Into the Fire with National Geographic’s Mark Thiessen

National Geographic always has incredible photography features, but these Mark Thiessen images documenting last year’s devastating forest fires o...

National Geographic always has incredible photography features, but these Mark Thiessen images documenting last year’s devastating forest fires out West really amaze me.

Go to the NG site for comprehensive coverage; see video about fighting forest fires, and even buy a Thiessen print (at a super-reasonable price!)

Some excerpts from an interview with Thiessen:

You really got into the thick of things for this assignment. How were you able to get into the middle of the fires?

I
went to fire school. I did that on my own as a personal project ten
years ago and I’ve shot fires in six of those years. Once you go
through the five-day fire school, you just need to get a one-day
refresher every year, and then you get a red card certification. A red
card makes it a lot easier when I show up at a fire–if the firefighters
see a photographer who is red carded, it opens a lot more doors. There
isn’t the whole issue about having to get a media person to escort me.
I’m always escorted, but I can go in with a fire crew or the division
supervisor.

What did you do to protect your camera equipment?

The
worst thing about fire is not the heat–it’s the dust. The road turns
into cake flour, and the dust is like powdered sugar. It’s the worst.
You get this dusting sand in your teeth just from the blowing embers.
Every time you change lenses you have that getting into the camera.
It’s not so much a problem with the lens, because you can wipe that
off. It’s getting it on the chip.

Was there ever a time when you thought, What am I doing here?

In
Smiley Park in southern California. I found myself on this street and
seven houses were burning around me. I wanted to see what was down this
one road that was blocked by a tree. I hopped over the tree, and all of
a sudden the wind shifted, and I became enveloped in smoke–I couldn’t
even see my feet. I thought maybe I died–maybe I died, and this is what
heaven is like. When you’re in that situation, you can’t see anything
because of the smoke. I could hear propane tanks exploding. I walked by
one garage and heard what sounded like Chinese fireworks going off–it
was ammunition exploding. Power lines were falling down.

In August 2007, photographer Mark Thiessen drove through the Jocko Lake fire in Montana

Obliterating houses and forcing hundreds of thousands to flee, 18 large wildfires ripped across southern California’s parched, crowded hills in three weeks last year. In this neighborhood near Lake Arrowhead, 178 homes burned–most in just two hours.

Malibu, California. Driven by wind but shaped by terrain, fires often move fastest uphill. As heat rises, vegetation above a fire dries out and burns more easily when the flames arrive. Narrow canyons, gulches, and drainages can also funnel hot air onto blazes, feeding and transforming them into fast-moving walls of flame.

Before: Just one ember, landing in dry pine needles heaped at the foot of a staircase, was all it took to incinerate this house during an October 2007 fire in Running Springs, California.

After: Beyond the debris of the house in Running Springs, California
(previous image), living trees reveal that fires often jump from house
to house, sparing vegetation.

In a last-ditch effort, firefighters covered the Scott Mountain lookout in heat-reflecting wrap to protect it from fire churning through Boise National Forest. It survived. Such lookouts, many built in the 1930s, play an important role in spotting wildfires.

Using terrain as a tool, a firefighter shoots flares onto a hillside, hoping to create a chimney-like effect: As heat from this fire rises, it should draw flames upslope, away from unburned forest below. But fire doesn’t always cooperate.

“Good” fires are ecologically crucial, clearing out dead brush and returning nutrients to the soil. Most of these ponderosa pines will survive, even thrive, after a low-intensity burn in South Dakota’s Custer State Park. “Trees respond to fire,” says Frank Carroll of the Forest Service, “like roses respond to pruning and fertilizer.”

Building, camper, truck: All were reduced toto incandescent skeletons by flames that savaged Running Springs, California, last fall.

A maelstrom of embers whips across a field near Santa Clarita, California. Driven by Santa Anas–fierce winds that can gust at more than a hundred miles an hour–wildfires burned hundreds of square miles of drought-stricken trees and brush in 2007, with exhausted fire crews struggling to keep up.

Beginning at dawn, a fire burned through a neighborhood near Lake Arrowhead, California–by dusk, all that remained was a waste of charred tree trunks and wrecked possessions. “There was this otherworldliness to it,” says photographer Mark Thiessen. “I was one of the first people there, and then these guys showed up to turn off the gas lines that were still burning in the debris.”