Wildfire Entrapment Avoidance for Outdoor Programs

Brendan Madden has spent 30 years in outdoor adventure education. His roles have ranged from field instructor to program management, with organizations including Outward Bound Canada and NOLS. His recent master's thesis at Royal Roads University explores wildfire entrapment avoidance for led outdoor activities.

In this episode, we discuss topics from his thesis, including the 1957 Grose Valley fire, what he learned speaking with 20 Canadian outdoor leaders, how wildland firefighters approach extreme wildfire conditions, the 30-30-30 rule, safety zones, evacuation considerations, and next steps for outdoor programs.

This episode is a conversation about research and experience. It is for general information only and is not safety advice, training, or guidance for any program, trip, or wildfire situation. The views expressed are the speakers' own. Wildfire conditions can change quickly. Follow the instructions of your local fire agencies, land managers, and other officials, and in an emergency, call 911.

Topics

• What safety should mean for an organization, and a closed-toed shoe policy on a sandy beach.
• What wildfire entrapment is, and why the risk is increasing.
• The 1957 Grose Valley fire.
• Information versus knowledge: how wildland firefighters read terrain.
• Wildfire avoidance versus wildfire entrapment avoidance.
• Smoke spotted in the field: the tools available to a program manager.
• El Niño and the season ahead.
• White gas stoves during a fire ban.
• The 30-30-30 rule, slow groups, and fire moving uphill.
• Safety zones, escape routes, and the limits of a helicopter evacuation.

Meet Brendan Madden

Brendan is an internationally respected thought-leader in outdoor adventure risk management. He is currently the Director of Enterprise Risk at Girl Guides of Canada. He has been active in outdoor adventure education for over 30 years and has held leadership positions at Outward Bound Canada and the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS-USA). He regularly teaches, presents, and consults on outdoor risk management and is a member of the steering committee of the Wilderness Risk Management Conference. Brendan is a founding member of the Wilderness Climate Action Lab, a volunteer organization dedicated to strengthening the resilience of outdoor programs to climate change. Brendan achieved an MA in Disaster and Emergency Management at Royal Roads University, with a thesis on exploring wildfire entrapment avoidance for led outdoor groups.

What Is Wildfire Entrapment?

The National Wildfire Coordinating Group (NWCG), which sets standards for wildland firefighters in the United States, defines entrapment as a situation where people are unexpectedly caught in a fire behavior-related, life-threatening position where planned escape routes or safety zones are absent, inadequate, or compromised. In Brendan's words, "your escape route to safety is cut off by a wildfire."

Almost everything written about entrapment is written for wildland firefighters, whose job is to go toward the fire. Brendan's thesis looks at led outdoor activities: camps, schools, guided trips, and other programs that take people into the backcountry and whose goal is to stay away from fire. His concern is that wildfire is changing faster than outdoor practice. As his thesis lays out, the number of wildfires in Canada is actually decreasing, but their intensity and the area each one burns are increasing, and fast-moving extreme wildfire events are becoming more common. Globally, the UN Environment Programme projects an increase in extreme fires of up to 14 percent by 2030 and 30 percent by 2050.

The 1957 Grose Valley Fire

Brendan's thesis opens with the Grose Valley fire in New South Wales, Australia. In November 1957, nine boys aged 12 to 21 set out on a day hike in the Grose Valley, a steep, forested gorge about 600 meters deep. As they began climbing out, a bushfire appeared below them. Seventeen-year-old Barry Carter shouted for the group to run through the fire toward the river. Five of the boys ran uphill toward the canyon rim instead. Three followed Barry down and spent the night sheltering in the stream, and they survived. Four of the five who ran uphill were killed. The fifth slipped, tumbled back downslope, and joined the boys in the stream.

Ivan Thelander, one of the survivors, later described how fast it happened: "there was no sign of fire… I looked behind and saw the flames jump to the treetops, 50, 60 feet high… it was right on us." His account is quoted in the thesis, and the Blue Mountains Gazette covered his story in 2013.

Brendan's literature search found no similar incident of a led outdoor group being trapped and killed by wildfire in the 69 years since. In the episode, he mentions one more he has found since publishing, in Hong Kong. His thesis argues that the low number may create a false sense of security: the kind of extreme wildfire event that likely trapped the boys is becoming more common, and wildland firefighters and civilians have had many entrapment fatalities over the same period (Page et al., 2019).

