it's going bankrupt and it's got close before and been saved by loans and one thing or another it looks like this time it may happen catastrophe the for service used to take 60 million board feet a year out of our valleys and now it's next to nothing uh but what they do get they have to Mill and now they're going to have to go somewhere farther to get it milled and so on it's just not a good situation but one of the things that can help is prescribed fire uh in various gues one is having a fire start from lightning natural start and and the whoever is responsible for that land has looked at it ahead of time and said well this is one we can let go and so uh you let it go and it burns out a lot of stuff that needs to be burned out uh another way of doing this is with prescribed fire where you go in and say we need to punch a hole in the forest right here to stop a big fire from uh really getting rolling and we don't need more than about a 30 or 40 acre fire but we need that badly now we need to find time to do that when it the Smoky skies are not going to make everybody within 100 miles um rushing to their phone to complain and the elk hunters in the fall are complaining they don't want smoke on this guy either and well the the window for this happening uh has shrunk uh over the years I used to be able to burn in the fall on my little uh holding C Lake um I take have a slash pile two or three uh small ones and burn it myself get a pal to help you need two people really uh for safety's reason now you can't do that in the fall you have to do it in the spring I'm not there in the spring you know you need snow on the ground uh when you do it so I have when I have one of those I have some friends do it but that's cutting the the burn season in half uh so then when the fires hit we've had two big ones near season Lake that nearly took out the town and one of them was scheduled to take all the cabins including mine uh the wind shifted and it didn't but these are 60,000 plus acre fires we had never had that when I was a kid so these fires are getting bigger uh they are more dangerous because they are getting bigger uh anybody who's been in fire for 25 years will tell you that they're more intense this is very hard to measure this fire is a climate change fire that very hard to do that uh but climate change has had an effect and anybody with any sense just say yeah of course it has you know if things are drier and hotter that's going to affect the fires so that's what's going on it's not healthy it's not good you got fires right now in Canada little early for this sending smoke down into the lower 48 was really bad last year that maybe bad again this year last year we didn't have a bad fire season in the lower 48 these things come and go you can get lucky and get past one and then the next year it's a 10 million acre season so trying to pin everything down is wrong you can't do that but you can say some things in the broad sense that climate change has had an effect more housing has had an effect uh treating the forest with intelligent uh Timber Harvest and fire uh is a way to go but there are hurdles for it all over the place including legal hurdles I mean if you have a prescribed fire you put in the plan you may get sued it may be a very good idea but somebody may not like it an environmental group or whoever and they will sue you and they can stop it the courts get involved in this uh it isn't just you know the guys out in the forest making all the decisions the way they used to and this year we're going to have 60 million board feed coming out of the Swan and Clearwater valleys and if you don't like it tough luck that isn't that was the 60s and 70s not no more yeah thank you for that um yeah I didn't I wouldn't have thought that so but you explained it pretty well so I I'm like okay I see the logic behind needing to do or letting some fires happen or even needing them to happen so um in your preparation for the book just diing back in that direction for a minute um what was the most memorable or impactful moment for you in the research and as you were putting things together was there something that really stood out for you um above other things in the research and prep and writing the book The people uh my entrance into the the wild landfire Community uh the kind of people that I met the friendships that I established some of which I've maintained some of which have been most important friendships of my life Bob and naiden Mackie are gone now but they were friends of mine until their deaths uh and others and it was eye openening it was wonderful and horrible I mean you'd sit with these people uh remembering their kids who were burned to death and it you know it can get very terrible um but they're you get into them as people and you down to the bottom of them in situations like this and the bottom is good yeah well it's interesting I um this next question is where I got this thought from so in a couple weeks I have an interview with um a surviving member of the also mudslide or Landslide situation that happened 2014 and uh little nervous about the interview because I this is a person who's gone through a lot of uh pain and stuff like that and so I'm I was like okay I need to be careful how I approach this because there's probably going to be a lot of raw emotions and feelings as a survivor in your case you were doing some of the same thing um was was that very difficult or did your background as a journalist must help you through that oh yeah I how did you do that yeah I mean my interview technique such as it is is silence um I've been talking a Blue Streak Tony but I'm normally a very quiet person and I think if you convey uh empathy and understanding and make a real effort a real effort to figure this thing out you know to get the facts that's what they respected and I made it a rule that I would always come back um you know I wrote the book I've written five books on fire and my rule was I will always go back and look the people in the eye that I wrote about and if they wanted to say something good better and different I would listen so listening is very important an honest effort to find out about their world is very important and a willingness to to be there to take the consequences of what you write um journalism is not in good odor these days um and one of the criticisms I've had of my fellow journalists is the little people who come in and they write their little story and then they run away and oh you can't touch me because I ran away and may have WR nasty things about you but I'm gone haha that stinks and if you want to write a good book that stands up afterward that's not how you operate one of my books is about the esperons of fire in California and when it was over um there was a gathering in the town where most of the people came from were