Farrell Hayes wanted to fight fires last year with the Nez Perce Tribe Forestry & Fire Management Division. But he wasn’t old enough.

“Now it’s my first year, and so I’m excited for all that,” he said.

He’s joined a crew of eight firefighters who will spend the next five months on the front lines of local fire response. But he represents something that veteran firefighters say is harder to come by these days: a young person who wants to get involved in firefighting.

A big challenge in Idaho, and across the nation, is that there aren’t enough people to help fight wildfires.

“We’re losing firefighters. The numbers are going down,” said Riston Bullock, a 13-year veteran with the Nez Perce crew. “We need people at the shop ready to go when those fires start.”

Bullock, who was checking and cleaning equipment with Hayes and three-year veteran Jalisco Miles on a recent June day, said they’ve been getting around two calls a week, sometimes three. The fires have been held in check and none has spread to affect massive acreage or large numbers of people and homes.

Nothing, so far, like the kind of fires that cause massive evacuations.

The Lawyer Complex Fire of 2015 destroyed 42 homes in nearby Kamiah, Idaho. Just three years ago, an unattended campfire sparked the Moose Fire in the Salmon-Challis National Forest, and burned more than 130,000 acres.

Fire officials have said this fire season could be another tough one.

Last year, Miles said, “we had a really big fire and it changed my perspective a lot on it.” He realized how important the job is when lives are on the line, and the experience focused him.

”Getting there, making sure everything’s OK, and just getting to the call and keeping ’em small,” he said.

Why fewer young people are signing up

Miles and Hayes are the kind of people Jeff Handel, the fire management officer, said the crew needs more of. He’s also worried the younger generation doesn’t seem too interested in firefighting.

“It’s pretty tough in today’s world when you can get a job, work from home and, do OK financially, why would you wanna go out and do the firefighting thing? Which is very hard work,” Handel said.

After pushing for years, federal wildland firefighters got a permanent pay increase through a spending package passed by Congress in March.

“Now the minimum is $15 across the board, and in most places it’s more like $17 or $18 an hour,” Handel said.

Bullock said what keeps him doing the job is his dedication to protecting the land, and his community.

“Now that I’ve been in fire for so long, it’s kind of more, being the first one to respond, put the fires out,” he said.

Bullock and the rest of the crew know that the way they respond — how they work with other agencies in the region — could undergo some changes soon.

The Trump administration wants to consolidate all federal firefighting into a single entity under the Department of the Interior. Approximately $1.2 billion will be requested as part of the DOI’s new Wildland Fire Service budget, according to the new budget justification released this month.

“When catastrophic wildfires break out on federal lands, we can’t afford to waste time or resources overcoming communication and coordination barriers,” said Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., in a press release. Padilla and Montana Republican Tim Sheehy have co-sponsored a bill that would create the national fire service.

“For too long, layers of senseless bureaucracy and red tape have splintered our wildfire management system, failed our brave firefighters on the ground, and let entire communities be wiped off the map by wildfire,” said Sheehy.

“The time is now to reshape our approach to American wildfire management and start fighting fires better, stronger, and faster.”

Reorganizing federal wildland firefighting forces into one centralized firefighting force would streamline wildfire response, Padilla said.

But that kind of change could mean shifting thousands of jobs around just as fire season is ramping up.

Severing the critical link between fire suppression and forest management could cripple the U.S. Forest Service, according to Steve Ellis, the chair of the National Association of Forest Service Retirees.

In a letter sent on June 10 to U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., a ranking member on the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Interior, Environment and Related Agencies, Ellis said the administration is too focused on fire suppression efforts and not looking at preventative measures, such as thinning overgrown forests and hiring more staff to support firefighters.

“The single agency suppression proposal overlooks the critical role of many thousands of Forest Service employees who assist in firefighting efforts but are not primarily firefighters,” Ellis said in the letter.

“The administration has dismissed many of these employees or encouraged and accepted their resignations. Others could be targeted in future reduction in force.”

Forest agencies seek tribal inclusion in policymaking. Indigenous leaders are holding them accountable

Under a new national fire agency, Ellis said he wonders who would make decisions about Forest Service land.

On the ground, it’s business as usual

In the station house for the Nez Perce tribal crew, Bullock said he’s not sure how combining all the fire agencies would work.

“I’d see it kind of being crazy ’cause there’s already one, it’s called the Interagency Dispatch Office,” he said.

That office is based in Northern Idaho, and Bullock said agencies like the Idaho Department of Lands and the U.S. Forest Service already work together, and with the tribe.

“I feel like it’ll just kind of be a new name, but I still feel like we’ll still have our shops and everything here will be mixed out through each other, and it’ll be, I don’t know, it might be complicated,” Bullock said.

For now, Bullock and the rest of the crew aren’t giving it too much thought. They’re busy getting ready for the next call.

They were organizing equipment like ropes and hatchets. He, Miles and Hayes went down a checklist of items that need to be in good order. Bullock started pulling on a pump to clear out the water.

“We’re always trying to keep our engines prepped in case we do get a fire,” Bullock said. “We’re trying to be the first ones there.”

Lauren Paterson is a reporter with Northwest Public Broadcasting. This story comes to you from the Northwest News Network, a collaboration between public media organizations in Oregon and Washington.

It is part of OPB’s broader effort to ensure that everyone in our region has access to quality journalism that informs, entertains and enriches their lives. To learn more, visit our journalism partnerships page.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2025/06/29/nez-perce-young-wildfire-fighters/