Sam Forstag

Oh, perfect.

We're starting on the right foot.

So I got to have some way to make sure we get a second interview in, you know, give it all at once.

Smokejumpers are just another kind of wildland firefighter.

We are aerially delivered, so we parachute into remote wildfires to put them out before they grow.

And the way the smokejumping program has always been pitched since 1939 when it started is speed, range, and payload.

So we jump out of fixed-wing aircraft, out of airplanes, parachute at 3,000 feet nowadays on the system that we use.

And it's just another way to get to a fire with less hiking, but a whole lot more on the back end.

that sounds scary that sounds a little scary for my taste it can be yeah yeah depending on how big the jump spot is it's either terrifying or beautiful but a way i i read an interview with a russian smoke jumper and the way he described smoke jumping is for three minutes fly like eagle and for three weeks dig like mole and that seemed pretty accurate to me

Oh, absolutely.

I mean, it used to be fire season in parts of the West.

It's just a year-round occasion now.

You know, you got fires in Colorado or California that are burning all the way through December or January.

And that means a whole lot more resource needs that we're all paying for.

And it's both the fact that summers are hotter and drier and longer.

And it's also the fact that we have 100 years of large scale fire suppression on the landscape and disinvestment from active forest management, from the sort of things that you would do between fire seasons to make sure that homes and the wild and urban interface don't have trees growing right up to your back porch.

And to make sure that those fires aren't quite so hard to fight once they start.

That's a lot of what I'm learning to change.

Right.

It's the fact that when we disinvest up front, whether it's wildfire or health care, we end up in a state of constant crisis response governance where we all end up paying so much more for so much less.