Notes From S-130/190 at Colorado Firecamp

Wildland fire training reflects what experienced firefighters already understand: success depends less on individual heroics than on coordination, constraints, and how systems behave under pressure.

That was the main impression I took from S-130/190 at Colorado Firecamp, a course that combined classroom instruction with live and controlled burns, and put a steady, unsentimental focus on how fires go wrong even when people do many things right.

The course moved deliberately between theory and practice. In the classroom, we learned doctrine, terminology, and historical lessons. In the field, we learned what those ideas actually feel like when you add heat, smoke, uneven terrain, and limited visibility.

Every drill, exercise, and burn circled back to those four elements, and to what happens when even one of them starts to weaken.

The People in the System

The group itself was more diverse than I expected.

Many participants were younger, physically capable, quick to coordinate, and early in their working lives. Alongside them were older Colorado residents who owned property in fire-prone areas and had joined volunteer crews after losing insurance coverage or watching nearby communities burn. They talked less about careers and more about terrain, access roads, and how thin suppression resources already are.

The incentives were visible even when no one said them out loud. Suppression is funded. Mitigation is harder to sustain. Response is rewarded. Preparation often is not. Several people were not there to become firefighters so much as to protect places they already lived.

That difference mattered.

Camaraderie and the Cost of Undervaluation

There was a real sense of camaraderie. It was not performative and not tied to mythology. It grew naturally out of shared risk, discomfort, and responsibility, and from knowing that everyone else there had made the same basic calculation about what was worth showing up for.

That camaraderie also made something else hard to ignore: how poorly this work is supported and recognized.

Wildland firefighting is often described as unskilled labor, which misses the point entirely. The defining feature of the job is not credential scarcity but risk scarcity. The work requires people who are willing to operate for long periods in dangerous, unstable environments, away from family, breathing smoke, carrying heavy loads, and accepting a real chance of injury or death.

The defining feature of the job is not credential scarcity but risk scarcity.

That willingness is rare.

The job is not glamorous. It involves long deployments, cumulative health costs, physical punishment, and pay that does not match the level of risk. And yet the system often treats this labor as interchangeable, as if there will always be an unlimited supply of people ready to step forward regardless of conditions.

There will not be.

I left the course with deep respect for the people who do this work for a living. It requires accepting physical strain, time away from family, long-term health risks, and environments that never fully stop being dangerous. Experience lowers risk but never removes it. This work continues not because it is easy or abundant, but because a small number of people keep showing up. That deserves far more support and seriousness than it receives.

What I saw at Firecamp were people who understood the stakes clearly. They were not there for recognition. They were there because someone had to be.

The gap between the value this work provides and the support it receives is not an oversight. It is a structural failure.

Tools, Crews, and Coordination

We trained on a wide range of tools, equipment, and procedures, far more than can be cleanly listed from memory. McLeods, combi-tools, radios, and fire shelters were only part of it. What mattered was not memorizing names, but understanding how each tool fits into a coordinated system of work.

Nothing was taught in isolation.

Most of the training happened in hand crews, with a strong emphasis on spacing, pacing, and moving as a unit. We practiced advancing, holding, and repositioning together, and saw quickly how small individual misalignments compound into larger problems. Communication was not treated as commentary. It was treated as a control input.

Radio discipline, verbal calls, and non-verbal cues all mattered. Drills were set up so that success depended less on individual competence and more on shared clarity. When crews moved well, the work felt almost quiet. When they did not, friction showed up immediately.

In this environment, coordination is the skill. Tools are just interfaces.

Live Fire Without Romance

The live and controlled burns were intentionally restrained. This was not spectacle. It was calibration.

Fire behavior was slow enough to observe but fast enough to punish complacency. Watching flame move with wind and terrain made it clear why situational awareness is not an individual trait. It is a shared responsibility. No single person sees everything. The system only works if information moves.

Fire does not reward cleverness. It rewards correct sequencing, spacing, and attention. Many drills existed solely to drive that point home.

Learning Explicitly From Failure

One of the most sobering parts of the course was incident review.

We watched replays of fires that went wrong, including incidents involving experienced crews and qualified leadership. These were not framed as moral failures or individual incompetence. They were framed as systems breaking under changing conditions such as weather shifts, communication breakdowns, and misjudged escape routes.

People died in these scenarios. That fact was never softened.

The lesson was not fear. It was humility. Experience reduces risk, but it does not eliminate it.

Constraints of the Field

Across many discussions, a consistent picture emerged:

This is work defined by constraint. The environment sets the terms. Everything else adapts or fails.

Recalibration, Not Resolution

I came to S-130/190 curious about what happens when attention is placed back into a system with immediate feedback and real constraint. Not as an escape, but as a way to recalibrate how effort and consequence relate.

What I found instead was clarity about where I might actually be useful.

I do not expect to fight fires full-time. But the need for mitigation, preparedness, tooling, coordination, and support, especially in ways that sit outside frontline suppression, is only growing. Volunteering and contributing where possible now feels grounded rather than abstract.

This course did not offer resolution. It offered calibration, a clearer sense of how attention, communication, and incentives behave under real constraint.

That alone made it worth doing.