We have been honored to support thesmokeygeneration and wildfire.experience as they have been collecting, preserving, and sharing the stories and oral history of wildland fire, espcially when we get to help sponsor stories like this: “The Women Before Me” - by a_monthei "The walls of the Zigzag Hotshot building are lined with crew photos—the first dating back to the late 1960s. The photos show ash-covered people in nomex or crew shirts, some holding tools, some saws. As early as the mid 1970s, the dirtied faces and huge smiles started to be accompanied by the occasional messy ponytail or braid, as women started to get hired to the crew. In looking at those images on the wall, I started to see a familiarity in those women, in the ash-y cheeks and exhausted eyes and smiles that can only come from hours and hours of hiking or digging or carrying a drip torch. I started to see a little bit of myself in them, and it occurred to me that there was a connection there, a rare generational link ...