Members who have been around for a few months may recall that I survived a U.S. Forest Service plane crash in 1962. I was in that aircraft voluntarily to take photographs for a newspaper story I was writing about fire fighting in New Mexico's Gila National Forest; I was a part-time stringer for the Southwestern New Mexico edition of the El Paso Times.
I was acting not as a impartial observer, but as an active cheerleader for the Forest Service and its efforts to fight fires. The Gila Forest had been my playground for several years, and I fully supported any efforts to keep it from burning up. Smokey Bear was my friend!
Today, I realize that the Forest Service was fighting a battle that it should have ignored, and that it's efforts, as "successful" as they were, were setting the stage for disaster by allowing the forest floor to become carpeted with a deep blanket of dead twigs, branches, leaves, needles, bark, and logs. In short, they were feeding future fires. In recent years there have been some of the largest fires in the forest's history right in the areas where I used to hike and camp. One of the victims was my Boy Scout camp, camp Tuff Moses, which was abandoned years ago because of the danger that the hundreds of boys who went there every summer might easily have been trapped by fire. In fact, one of the worst of the fires occurred just two or three years ago on Signal Peak, which was one of the scouts' hiking destinations for day hikes.
I recently read about a scientific study in the Gila Forest, based on the longevity ponderosa pines in a firey environment. The researchers determined that trees that had been growing since pre-colonial times had "suffered" from scores of fires, but nevertheless thrived. Because of the lack of duff on the forest floor, the fires, apparently, weren't hot enough to destroy the trees, much less the soil like recent fires are doing.
The men I worked with when I was writing my story were all earnest, hard workers who believed that what they were doing was the right thing to do, rather like some politicians in my past who believed that intervening in other people's conflicts was the right thing to do. In short, Forest Fires were on an equal par with Communism in the political mind. In both types of situations, however, the people in charge were simply charging ahead, armed with inadequate information. Unfortunately, there was and still is an consequence of all that fire-suppression activity: injury and death.
While I was still in high school, a teenage smokejumper was permanently paralized when he landed on a large rock in the Gila.
The airport from which the Forest Service's tanker planes and bird dog planes operated was about 11 miles (19 kilometres) southeast of my home in Silver City. Late one summer afternoon, my dad I and I saw two TBM tankers, heavily laden with borate slurry, clamoring for altitude as they headed for a fire in the Gila. Their flight path took them right over our house. Long after sunset, when it was nearly dark, just one of the TBMs flew back, low and fast, heading for the airport. We learned the next day that the 19-year-old pilot of the other plane had clipped a mountain top just as he was heading for his drop point, and crashed into the canyon below. The photograph at the right, below, likely shows the TBM that survived that flight; I took the photo about half an hour before I took off on my own fateful flight. (The photo at the left shows a B-25 Mitchell bomber repurposed as tanker. I couldn't fly in that plane that day becaue it was being serviced):
One of the models in my stash is a TBM that I plan to build as the TBM in this photo.
Bob