Wildfire Avoidance Versus Entrapment Avoidance

This is the central point of the thesis. Many organizations Brendan interviewed were already doing wildfire avoidance well. His thesis calls it circumvention: monitoring fire maps and weather forecasts, rerouting or rescheduling around known fires, carrying satellite communicators, and planning evacuations. The 20 leaders he interviewed averaged nearly 26 years of outdoor leadership experience, and all of them actively managed wildfire risk.

Entrapment is a different problem. Circumvention depends on knowing where the fire is. Brendan's concern is the fire that is not on any map yet: a new ignition, maybe from someone else's campfire, that grows fast in dry, windy conditions. His thesis notes that satellite fire detection can lag by several hours and tends to miss new, small, or smoldering fires. In the interviews, 12 of the 20 leaders said entrapment was not identified as a specific risk at their organization, and terms like entrapment, escape route, and safety zone were absent from the conversations.

Research on wildland firefighters points the same way. A 2019 review in the International Journal of Wildland Fire found that entrapment potential peaks when fire behavior rapidly deviates from what people expect, becomes extreme, and compromises escape routes, safety zones, or both.

Fire Maps and Field Conditions

Online fire maps were the resource Brendan's interviewees mentioned most. I built Field Conditions, a free map that puts active wildfire perimeters, NASA satellite fire detections, smoke, and air quality in one view, with no account and no paywall. It is a good way to see the known fires. Brendan's point applies to it too: a map shows what has already been detected, and a brand-new fire may not be on it yet.

The 30-30-30 Rule

In the episode, Brendan describes a guideline wildland firefighters use in Canada to flag conditions for extreme fire behavior: temperature above 30°C, relative humidity below 30 percent, and wind above 30 km/h. In Fahrenheit and miles per hour, that is about 86°F and 19 mph. As a BC Wildfire Service forecaster told The Weather Network, the rule is a simplified way to make people aware of the threat of extreme fire behavior, not a hard-and-fast rule. Brendan's point is how ordinary those numbers are. A 19 mph wind is not a dramatic day.

Safety Zones, Slow Groups, and Fire Moving Uphill

Safety zones and escape routes come from wildland firefighting. The NWCG describes a safety zone as a place where a firefighter can find adequate refuge from an approaching fire, and notes that the best locations are usually already burned ground or large bodies of water. In British Columbia, wildland firefighters learn these concepts through mandatory S-185 Fire Entrapment Avoidance training, which Brendan's thesis uses as its point of comparison.

His interviews found the idea in informal use. Seven of the 20 leaders had planned for moving a group quickly away from a fast fire. River programs saw a big river as protection. "You can just buckle down and keep paddling till the forest beside you is not on fire," one told him. Mountain programs pointed to talus fields and snow. What was missing were the parameters firefighters define: how large a safety zone needs to be, how big a river has to be, and how long it takes to get there.

That last part depends on the group. One mountain hiking leader described a talus field that could be a point of safety, then asked, "can we actually get all the people to it?" Their groups sometimes move two kilometers in a whole day. Fire also moves faster uphill. South Australia's Country Fire Service notes that fire travels up a 20 degree slope about four times faster than on flat ground, and in mountain terrain, the safer ground is often uphill.

"We Need Backups to Our Backups to Our Backups"

Seventeen of the 20 leaders Brendan interviewed described emergency evacuation as a foundation of their wildfire plan, and for many of them that means aircraft. Six noted that air evacuation might not be available during a major fire: smoke can ground helicopters, and aircraft may be committed to firefighting. As one put it, "Helicopters being grounded for fires… I'd be unsure about the next step." In the episode, Brendan's answer is redundancy: multiple ways out, and backups to the backups.

Sometimes aircraft do come. In July 2026, fire threatened canoe groups in Wabakimi Provincial Park in northwestern Ontario. A YMCA of the North group of 11 teens and 4 staff was evacuated, one part flown out overnight by plane and the other by helicopter in coordination with Canadian authorities. In the same park, an outfitter hired a private helicopter for two canoeists after police told him the rescue was his responsibility. Brendan's point is not that aircraft never come. It is that a plan should not depend on them.

What the Thesis Recommends

Brendan's thesis closes with recommendations for led outdoor activities. In summary:

• Recognize wildfire entrapment as a high-priority risk.
• Develop an entrapment avoidance training program specific to outdoor programs, using wildland firefighter training such as S-185 as a template rather than a substitute.
• Engage guides in observing and recording fire weather, fuel, and terrain, for example by adding a wildfire section to the daily log many already keep, and in mapping potential safety zones, escape routes, and higher-risk areas.
• Re-examine emergency response systems with entrapment scenarios in mind, through tabletop and live drills, ideally with government land management and wildfire agencies.
• Share more knowledge between organizations, and with government agencies.

