Watching for Smoke

This is Love

This episode of 'This is Love' explores the quiet vigilance of wildfire lookouts in California, focusing on Ken Jordan's decades-long role as a fire watcher atop Colby Mountain.

Key takeaways

• Human presence at remote lookouts remains vital despite technological advances, as communities trust real-time observation over automated systems.
• The cycle of fire is inevitable—burned areas regrow with flammable brush that increases future wildfire risk.

Main topics

• Wildfire monitoring and lookout culture
• Impact of climate change on wildfire frequency and intensity

Notable quotes

"If we can turn it black, it can't burn again in August."

Conclusion

As climate change intensifies fire seasons, the human element in wildfire

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) I'm Mitch Purse, and this week on Confessions of an Elite Athlete, I'm sitting down with Mr. ACL for the world's greatest athletes. Dr. Riley Williams is the medical director for the Brooklyn Nets, the New York Liberty, and a team physician for USA Basketball. He's also the surgeon who repaired my very own ACL. We talk about how he became one of the world's top surgeons, why women's sports are seeing more ACL tears, and what knee injuries you should be most afraid of. You can hear it all here. by listening to Confessions of an Elite Athlete on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 1 (0:36) Support for This Is Love comes from Fetch Pet Insurance. Every six seconds, a pet owner in the U.S. gets hit with a vet bill over $1,000. Fetch can help. Fetch is the most complete pet insurance for dogs and cats, according to ConsumerAdvocate.org. You get paid back up to 90% of vet bills at any vet in the U.S. and Canada, with claims paid back in as little as two days. Go to FetchPet.com slash save right now for your free quote. That's FetchPet.com. fetchpet.com slash save. Hi, it's Phoebe. This fall, I'm going on the road with a big experiment. It's a brand new live show all about me and my family and secrets. It's totally different from anything we've done before. We're going to announce the full run of Tour Date soon, but first, we've got a couple of special shows coming up in just a few weeks. Speaker 1 (1:31) I'll be in Durham on September 16th, at the first place we ever did a live show, Motorco, and in Portland, Maine on September 18th. We've never done a show in Maine. You can find out more at thisiscriminal.com slash live. I hope to see you very soon. Lighting can start like a fire in a stump or something, or even in a tree. And it sits there and smolders for days. But you can't see anything. It's all internal inside the tree or the stump or something. And after a while, it's slowly creeping around in there. And after a few hours or a few days, whatever, the right gust of wind will happen, the right temperature, and all of a sudden, boom, it'll burst out into flames. And I've actually seen that happen. And all of a sudden, boom, there it was, the smoke and the flames. It's called a holdover. That's what we watch for the holdovers. Speaker 1 (2:27) On a mountain in the northeast of California, there's a 14 by 14 room at the top of a tower where Ken Jordan has spent much of the last 41 years completely alone. The main job, of course, is watching for smoke so you don't really see fires unless they get really big. That's the whole point of lookouts is to make sure fires don't get big. As a lookout, Ken spends every wildfire season at the tower on Colby Mountain, and he's seen some of the biggest fires in California. In 2018, a fire started in the off-season. It burned 150,000 acres and killed 85 people and was known as the Camp Fire. And then the Park Fire a couple years ago burned a half million acres on the other side of B-Metals. Speaker 1 (3:16) You can park anywhere. Go ahead and pull up towards the bathroom there. It might be the best. The tower stands off a gravel road by an open field and an outhouse. It looks like a white shed stacked on top of a radio tower with three flights of stairs underneath. There's one tall fir tree right next to it and mountains on the horizon. So this is your whole world? A lot of it, yeah. The best part of my world, that's for sure. If you climb up the stairs, you'll see Ken's name written on a beam under the tower, and a list of years starting with 1985. What's it like when a big storm comes through? It's awesome. Speaker 1 (4:06) You can see lightning 360 degrees. It might be just cloud-to-cloud lightning. It just feels like it's like 10 feet over the lookout. And are you ever worried about getting hit? Well, it used to be, but there's a lightning rod up there. It's grounded with these big wires that come down. Also, inside, there's certain things to do. Close the doors and the windows, because... electricity can follow little air currents. Don't want to be out on the catwalk or anything metal. So I have to stay away from the fridge in case it gets hit. Then every lookout has a lightning stool or lightning chair. Usually an all-wooden chair that has glass insulators on the bottom of the legs. There was an east wind that had been blowing. A warm east wind early in the morning. Speaker 1 (4:58) Kathy McCovey remembers waking up to the sound of the wind at 5 a.m. She went back to sleep. It was September 8, 2020. Then about 7 o'clock I hear a siren. And I walked out and I kind of started looking around and all of a sudden I looked at the top of Slater Butte and there was a big column of smoke coming out. Slater Butte is a mountain just northeast of Happy Camp, California. The town is home to less than a thousand people, including Kathy. It's on Karuk land. Her tribe has lived there for thousands of years. A power line up behind the lookout on Slater View snapped. And when it fell, it just started burning. Speaker 1 (5:43) I lived downtown, right? Middle downtown. And I was sitting out in the front yard and people were in shock. They were all gathered in front of the Happy Camp Liquor and Sporting Goods store. Nobody really believed that this thing was going to come at Happy Camp. Because usually in the past, you know, we've had fires all around us, but they never were blown right into Happy Camp like that fire was. Then we had game wardens come by and say, you guys got to evacuate. So that's when everybody in town disappeared. And so there was nobody around, no traffic, nobody was coming by. And I was watching that call and I could hear the propane tanks exploding. Speaker 1 (6:28) Kathy had seen the mountain burn before. The first time was when she was very young. She remembers there were big fires every once in a while. My grandfather, he worked for the U.S. Forest Service. He raised me. And one of his jobs was working on fires. So he would come home and he'd be all charcoaly and smell like smoke. And I used to crawl up on his lap. When she was 18, Kathy signed up to work on a fire engine, too. People called the engine she worked on the Red Eye Express, because of all the times I get called out at night. A lot of the fires started because of lightning. We could have a big lightning storm with a thousand positive down strikes, and we could get 137 fires out of it. So that's kind of what I've seen for average. Speaker 1 (7:19) Before the fire started on Slater Butte, Kathy had taken her truck to the mechanic for a repair. She walked to the shop. The repairman was getting ready to evacuate. As soon as I saw that, I knew I wasn't getting my truck back that day. So I went back over to the house, and I had my two dogs, and I put on my fire clothes. Because I didn't know what was going to happen. So at that point, what I did was I said, You got to ground yourself. You got to sit here and you got to just experience this. This is something really historic happening. A lot of times when you're working on fires and stuff, you only use up so much energy and you just need to sit down and you need to reassess the situation is what I was doing and just kind of resting. Speaker 1 (8:10) Kathy knew she had to get to a nearby park where there was a safety zone, an open field far from the trees. She was planning to walk there with her dogs when the fire got closer. And all of a sudden I see a tribal truck pull up. And it's Alex Wadstopen, and he's the archaeologist for the tribe. And he pulls in my driveway, saying, well,