Kelly Ramsey spent two years as a hotshot firefighter in California beginning in 2020.
As a woman, she was an outlier on the crew. She said women make up only about 5% of specialized wildfire crews. In her new memoir, “Wildfire Days: A Woman, a Hotshot Crew and the Burning American West,” she said she had to prepare mentally and physically to perform like her male counterparts.
“I thought, ‘I need to show what a woman can do,’ Ramsey said. “It wasn’t just, ‘I need to show what I can do,’ but I need to be able to vindicate or prove that any woman can do this.”
10 questions with Kelly Ramsey
What is a hotshot wildland firefighter?
“A hotshot goes through a very specific kind of training and series of qualifications … Hotshot crews often are asked to go to the most difficult, dangerous, or just sort of hard-to-reach parts of a wildfire. So we train a bit harder and have to do a certain number of pull-ups and push-ups. You have to run a mile and a half at a certain pace. So yeah, a lot of people will say it’s kind of like the special forces of wildland fire or the Navy SEALs of wildland fire.”
Not only were you the only woman on the crew that first year, but you were also in your late 30s. At that point in your life, why did this idea of chasing fire as a hotshot appeal to you?
“I’m not exactly sure. It might not have been a wise choice, but you know I just sort of stumbled into it. I was working for the Forest Service already, and the town in which I lived, Happy Camp, is a really especially fire-prone part of California, so I had seen some local wildfires and I was just surrounded by firefighters. And the more I saw them do the job and learned about fire, the more fascinated I became.”
There was a hike at the beginning of your first season. The crew heads up a mountain carrying all kinds of heavy gear. You’ve mentioned the physical demands of this job, but how did you prepare for that?
“The training for a crew like ours actually begins the previous fall. You spend five to six months just hiking up the steepest hill you can find, and by hill, I mean a vertical mountain, and you try to carry as much weight as you can. So I would always carry at least 45 pounds, which is the standard weight of a wildland firefighter’s pack. But then, often I would add extra weight or I would carry a chainsaw.
“You want to be able to carry 65 [to] 70 pounds, but it’s also it’s like a training montage; you have to do a lot of running and a lot of running hills and then push-ups, pull-ups, sit-ups, wall sits, weight training. I trained at least six days a week for those six months … and then when the whole crew comes on together in May, you spend about a month training physically and in a classroom to prepare for the season.”
Did you feel pressure to perform like the men on your crew?
“I felt some pressure from them, to be sure, but I think the greatest pressure came from myself. That first hike that you mentioned, I didn’t perform well despite having trained for the entire offseason. And I just felt incredibly humiliated and terrified. I was like, ‘I have to get up to speed’ because not only do I need to do that in order to just be a competent member of the crew, but I’m the only female and I need to show them what women can do, what I can do.”
“Wildfire Days” is not just a book about fire. It’s also a very personal book about your relationships: with your fiancé at the time, with the other men on the crew. You also write about your complicated relationship with your dad, who is an alcoholic. He left your mother when you were a child. How much did that shape this journey of yours, fighting fires in the mountains?
“I think that my own backstory, my own life up to that point, was really shaping what drove me to go to the mountains in the first place. I don’t think I necessarily recognized that completely at the time, but yeah, I had this impulse to go out into the world and especially to go out into nature always seeking something.
“I was looking for myself in a way, but I was also looking for my true family or a place where I could feel at home, and so I think in a lot of ways that’s what led me to the Forest Service and also what drew me to fire, that sense of trying to find myself and trying to find a place where I belonged.”
2020 was a historic year for fire in California. When you signed up, did you realize how big the job would be?
“No, not at all. I had only seen some small fires in Happy Camp in 2019. I’d seen the column of one big fire from a distance, but you know I’ve never seen 50-foot flame lengths and a wall of flames racing across a desert.
‘Or I’d never seen torching, which is when a tree just kind of ignites from the base and the whole thing goes up with this like giant whoosh in one second, and if a bunch of trees are torching at once, it sounds kind of like a jet engine roaring in the distance. I had never seen a smoke column up close, so yeah, everything was just this surprise to me. And I spent a lot of time being awestruck and having my jaw drop open and being made fun of by the guys for being so awestruck.”
You spent a lot of time on the job in the dirt. How was that?
“Most of the time, hotshot crews just sleep in the dirt in the woods pretty close to the fire line. We have a really simple setup of just a tarp and a sleeping bag on the ground, and there are fire camps that have showers, but we never really had the time. At the end of the shift, you’ve worked 16 hours, you go into camp, you grab your dinners, and you head back out to the woods.
“We never really had the time to use the showers, so you’re going 14 days without a shower, which would be gross even if you weren’t working in ash and dirt, but you are working in ash and dirt.
“You get really smelly, but you can’t even smell yourself because your nose is full of like these ash boogers.”
This is a dangerous job. How did you handle the moments of fear fighting these huge fires?
“At first, it didn’t really sink in. There’s such a culture in firefighting of really being prepared and practicing for any emergency or eventuality. We do a ton of training on extraction. And we do a ton of medical drills and so you can have this false idea that because you’re really well trained, that you’re safe. And the veil kind of was lifted gradually for me.
“My second season, we had a couple incidents where a tree strike happened. That’s when a tree that’s burned out of the base in the fire and falls on a person. I get chills now just talking about it.
“For the first time, I realized like, ‘Oh my God, we could actually die out here.’”
When the tree fell on a crew member, it was a very emotional moment for the whole team. People were in tears. What was that like?
“That moment was so striking and so beautiful in many ways because I really didn’t expect that out of them. You know, we had an after-action review, an AAR as we call it [and] usually in AAR is really practical. You just sort of talk about, ‘Why did this happen? What could we have done better? What will we do next time to prevent this?’
“It started out that way, and then the men just started telling stories about other close calls they had, and injuries they’d seen on the fire line, and people just started openly weeping. They will not like me saying that about them because everybody really prizes being tough and unemotional in fire culture, but they wept, and I wept. And it was such a moment of connection for all of us, of understanding that we all share this fear and this heartbreak and this deep, deep desire for everyone to stay safe because we love each other.”
You had to retire for health reasons. Do you ever feel the desire to get back out there?
“Oh yes, yeah. Every year, you see … the first fires happening and you hear that a crew or even my former crew, I hear that they’ve gone somewhere, and I feel this intense jealousy and longing to be out there because it’s the most incredible job. It’s absolutely amazing.”
This interview was edited for clarity.
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Emiko Tamagawa produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Peter O’Dowd. Tamagawa adapted it for the web.
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Book excerpt: ‘Wildfire Days’
By Kelly Ramsey
Adapted from “Wildfire Days” by Kelly Ramsey. Copyright © 2025 by Kelly Ramsey. Reprinted by permission of Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
Copyright 2025 WBUR