People and Organizations Mentioned in This Episode

• Brendan Madden: on LinkedIn, where he says is the best place to reach him.
• Girl Guides of Canada: where Brendan is Director of Enterprise Risk.
• Outward Bound Canada and NOLS: where Brendan spent most of his field and management career.
• Royal Roads University: Victoria, British Columbia, where Brendan completed his MA in Disaster and Emergency Management in 2026.
• The Wilderness Risk Management Conference (WRMC): where Brendan serves on the steering committee. Brendan and I will both be at WRMC in Portland, Oregon, October 20 to 22, 2026, where Brendan is presenting on operating thresholds for heat and wildfire smoke and on climate resilience in the outdoor industry.
• The Adventure Risk Research Symposium: an online research symposium held alongside the WRMC, which Brendan mentions as a free, accessible way for the field to share research.
• The Wilderness Climate Lab: the volunteer group Brendan helped found, which runs a discussion group on LinkedIn.
• YMCA of the North: whose canoe group was evacuated from Wabakimi Provincial Park in July 2026.

Resources and Further Reading

• An Exploration of Wildfire Entrapment Avoidance for Led Outdoor Activities (Madden, 2026): Brendan's thesis, open access through Royal Roads University.
• Escape and Entrapment (NWCG): the National Wildfire Coordinating Group's definitions of escape routes, safety zones, and entrapment.
• Safety Zones and LCES (NWCG 6 Minutes for Safety): how wildland firefighters describe safety zones.
• A Review of US Wildland Firefighter Entrapments (Page, Freeborn, Butler, and Jolly, 2019): trends and environmental factors in firefighter entrapments, International Journal of Wildland Fire.
• How the 30-30-30 Rule Is Essential for Wildfire Safety (The Weather Network, 2024): a BC Wildfire Service forecaster on the rule and its limits.
• Effect of Slope of Land (Country Fire Service, South Australia): how slope changes fire spread.
• Blue Mountains Bushfire Survivor Breaks His Silence After 50 Years (Blue Mountains Gazette, 2013): a survivor's account of the 1957 Grose Valley fire.
• Canadian Air Force Rescues Minnesota Teens Trapped in Wildfires (CBS Minnesota, July 2026): the YMCA of the North evacuation from Wabakimi Provincial Park.
• "They Might Have Been Toast": Canoeists Escape Ontario Wildfire (Global News, July 2026): a private helicopter evacuation from Wabakimi Provincial Park.
• Number of Wildfires to Rise by 50% by 2100 (UN Environment Programme, 2022): projections for extreme fires.
• What Equipment Is Allowed During a Fire Ban? (Ontario Parks, 2026): an example of how one agency treats stoves during a fire ban.
• Field Conditions: my free map of active wildfire perimeters, smoke, and air quality. As Brendan says in this episode, not every fire is on the map yet.

Field Debrief™ is produced by Field Risk Systems™ LLC, the company behind Field Risk OS, The Operating System for Expedition Programs.

More from Field Debrief

• Building Field Conditions: A Free Wildfire, Smoke, and Air Quality Map
• My First Sat Phone Call as an Outdoor Program Manager
• Safety-I, Safety-II, and Risk Optimization for Outdoor Programs: Episode 2, Part 2 with Steve Smith
• Blame, Accountability, and Trust: Episode 2, Part 1 with Steve Smith
• Airblue Flight 202: A Human Factors Disaster

Transcript

Lightly edited for clarity.

George Bull (00:00): Hi everybody, welcome to episode three of the Field Debrief Podcast. Today I'm going to be joined by Brendan Madden. Welcome to the podcast, Brendan.

Brendan Madden (00:11): Thanks, George. It's great to be here.

George Bull (00:14): Brendan is an internationally respected thought leader in outdoor adventure risk management. He is currently the Director of Enterprise Risk at Girl Guides of Canada. He has been active in outdoor adventure education for over 30 years and has held leadership positions at Outward Bound Canada and the National Outdoor Leadership School. He regularly teaches, presents, and consults on outdoor risk management and is a member of the steering committee of the Wilderness Risk Management Conference. Brendan is a founding member of the Wilderness Climate Action Lab, a volunteer organization dedicated to strengthening the resilience of outdoor programs to climate change. Brendan achieved an MA in Disaster and Emergency Management at Royal Roads University with a thesis exploring wildfire entrapment avoidance for led outdoor groups, which is where we're going to spend most of our time today.