killed and it was a kind of a movie movie theater Barn kind of thing and I got up on stage and I gave my talk about the book and a PowerPoint program and then they had the engine captains who were with the guy who was killed and his crew that day come up and sit on the stage i' interviewed all of them for the book and sit on the stage and react to the book this was just right after it came out I had no idea what they were going to say and I sat there with them and at the end of that I was happy now that's I wish other people in journalism would behave in a way where they can always come back after they've written a story and look people in the eye that they wrote about yeah thank you yeah that's important and I'm sure those people really appreciated that so much we're friends still I these people the genon captains and I i' maintain they're in California and you know I haven't seen them years and all that but when we do have a some kind of a connection like social the social media is a really good good way to stay in touch it's always mutually respectful um that that book provided so much there's so many things in there and I I I'm going to say it again people you need to read the book it's it's amazing um for you what aspect what he's talking about fire the mountain that's right and and folks I will put that on the screen as well so I thought I'd preempt to yeah no for sure we will I'll probably leave it up the whole time too because I think people need to see it and and go look for that book um but what aspects of or or what from that book what are you hoping the readers will pull away and understand most um because there's so much there yeah I think that uh after far after the South Canyon fire there's a blame game of course always is you know and it's a normal human thing let's not you know pretend that this is some anomaly uh particular just to this thing but a lot of time has passed and I think what I hope people would get out of the book today is if you're in fire get some lessons out of it that's very important uh but get a sense of uh walking where these people walk making the decisions that they made one of the things that came out of the South Canyon fire one of the really marvelous things was the adoption by the United States Forest Service of Staff rides uh each of the regions of the for service has to now have a staff ride what is a staff ride the uh prussians invented this thing and they were great militarists and what you do is you establish decision points or uh around of fire where key decisions were made and then you get a bunch of young kids and you assign them the roles of the people who were involved in those decisions and they go to the actual place where it happened and they've done their reading that's very important so they're all read up on this and they know which character they're playing and then they confront the decisions that were made what is your decision oh it's different from what you thought when you were sitting there oh what the hell they just made the wrong decision should have gone left when they went right that's easy no it ain't easy it's real life uh my Dad's fire uh the man gure fire as I said it's coming up for its 75th Anniversary this year and one of the things that's being done an awful lot of things being done uh manang Gulch is more vibrantly alive today than it was 25 years ago at the 50th uh but they're now going to have a staff ride uh and the decision points the narrator is a guy named Dave Turner who has devoted a lot of his professional life to Manel she really knows the stuff they're going to make make it available online this is marvelous because then what you can take out of it is what a lot of what the people that day experienced how they made their decisions and if you get that out of the book you know some sense of of who these people were as people and how hard those decisions were I mean when bom and I Mackie and I stood at that point where Don made his decision Don was totally alone no one would have faulted him for saving his own life and going with his friends well they would have but let me not say that because they faulted him for everything else until they read my book um these are not simple spur of the- moment kinds of of calls they are life and death calls and when you're on the ground that comes real to you and I hope when you're in the book some of that becomes real to you uh so that you do experience some of what they experienced and get away from making easy judgments uh about the very tough calls that uh people made that resulted in death I mean mistakes were made hey did they make a mistake well they got killed you know that tells you something but how they got there is something where I've always felt you know boy I could have made every one of those mistakes and worse yeah and I think um one of the things that happens too much in society now is a quick judgment on people that have split-second decisions that have huge impacts on their life or others and it's hard because we don't know what that's like and you know your point is exactly right is that you know taking a moment put ourselves in their place I think helps us just have an appreciation for the moment and stop judging people for that because I think most people are trying to do the right thing yeah walk a mile on their fire boots and you talk to me exactly um couple more things we're running close to an hour and I I'm so glad that you get you know that we were able to carve an hour of your time out um would you what would you say to the audience um about the powerful and devastating power or force of forest fires I mean people once again people see it at a distance but what do what would you say about this to them so they could appreciate this when you're around one follow directions and stay the hell away from it I these things are very unpredictable uh and you can see this thing billowing smoking going away from you and two minutes later it's coming right at you uh and they don't the Fire doesn't care does care about you you know doesn't know who you are doesn't know what a wonderful person you are how nice you are to your kids uh you've been a good uh son or daughter yeah you're going to get wiped if you're in the way so uh if you're on the road and you see get stopped and you say oh this is my vacation there stopping me I really wanted to go fishing today or I wanted blah blah blah blah blah U have a little thought for yourself there's a reason you're not being allowed to go in there uh and it's not going to get better it's going to get worse there's going to be more of this kind of thing uh unless climate change is reversed in some way start sucking car carbon out of the air they find something or there's a sunspot that changes it all I mean it ain't going to get better it's just going to keep getting