May 23th

9C mixed sun and cloud.
Well I got the fire story finished last night, I have to admit it was not very exciting story-wise, but fighting it was a little more than routine. Nowadays there would have been a skidder dragged water tank with a fire pump attached some where available. We probably wouldn't be allowed to utilize a virtually lightless Cat and wouldn't be able to work the men for 18 to 20 hours.

I checked into the office as soon as I got back, George greeted me as I went through the door with, “ Sure Glad you left that note, I figured for sure it was goin’ ‘over the hill’ in all that down stuff.”

  I replied, “It was tough with only a D2 and hand tools, but the night air and no wind made the difference. I’ve found a really small supply of water but I have to make some kind of a pump that will handle it. Can you get hold of someone from the hardware store and see if they’ll open up to sell us a washing machine pump? I’m going to see that fellow on the edge of town that does lawn mower and roto-tiller repairs.”

  A short while later the Forest Service were the new owners of a used roto-tiller engine and a brand new washing machine pump. Corny, the dispatcher arrived just as I got back to the office, together we screwed down the motor and the pump onto a small rectangle of plywood and after another call to the hardware store owner and some more purchases of some pulleys, a couple drive belts and almost all the garden hose he had instock we had us something that should pump water.

  We filled up a five gallon bucket with water and dropped in a short piece of hose for a suction hose. In seconds after the motor was fired up we had water coming out of a fifty foot length of hose screwed on to the discharge side of the pump. It worked!

  I headed straight back to the fire, by the time I got there the makeshift reservoir was about twenty feet long, six feet wide and about six inches in depth, it was almost full of water.  We set up the pump and in a few minutes were pumping muddy water accelerating the mop-up. Even then we emptied the little pond in about a half an hour and then waited an hour for it to refill. By the time the relief crew arrived I felt comfortable in sending back the fellows that had worked so hard overnight.  Two days later we declared the fire out but I had Jules and Jerry continue to check it for another week.

We eventually made a better base for our little pump and that fall it was officially taken on to our inventory and was called “Nor-King 1”, it was the only one of its kind in the Forest Service. 

  I no longer remember what we named that small fire, in retrospect we should have called it Lucky; we were lucky the reporting pilot recognized the bubble in the smoke as unusual, we were lucky that there was no wind, we were lucky that Jules had the ingenuity to make ‘coffee tin’ lights and we were lucky for the small supply of ground water.