George Bull (01:04): I know in your current role at Girl Guides of Canada, you're probably approaching the idea of safety and risk in a different way than a field guide might. How do you view safety and risk as far as the prioritization of an organization?

Brendan Madden (01:22): Yeah, that's a great question, George. I think it's really important that every organization answers this for themselves. One of the things I've learned over the years is that the word safety is something that everybody just accepts. Of course it's a common value. Who wouldn't want people under our care to be safe? But it's also a bit of a slippery fish. It's a very vague idea. And I'll tell a brief story rather than just trying to tell the principle. In my last job, I was conducting a safety review of a program. It was a sea kayaking program, and we took a motorboat water taxi out to the program and we landed on this beach to go and visit the sea kayaking group. And the water taxi couldn't get all the way in. So the person I was with and I took off our shoes, rolled up our jeans, and waded ashore in the ocean, as one would do. And we're standing on the beach and the instructors came over and said, my goodness, don't let the students see you without your shoes on. I was like, why? Well, one of the policies is you have to have closed-toed shoes on at all times. And it'll create a problem for us because we've really had to argue with them to get them to do that. And we're talking about that a little bit more with the instructors. It's like, okay, so we have this policy. How's that working for you? And they're like, my goodness, it's terrible. Because what happens is that we're on a beach. It's sandy and the wet sand actually gets in their shoes and it rubs their feet raw. So everybody has these open sores and we're having a terrible time with it. And I just had a moment of like, okay, let's back up. The message I'd been giving to our staff for years is what we care about is something that might kill somebody, something that might cause a life-changing injury, or something that might traumatize them psychologically. Safety to us means: is this something that's going to change your life for the worse or end your life? That's where we want people to put their care and attention. And here we have, because we clearly hadn't delivered that message clearly enough and created our policies clearly enough, the instructors focusing on how do I make sure these people are all wearing closed-toed shoes on a sandy beach by the ocean. Now, I raised two kids. You take them to a sandy beach by the ocean, the first thing they do is kick off their shoes and go running full tilt down that beach. It's one of life's great joys to run down a sandy beach in bare feet,

George Bull (03:52): Yeah.

Brendan Madden (03:52): right? Yet this is what we're trying to prevent. And not only is that causing a hassle, but we're creating more problems by the fact that now they have shoes that are full of wet sand that are causing open sores on their feet. So it's like, my goodness, we've missed the plot here. In trying to help our field staff really focus on what matters, we still had work to do in terms of that message, because we could let go of that thing and still achieve the goals. So that's the tricky part. The instructors in that story are focused on safety, but they're not focused on the organizational risk priorities and putting their energy there. And that just shows that we still had work to do.

George Bull (04:36): Yeah. I mean, from my perspective, relating more with the field instructor there, I've been in tough spots like that before where you have to be really hardline about a rule that isn't that important in the big picture, and how that affects your relationship with the participants too.

Brendan Madden (04:56): Yeah, they're just trying to do their job as they understood it. It's outdoor education. You've got to have people with closed-toed shoes on. It's a very common rule. But it's that balance of where do you give people the power to go, yes, that's the rule, but in this context, I actually think it's fine if we take our shoes off and walk around the sandy beach barefoot. Be totally fine. How do you do that? It's a challenge, and every organization needs to figure out that balance for themselves.

George Bull (05:29): Yeah. Well, speaking of things that could end your life, wildfire entrapment is one of those things. I know that's the topic of your recent master's thesis. What is wildfire entrapment and why is it important?

Brendan Madden (05:50): Well, to put it simply, wildfire entrapment is when your escape route to safety is cut off by a wildfire. And now you're entrapped by the wildfire, so you can't get to a safe place, and you may find yourself in danger of being killed by that wildfire. It's something that thankfully has been very, very rare from what we can tell in led outdoor activities. It's a very common hazard in, say, wildland firefighting. But my concern for some time has been, because the nature of wildfire is changing and changing fast, the risk of wildfire entrapment has been increasing. It's that frog in the pot thing, where our environment is changing, but we're still doing what we've always done. And I think that creates a huge vulnerability for us.

