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(Courtesy Brian Connor) Zigzag Hotshot Crew Member and Squad Boss, 1976–1980 “I wasn’t a natural athlete, but I could hike, I could carry heavy stuff, and I was familiar with the outdoors, so I was good at it.” Kimberly Brandel Kimberly Brandel, shown here in Minnesota in 1976 during her first season with the Zigzag Hotshots, was the first woman to be hired to Zigzag and one of the first women to work on a hotshot crew in the Pacific Northwest. “My best attribute for firefighting was endurance, and I think that’s common for most women who do this,” she says, noting that she’d spent her youth and teenage years backpacking in the Sierra Nevada with her dad. While she was new to the world of wildland fire, it didn’t take long for Husari to realize that she was well suited for the rigors of hotshotting. For them, it was just a job, and they were there, and they liked it, and I was also there, and that was it.” “Many of them had been in the Vietnam War and had moved up to the mountains when they came home. “The guys were a little bit older and very protective of me,” she says. Still, her experience on Lassen was overwhelmingly positive: Husari says she wasn’t treated differently than her male colleagues, except that her coworkers often looked out for her, particularly because she was just 21 when she was hired.
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“I still don’t know why they decided to hire a woman. She was the first woman on the crew and one of the first women on a hotshot crew in the state. Husari was hired to Lassen, a hotshot crew in Northern California, in 1976. It helped me form the basis for my understanding of fire ecology,” she says. “You don’t have many more opportunities to just watch fire burn like you do on hotshot crews, and there’s no better way to learn about fire. In 2012, she retired from the NPS Pacific Northwest Region, where she served as the regional fire management officer. The two seasons Sue Husari spent as a hotshot led to a 45-year career in fire management. (Courtesy Paul Steffy) Lassen Hotshot Crew Member, 1976–1977 Sue Husari Sue Husari lights brush during a burnout operation in California in 1977. They shared stories of blatant sexism and harassment, but they also shared their triumphs. I learned about the days that made them feel alive, about the fires and shifts they’ll never forget, about policies they changed for the women who came after them. They laughed as they recalled hard shifts and recounted their experiences working in a field that, prior to 1975, due to few women applying and many supervisors not hiring women, had attracted only men. Over phone calls and cups of coffee, I asked them to share their memories of the job that united us, despite the decades that separated our time doing it. When the 2019 fire season ended, I tracked down some of these women and their peers, the first women to hold positions on hotshot crews in California and the Pacific Northwest. I could see myself in them and in the tired, genuine smiles that can only result from days of hard work. Though decades separated us, their expressions were familiar to me-their eyes creased with joy and exhaustion. With their clothes and faces covered in ash, they were hardly distinguishable from their male colleagues, besides the occasional messy braid or ponytail.
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As I took the pictures off the wall, I noticed a few women in early images. Early last season, while we waited for a fire assignment, I was tasked with building shelves for 40 old crew photos dating back to the mid-1970s. Forest Service hotshot crew near Mount Hood, Oregon. For the past two summers, I’ve worked as one of four women on a U.S.