“Someone’s Got To Do It”: Inside a Small Wyoming Town’s Volunteer Fire Crew

The original story by Chris Clements  for NPR.

In a corner of northeast Wyoming, where pine breaks meet the Black Hills and summer wind turns grass into tinder, firefighting isn’t a job title — it’s a promise. Pine Haven, population 565, leans on neighbors with pagers, day jobs, and a knack for dropping everything when the siren wails.

Inside the town’s modest station, volunteer firefighter T.J. Gideon moves through a cherry-red engine like it’s a second home — checking tools, flipping switches, listening to the rumble of the ignition. He’s lived here 15 years and still remembers the moment an ambulance’s flashing lights made him wonder who shows up when you dial 911 in a place this small. Out here, he says, you can’t assume help is coming unless someone in town decides to be that help.

The gig is less about hero shots and more about readiness. Gideon trains for grass fires and wind-driven wildland runs, then pivots to house-fire tactics and structure work. The stipend — $500 a month — covers gas and gear but not the tradeoffs. On “red flag” days, when heat, wind, and low humidity prime the county for ignition, the boat stays on the trailer and everyone waits for the tone. Once, the pager clipped his daughter’s lakeside birthday in half. He heard the call, glanced at his family, and went. That’s where the support matters most, he says.

Wyoming’s 2024 fire season was its worst in decades, the kind state officials called historic and unprecedented. County fire warden Charlie Harrison remembers the cadence as “fires every day,” with volunteers stretched thin and edging toward burnout. Gideon kept showing up — between managing a fleet of ATMs and running a bar in a nearby town — because, as he puts it, someone has to. He doesn’t do it for the money. He does it because the drive hasn’t dimmed.

Ask what keeps him going and he shrugs, then lands on the feeling after the smoke clears: the quiet moment when the crew looks at each other and realizes they just solved a problem for someone who couldn’t solve it alone. That’s the payoff.

Across Wyoming, recruiting volunteers has gotten tougher. Pine Haven is the outlier. When Gideon joined, the roster had seven names. Today it’s 28 — teenagers just old enough to suit up and retirees old enough to have taught them, the youngest 19, the oldest 75. In a West where fires are bigger and seasons longer, small towns like this still bet on people. And on the nights when the wind kicks up and the radio crackles, those people keep showing up.