George Bull (06:42): Something I found really valuable about the opening of this thesis was the case you make for why this matters now, even though there are only a handful of recorded entrapment fatalities in led outdoor programs. The best known is the 1957 Grose Valley fire. I know you open your thesis with this case study. Can you tell us a little bit about what happened in the Grose Valley and why it's relevant?

Brendan Madden (07:09): The Grose fire incident happened in New South Wales in Australia in 1957. There was a group of young boys who were on a led outdoor activity event, and they were walking in a very steep wooded valley, and they suddenly realized there's a wildfire very close to them. One of the young people, a seventeen-year-old boy, said, okay, here's what I think we've got to do. We've got to head down, which meant actually going through part of the fire, and get to the creek at the bottom of the valley. That's going to be the safest place. The group immediately split in two. Half of the group kind of panicked and said, no, no, we're not doing that. We need to get up and away to safety up at the top. And they started running up the hill. And then the young man, Barry, did his best to lead the rest of the group down through parts of the fire and take shelter in the creek at the bottom. So the people who did that survived. The people who ran upslope to try to get away were killed by the fire. So that happened in 1957. It's one of the very few examples I've found of a led outdoor activity actually getting entrapped and having people killed by a wildfire. There's another example I found since publishing my thesis that happened in Hong Kong. So what does that mean for us? Well, it may be affirming, because we just haven't had many incidents like that, and there sure have been a lot of groups out around wildfire in that time. But we should focus on what we know. What we don't know is what our data is. Have we had a lot of near-miss events in our industry with wildfire entrapment? We simply don't know. Anecdotally, I've heard quite a few stories, but we just don't have that data. What we do know is that the fire hazard is changing very, very quickly. And the big thing I'd like to focus on there is the idea of extreme wildfire events, which is not necessarily a huge megafire the size of half of France. It could be a very small fire started by a campfire or a thrown cigarette, and there's a wind event, and all of a sudden this fire takes people by surprise. And it's like, wow, this thing is jumping into the crowns of trees. It's blowing towards us really fast. It's creating a dangerous situation in a way that nobody expects. What you hear from wildland firefighters a lot who are encountering these events is a phrase like, I've been fighting fire for 30 years and I've never seen fire behave like that. I've never seen a fire move so fast. I've never seen a fire do that. That's the kind of thing we're hearing from wildland firefighters a lot. So we know the nature of fire that's happening out there is changing because of climate change and other factors. So we can reasonably expect that our chances of getting caught by a fire are increasing, even though we don't necessarily have data to support that. But we can reasonably extrapolate, and I think we really should.

George Bull (10:18): Yeah, I think to someone that doesn't have as much experience in wildfire, the risks can almost feel more intuitive, maybe, than scientific. I was working with an organization in rural Wyoming, and we were threatened by a wildfire coming towards our base camp. Every morning and every night we would check the wildfire tracking data. We would call the Forest Service or our local sheriff's department. We even got to the point of dusting off the emergency operations procedures and calling people in town to say, hey, can we fit a hundred of our participants at this church if we need to? Things like that. But I definitely didn't have wildfire entrapment in my vocabulary. And I'm not sure that I was thinking about things like wind direction, or the types of variables that someone trained in wildfire safety would be thinking about.

Brendan Madden (11:21): Yeah, and there's a lot to think about, but you hit on one of the key ones there, which is wind changes everything. I don't know of any entrapment fatality event where wind hasn't been a factor. So definitely wind is something we need to pay a lot of attention to.

George Bull (11:37): How does our approach in the outdoor industry differ from the way wildland firefighters approach wildfire?

Brendan Madden (11:44): Yeah, great question, George. I think the place I'd start is we have a knowledge gap. And knowledge is different than information. Information is me looking on a website, reading about fires, looking at fire maps, that sort of thing. That gives me information. But a wildland firefighter has knowledge, which is a depth of nuanced context about terrain, fuel, how fire behaves in different conditions. Quite simply, I will look at a mountainside with trees on it and kind of see a general hazard, while a firefighter will look at it and go, okay, that gully there is a very dangerous spot. You'd actually be fairly safe over there. There's only really one way to accumulate that knowledge, and that's to get the training and spend years on a fire line. So given that we had such a glaring gap with an increasing hazard, I turned to a place where there's been a lot of work done to build that knowledge over the last century, and that's wildland firefighters. What you see there is a really healthy relationship between science and researchers and field practitioners, where there's a lot of communication back and forth. We're studying things. The researchers are coming back to the practitioners and saying, hey, here's what we think works in these conditions, here's what doesn't. And then you get feedback back again from the field to academia. So it's a really healthy and thriving kind of knowledge relationship. And that knowledge isn't all instantly transferable, because we have different jobs. Our job as outdoor leaders is to go away from the fire. Their job is to go towards the fire. So it's very, very different. You can't just automatically take wildland firefighter training and apply it to what we do. On the other hand, there's just such great knowledge there. And if we could access that, that would make our programs safer than they are now. So talk to a wildland firefighter, hire a wildland firefighter for your staff, try to figure out a way to access that kind of knowledge.

