Forever Young

When Bill Young arrived on the scene of a three-acre Custer County forest fire Aug. 3, it was his eighth decade of responding to fires as either a paid or volunteer firefighter.

You read that right.

For every decade since the 1950s, Young has been answering the call to help others and fight fire. The majority of people don’t even live eight decades, let alone do something as rigorous as fighting fire for eight decades. Young credhis good genes and the good Lord for still being able to fight fire as he approaches his 80th birthday.

As he flips through his three scrapbooks dedicated to his time fighting fire, the memories burn as bright as many of the blazes he has battled. He remembers the places he traveled and the fires he fought. Perhaps most importantly, he remembers the people he stood shoulder to shoulder with on the fire lines.

He beams with pride as he talks about his brothers in fire and deflects praise from himself onto others—it’s not about him, he says—it’s about all who have fought fire and taken time to volunteer to help others.

“It’s one of those things,” he says as he looks at an old photo of him and his former helitack crew. “We look out for each other.”

The fire Young responded to Aug. 3 as a member of the Pringle Volunteer Fire Department was on a ranch on a “pretty good slope,” and that ended up being around three acres. A bevy of government entities also helped keep the blaze in check.

The first fire Young ever fought was back to 1959, when he was 18 years old. The fire was the Alkalai Draw Fire that burned north of the former Linde Sawmill in the Limestone area. It was his first seasonal job as a firefighter with the U.S. Forest Service. He was stationed at Junction Ranger Station, which no longer exists.

In 1959 Young needed summer work to save money for college. He was hired by the Forest Service to work as a wilderness ranger on Harney Range before getting into fire. Even after graduating from Black Hills State University in 1963 and becoming a lifelong educator and coach, he continued seasonal work with the Forest Service every summer, sans a couple of summers in the 1970s.

Not only has Young attacked fire from the ground, he has attacked it from the air. In 1961 he became part of the Black Hills Helitack crew, which he remained a part of until 1998. It is the that crew’s job to fly via helicopter to the fire and get as close as possible to put firefighters on the ground for an initial attack.

Over the years, Young has fought fire in several states, including Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico and, of course, South Dakota. Some fires are ordinary while others are seared into his memory. Among those is the South Canyon Fire, a 1994 wildfire that took the lives of 14 wildland firefighters on Storm King Mountain near Glenwood Springs, Colo.

According to a National Geographic article, when the South Canyon Fire exploded into a blowup, there were 49 firefighters scattered across an area later known as Hell’s Gate Ridge, which extends like a an arm of Storm King Mountain. 

The smoke jumper in charge, Don Mackey, directed one group to safety. He then faced a daunting choice: stay with the group headed for safety or hike back into dense brush to check on a dozen firefighters digging and cutting a fire line to contain the flames. He turned back to join the firefighters in the brush.

Mackey, with the fire below him in the canyon now racing toward the firefighters, power-hiked to catch the endangered firefighters who had seen the fire erupt in the gulch below them and had turned back, heading away from the flames along the fire line they previously had cleared. Mackey caught up to them where the line turned 90 degrees upward, toward the ridge top.

The group tried to outrun the fire and even considered deploying their fire shelters, according to survivor testimony. Mackey, two other smoke jumpers and nine others, all members of the Prineville Hotshots from Prineville, Ore., did not make it out.

The tragedy accelerated technical advances in battling wildfires, from a new generation of fire shelters—small, protective “mummy” bags carried by firefighters as their last defense from flames—to improved communications. It also now more acceptable for firefighters to speak up or even decline assignments they consider too dangerous.

Young was on a Helitack crew on the fire and says, “A lot of things went wrong,” including weather that fanned the flames and whipped up the fire coming in earlier than was expected or reported. The fire covered three-eighths of a mile in 25 seconds and burned more than 2,000 acres in three hours. Stories of the fire and tragedy litter the internet and Young has a copy of Newsweek Magazine about the fire, which includes a photo of him and the others on his helitack crew.

His first big fire, however, came in 1960: the Whitehorse Fire that burned from near Oreville Campground to Reno Gulch. He was 19 years old  and says he survived it only because of training.

Young was one of the first guys on top of a hill working to stop the fire when it was only three acres. In those days, communication wasn’t as advanced as it is today (nor were uniforms: “If you had blue jeans and a long-sleeved shirt, you were ready to go,” Young said). He watched as a lead pilot came over him with a slurry bomber behind. The lead pilot flopped its wings directly over where Young was standing. Young knew what that meant: the bomber was being directed to dump its slurry there. The loads may be liquid, but they are heavy enough to break off trees.

In short, he needed to get out of there, and fast.

“I took off down the hill as fast as I could and crawled under the rock,” he said.

It made him appreciate his training—he preaches safety and training—and says that was the closest call he ever had while fighting fire.

“That one was close enough,” he said.

The Whitehorse Fire also saw him work a fire with his father who answered a call to sawmills for able bodies to help battle the blaze. Later, he also got to work with his son, Steve, another seasonal firefighter, on some fires. He occasionally sees students on fires, as well.

He recalls a 1994 fire in Colorado when he received a radio call saying there were firefighters coming in and one man in particular needed to be watched: a firefighter in a white hardhat. That firefighter turned out to be Secretary of the Interior.

“He got out and I’m at the door and he starts walking back into the tail rotor,” Young says with a laugh. “I grabbed his arm and said, ‘Sir, we are going down this way.’”

The secretary stayed with the firefighters and worked beside them the entire day.

Young’s final fire assignment on the helitack crew was in Ely, Minn., in 1998. His crew received a letter of praise from the regional forestor for its superior work. Young left the crew that year after roughly 20 years of service due to a melanoma diagnosis, which he later beat.

And as far as the largest fire in Black Hills history, the 2000 Jasper Fire, Young was teaching at St. Thomas More High School in Rapid City when it exploded and was called to work logistics. It wasn’t an easy task coordinating resources, meals, etc.

“I got a whole new appreciation for anybody running logistics,” he says with a laugh.

These days, Young answers calls for the Pringle department and says he feels like he still has something to offer a fire department.

“I don’t know if it’s an adrenaline rush or not. You’re just trying to be there to keep it from being a major fire,” Young says of being drawn to firefighting, noting his expertise is in wildland fires, as opposed to structure fires.

While he doesn’t know if he will make it to a ninth decade of fighting fires, the soon-to-be octogenarian said as long as he feels he can still get the job done, he will continue to scratch that itch.

“We will see what the good Lord has in mind for me,” he says. “It’s been a good life. When I find out I can’t do the job, it will be time to hang up the boots.”