Oregon State wrestler Eric Jorgensen takes on bigger opponents
By Kip Carlson

For most of his life, Eric Jorgensen has been taking on opponents his own size. That's just the way wrestling works.

Jorgensen has been successful, as the Oregon State 157-pounder has been ranked among the nation's top 10 wrestlers at his weight class most of the past two seasons. This winter, he won the Pacific-10 title and finished fifth at the NCAA Championships and was named All-American.

The past few summers, though, Jorgensen has set his sights on a bit bigger foes: forest fires.

Ash Rock, Red Butte Canyon, Rock Creek, Elko, Buffalo Lake ... those are just a few of the blazes Jorgensen has battled across the West. The OSU senior is part of a crack Hotshot firefighting crew stationed near his hometown of La Grande in northeastern Oregon.

The forest management major likens the experience to the ones he has on the mat. As Jorgensen describes firefighting, he doesn't become animated - it's immediately after an OSU practice in the Dale Thomas Wrestling Room and he has ice packs wrapped tightly to both shoulders. But the intensity and excitement in his voice are unmistakable.

"It's definitely exhausting, but there are also times that it's fun," Jorgensen said. "When you're doing initial attack on a fire and you're digging hot line or something like that, it's an adrenaline rush. It's awesome to get ahead of the fire and end up kicking the fire's butt; taking the fire head-on and saying 'I won.' That's the best part about it."

Two other Beaver wrestlers also have put in some time fighting forest fires. Ryan Jorgensen, a freshman 184-pounder and Eric's younger brother, worked on initial attack crews; Casey Anthony, a freshman 125-pounder from Vale, helped helicopter supplies to ground crews.

The older Jorgensen got his start in 1998, when he took a job thinning trees for a silviculturist on the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest near La Grande. The job called for four-day weeks and three-day weekends to rest from the exhausting work; Jorgensen chose to spend those three days working with the crews on the fire engines.

The next year, Jorgensen was offered a spot on the Union Hotshots, a crew named after a town near La Grande. Since then, he's fought fire in Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Nevada and Utah.

"I never did go to Montana - everybody asks, because those were the fires they saw" on television, Jorgensen said. "But in Washington they had several houses burn. We ended up saving about 15 homes from burning, along with a ton more acres, so we were pretty happy about that."

The typical workday lasts from 14 to 16 hours, depending on the fire situation, but Jorgensen has worked shifts as long as 37 hours. Jorgensen and his crew mates wake around 6 or 6:30 a.m., walk to breakfast in a single-file line - "like a military-type deal," Jorgensen said - then go back to camp and gather their gear.

What a Hotshot will carry depends on his or her particular job. Most days, Jorgensen's load included eight quarts of water, a first aid kit, a personal fire shelter, containers of gas and oil for chain saws, an extra T-shirt, a file and a Pulaski tool. Total weight, 30-35 pounds, though Jorgensen notes that some loads can be up to 45 pounds.

No matter how warm the weather, Hotshots wear long pants, long-sleeved shirts and gloves to protect themselves, plus safety glasses and hard hats. After getting their equipment ready, they load into "buggies" - a semi-style cab with a large box behind it containing nine bucket seats for crew members.

The Hotshots drive as close to their work as possible and hike the rest of the way. Then it's time to "dig line" around the fire; that means clearing a trail devoid of flammable material to keep the fire from advancing beyond it.

The fire line Jorgensen and his crew mates must create varies from fire to fire, from terrain to terrain.

"When we're in Nevada, it's all sagebrush and just little sparse grasses on the ground," Jorgensen said. "So we'll just dig a scratch line - maybe 17 inches or so. It's just enough to make sure the fire isn't going to have any fuel to touch. Then we'll take the sagebrush away in about a three-foot radius. When we dig in timber, we make a five-foot swath with a chainsaw and try to dig about a 32-inch hand line.

"Sometimes when there's not much going on in the summer, they'll keep us on a fire and we'll go back and rehab everything that we did on the fire," Jorgensen said. "Reseeding, replanting - that's a really good part, and it's fun to do."

After completing his degree, Jorgensen hopes to pursue a career in reforestation or silviculture, which involves being able to look at a forested area and outlining options for its management that will meet the needs of the forest and its owner.

"I haven't totally decided what I want to do," Jorgensen said. "Because right now I'm having so much fun fighting fire that I want to become a smoke jumper before I stop fighting fire. I think that'd be awesome."