longest wildland shift?

[Snider]

lets here some of the long shift stories.

My longest was 28 hours, we were a very young crew based in Alberta and on loan in Yukon Territory. We had a couple days in doing loaded patrols for Initial Attack and then got sent to a bigger fire close to Haines Junction.

We started at 8:00 and were on the fire about noon. We spent all day working hot spots and later were assigned a section to work and patrol fire guard. I think they forgot about us, or at least what our schedule was, we just kept going and noon the next day were sent into town for a sleep while camp was built. I remember at the time wanting to stay on for the rest of the day, I was having too much fun. But, collapsed right after some lunch and found my bed.

It was my first big exciting fire, so I did not want to miss anything, much was learned then and after....ah, the old days!

[cdnbacon]

My longest shift was 28 hours as well. It was my first summer which was 2003 and we were at the end of a 14 day deployment. We were in Sicamous at the time when the Barriere fire started.

We were able to call one day that was earlier in the tour a light duty (we cheated a bit) day so that would allow us to extend our tour to 19 days.

We left Sicamous at 6 am for Kamloops to get our marching orders. What we didn't know was that another fire started near Falkland where homes were being evacuated. So we eventually made our way to Falkland.

In 2003 there was a shortage of Forest Service personnel that could run fires so we had fire wardens running the show.

After running around all doing different things such as dropping off personnal gear, start hot spotting at one spot to get sent to another before we were finished. We eventually got our orders to do a burn off. We had to wait until 3 am to start our burn off. This was my first burn off and being at night it was quite the show. We finally finished burning off and got back to our trucks at abouit 5:30 am where we were supposed to wait for the next shift to replace us. Needless to say as soon as we got in the trucks we passed out. I'm not even sure if the other crew came, but we did get off the clock eventually at about 10 am.