Friday, June 15, 2007



Forestry Tech Mark Parker, the day's burn boss, briefs the crew on the morning's burn. To Mark's left is helicopter pilot Hayden Bergen

Excerpt from "Definitely an Art”


I followed Mike into the briefing room. Sitting on a table was Hayden Bergen, the helicopter pilot. Mike introduced us. Tall, tan and wearing a green jumpsuit, dark tortoise-shell sunglasses and rock-star hair, the pilot had an accent I couldn’t place. English? Australian? “Ne-ew Zayland,” he said.

On contract from Decatur, Texas, Hayden and the Bell LongRanger helicopter were stationed at the Sandhills through the burn season, from February to May. The next summer, Hayden would be on fire detail at the Moab Desert in Utah, where he would drop 100-gallon buckets of water from his helicopter onto fledgling wildfires so we wouldn’t get to hear about them on the evening news.

Hayden had 2 responsibilities. One was to fly patterns above the burn zone so that the helicopter crew could drop lines of incendiary “ping-pong balls” to start fires. The other was to get the crew back safely.

At an earlier prescribed burn, I’d stood in a fire break and watched the helicopter hover, bank, turn, and shuttle back and forth fifty feet above the trees along the edge of the smoke while a crew member, leaning from the open door of the chopper and manning the aerial ignition machine, dropped balls to seed the flames.

I wondered how the devil Hayden could see the forest through the smoke. . . .

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