HeliBarbie and the Mad Cow

He he he. Had to throw a silly title in there one of these blogs. I'll get back to the reason behind that title in a bit. Funny story. Wow, it has been an amazing week with this fire since we came back. We did 28 days on it last month and it’s still going strong. We have been here since last Friday and will be here till the 31st I think. We are going to do 21 days most likely then return to our forest, Independence of course, then who knows, back here!!!! Just yesterday, Wednesday, I flew helco all day 7.8 hours of flying, and watched the fire do crazy things. It is burning in every direction from the south, to the east, to the north, and hooking back around to the west back towards the direction where it started! It’s going to tie in with that whole north west end we had PSD’d to close off. Then it could and will continue further west and north if we don’t get a handle on it. It was gotten so big and just too many heads on it. The other day it looked like a monster with all of the heads of smoke and what looked like arms of fire reaching out from every aspect of the fire spreading and growing. I’ve seen and done so much in the past week that I have tried to make quick notes of little things I just wanted to talk about that I think are funny or interesting so bear with me as I will go back and forth with silly stories and silly things.

I have read everyones comments and soooo appreciate them. I love reading your comments and will get back to them soon.

Okay, so helibarbie and the mad cow, well a few days or so ago on one of my recons one of the ops people was a woman and she sat up front with me. Found out she is an airplane pilot. Well at the end of our flight the other ops guy on board said his daughter wants to be a pilot and wanted a photo of the two lady pilots. After our picture, she called me heli Barbie.

Then she called herself fire Barbie. Just thought that was kind of funny and cool. Lol.

The mad cow, well he’s actually a bull, but I like mad cow since I was told he was a mean bull and very stubborn. Few days ago I was flying helco and watching the guys on the ground light back fires and this mad cow wouldn’t move! He ran a bit then grazed and layed down for a bit and ate some more all the while they were burning around him. I so badly wanted to get down there and heli heard him to get him out of the way. I worried that he was going to get boxed in if he didn’t move. It was funny to watch but like I said, I was scared for him. I found out today, Thursday from one of the L.A. County guys on my recon, Zack, that the cow made it! Yay!!!! He eventually got across the line and out of the firing operation. Zack was down there during the ground firing ops.

Another interesting thing…..was flying helco again another day and one of the pilots dropping water, Barry, said there were turtles in the Siquoc where he was dipping out of. Poor little guys! He said they swam out of the way of his bucket, but pretty cool that there are turtles down there.



Okay, now we are on Thursday. I started writing this Wednesday. So today I flew tactical recons all day. Pretty exciting stuff. I saw it all, well most of it anyway. Flew the entire fire line and went into some pretty hairy canyons with visibility that was maybe a ¼ mile at times and sometimes you could only see the terrain if it was right in front of you. Trust me, it was not dangerous, but it sure was an adrenaline rush flying around in the smoke with 100-200 foot flame lengths at times right out my door. Towards the middle of the day to the end of the day I worked with the firing branch on burn ops. That was exciting and fun as well. Frustrating at times when we kind of lost the line, but still at the same time, just amazing to be out there and be a part of it. I can’t believe I get paid to be up there. We stayed on the line till close to dark(pumpkin time it’s called) and it was awesome to be up there, to see the flames all around, the smoke columns, the sunset was amazing, and the embers glowing on the mountains, it was really really pretty.

Spent most of Thursday watching the helitorch ship in action. Always fun to watch that. All of the fire on the north side was all helitorch and drip torch(from the ground guys) that made the majority of the new smoke column on the north Thursday.

Forgot to mention the archeological sites and historic sites out here on this fire. I don’t know much about them but what I do know is that because we are not allowed to use dozers to cut line where the arch sites are, like the line we were working yesterday, that is part of the reason we can’t stop this fire. Just part of the reason. There are many factors, wind, temps., fuel(plants), terrain, etc. And lack of resources too. We could sure use some more helicopters here over on the north end. So at that arch site, the dozer had to stop and only hand line was put it. Kind of hard to have good separation of the fire crossing a hand line with the spotting as well as not being able to put safety zones out there to get more guys on the line to stop it. Although I must say, I’ve seen some cool stuff out here. Lots of amazing rock formations and we flew next to some caves on day last month on the fire and checked out some Indian paintings! Pretty cool! Also flew next to some old cabins. Felt like I flew back in time as if I was on the little house on the prairie set or something.

So more interesting things happened. Thursday, one of the turtles from the Sisquoc ended up in a pilots bucket(I’m sure more have not been as lucky as this little guy)during a drop on helispot 18 for dust abatement during troop shuttles, etc. Anyway, one of the guys picked him up and apparently he survived and now he will have a home with the guys son. He’s a little guy. Pretty cool story.

Last night another interesting thing…..during the tanker retardant drops I couldn’t help but wonder how many red rabbits are running around the forest. There are soooo many rabbits out there that I see running around under us as I fly by. Some of them must get painted. Just a thought.

So I guess Chatsworth couldn’t wait. I get back to the hotel tonight and have a message from my friend Bob that Chatsworth had another quake. I am seriously hoping the earth just has IBS right now and is releasing some sort of pressure on a regular basis. Sounds like it wasn’t too bad and everything is okay back home. I should be home this weekend for my 2 days off.


Okay, now it’s Friday morning. I’m sitting here in my rental car at the helibase and just wanted to mention if I haven’t that despite my reservations about coming out to a low elevation fire in the beginning, I am having the best time out here. We have a great crew, and super great people on this fire. Everyone is really fun to work with and despite our helibase location, it’s an awesome base with the people we have here. Sometimes I feel like I’m missing out on my days off when I have to leave. Have a great weekend everyone.