a lot worse yeah yeah um as we move towards the end of the interview what is there anything that probably I should have asked you is there something that you're thinking I always ask people that question at the end and I never go to answer so anything I should have asked you here you know I screw up so and they kind of look blank at me because by then it's been an hour or something like right their mind has turned to Jello yeah I thought I'd ask before we get to the hour point so no I think you asked everything that could possibly be asked Tony you did a great job awesome hey this has been great uh before we wrap up once again people read this book I I keep one of the memories I have of the book is the the moment and I can't remember his name I tried so hard to remember his name where he burned he got his arms burned um and he was and he had to come back and and get treated hipy yes hipkey I was like that moment that we're going through that in the book I was just like oh man oh man you know powerful there so many like that he was off being a smoke jumper by the end of that season he's incredible physical specimen became a very very good friend of mine the last I haven't seen him in a long time I think he's retired now from the forest service but uh absolutely wonderful guy helped me enormously uh when I wrote the account that you're talking about of his burning it was very hard to write because he didn't remember it all that well he'd remember it one way one time and another way another time and we wound up with me at my computer right here in this room with Eric right here on my shoulder going through that now what about this is this sentence what about the that kind of thing W uh so that at the end he said you know this is explained to me what happened so I didn't really understand before what happened but because we walked it through step by step by step and done it over and over and over and over and over again I think now I have a real understanding of how I was burned he broke away from the main group and Powerful guy with legendary legs and and made it up the Ridge and just as he got to the Ridgetop Boom the fire hit him from the back did he jump or was he pushed and he couldn't figure it out wow well when we finally settled it you see in the book you know both things happened uh yeah but account there is one that uh was earned with Blood Sweat and Tears yes powerful moment among many in that book um what's next for you John oh I got tired of writing about fire because I started getting sad and uh uh so I've been writing about fishing and I've got two books out in home Waters which is Chronicle of my family uh in Montana mostly and I wrode a long forward to Ernest Hemingway's Big two-hearted River as a consequence of Home Waters and I've been writing about Hemingway and fishing since and uh uh I'm working on shorter pieces Tony because I don't really want to take on a book book book my books took me five years uh and I'm not of an age where that is really a good idea put you know but my doctors look me says you know you're doing really well all things considered and so I'm doing really well and I'm having fun and I'm writing uh a piece right now I'm putting not writing it yet I'm putting it together for I hope for Field and Stream on the rewards and challenges of fishing uh late in life uh where you lose some things and you gain some things called fishing into the Twilight and uh it's opened up a lot of uh things I hadn't thought about uh that are really very good there are two rivers in my life big ones that have gotten better in the last 30 years I mean how many rivers can you say that about as trout fishing rivers the Blackfoot River in Montana has gotten better thanks to my dad's book the river runs through it and a lot of work by a lot of people and hen Creek in Pennsylvania Dead Center Pennsylvania which I fished for 30 years I was just up there last week and had the best day I've ever had on it wow um the fish have gotten steadily bigger the average fish has gotten steadily bigger over those 30 years because of changes in regulations yesterday I spent uh a while on the phone talking to state fish biologist about why that has happened and what the future looks like so that some things can get better and when you're at my stage of Life uh where you're looking about you know how are we going to wind this up and I think that the the people I've seen who are happy are the ones who are dealing with conservation who are trying to leave it better than they found it and have succeeded in some ways and are either watching that go forward and maybe hoping that somebody else will pick up the standard and carry it on or just uh enjoying a great day on pens streek because things have gotten better uh and finding out how that happened uh and trying to give it a little push so that's what I'm doing that's great that is wonderful well as we get ready to button this episode up um how can people tie into you follow you connect with you see what you know just see what's going on is there a a way for them to I have a website John mlan books.com and I don't keep it up to date but I am on Facebook and uh that's fairly up to date if you're going to ask to be friended please have more than one photo and uh say something about yourself if somebody has a friend request and there's nothing in there about themselves like sorry you know who the hell are you right uh and you get a lot lot of these weird things coming I think they're pirated uh profiles but anybody who's got a good solid uh uh Facebook page and wants to good friend it up I'm perfectly happy to do it and uh I'm not your pen pal uh but we might exchange a a message once a year or less uh depending and you can always buy the books yes uh you can buy them uh sign copies through the website uh happy to do that there's a whole I have a little thing I'll send you on how to do that uh I'm not begging it I'm happy with my marketing and sales I'm not barking for it but it's there and some people like that and one of the popular things that I have sold are first editions of my dad's book of river runs through it a little blue book those are expensive um but those can be had uh that's my life wonderful that's been great let me keep you on for a minute when we close off the interview but I want to wish you a great summer and so all the success in your future work and maybe we'll bump into each other down the road and I can chat with you again but it's been a lot of fun today and as we wrap up I just want to say to everybody out there remember there's a lot of strange and unexpected out there in our universe and in our reality keep your mind your eyes and your heart open and until next time stay safe thank you for listening to high strangeness this was a glance at some of the strange that exists in our reality