George Bull (13:52): One question related to this that I wanted to ask you is if you see a distinction between wildfire avoidance and wildfire entrapment avoidance. It sounds like there certainly is a difference there for firefighting organizations, but should that difference exist for outdoor organizations?

Brendan Madden (14:17): I think it does exist. That's a great point. And it's really kind of the central point of my thesis, I think. We actually are already doing a great job of recognizing and avoiding wildfires. Every single organization I talked to is doing the same thing. We monitor for fire, and if we know there's a fire there, we don't go there. We don't put our groups there. And we're already doing that and doing that quite well. And that's probably a large part of why we haven't seen so many entrapment fatalities over the last century in our business. At the same time, I think there's a gap in that thinking, which is entrapment avoidance. Because what I really learned in my background research on wildfire entrapment is it's likely not to be the large established fires that catch you. And those are the ones we're monitoring. It's likely to be a surprise fire that may not even be on the fire maps yet. You're out there, you realize you're in some dry conditions, the wind gets up, and all of a sudden you realize another camper put their campfire in the wrong spot. You had an ignition, and now there's a fire moving towards you. The fire hasn't even been picked up on the satellites yet because it's so new. But because conditions are right, you're in a very dangerous spot. And that's the nuance to our thinking: it's not the known fires on the fire maps that are likely going to entrap us. It's a new, fast-moving, fast-propagating, extreme wildfire event.

George Bull (15:47): Yeah, that makes sense. It reminds me of some training I've received from an organization, which was if you're leading a group and you see smoke where you're not expecting to see smoke, you should pull your sat phone out and call base. But what I'm thinking through now during this conversation is, let's say you are a program manager running an Outward Bound or NOLS or similar, and an instructor calls on the sat phone and says, hey, I see smoke to my south. It's really hard to judge, probably, how far away the source of that smoke is. What tools even are available to that program manager in that moment?

Brendan Madden (16:27): Yeah, and that's a really common situation. I've been in that myself, you know, dozens of times. As a manager, usually what I would do is I'd look on the fire maps, and potentially, depending on the degree of concern, I would try to contact the wildfire response and have a conversation with them about it. That's kind of standard operating procedure, and that's fine. We should keep doing that. But I would caution: what if there's a fire we're missing? So you're out there and you're seeing smoke. You call it in, they go, yes, there's an established fire 20 miles to your east. And it's actually a new fire that's not on the fire maps yet. So we need to be a little bit more heads up, really observing those local conditions and thinking, and being a little bit skeptical that not everything is on even the best fire maps.

George Bull (17:20): How do we expect this year's super El Niño to affect wildfire season?

Brendan Madden (17:28): Well, we don't know for sure. We still aren't able to really accurately predict the weather more than about two to three weeks out. But early indications say that this super El Niño may have a major effect on many parts of the world. It's hard to generalize. In Canada, for example, what they predict is that you'll have a drier, hotter summer in the west and north and a more rainy, humid summer in the east. Probably fairly similar in the lower 48 of the United States, though you'd want to look at that. So it's a little bit regional. Some places it's going to get wetter, some places it's going to get hotter and drier. But it has the chance to have a massive effect on us. So we really should be preparing. We should be reevaluating things like our escape and evacuation procedures, or how we make a go/no-go decision about sending a group into an area at all, in light of the fact that there might be a really dangerous season coming up for us in some parts of the world.

George Bull (18:38): In your discussions with these program leaders, did anything surprise you about their perspective or things that they were doing?

Brendan Madden (18:47): Yeah, there was a surprise to me. I talked to a participant who... one of the things we often do, it's very common, is you might have a fire ban, no campfires. So it's like, great, we'll still send our group out there, we'll use stoves, a white gas stove, a WhisperLite, whatever it is you use. And a participant pointed out that he'd been out with a group, actually as a consultant, in really challenging fire conditions, and realized that the type of stove they were using was actually a hazard. Certain types of stove, particularly white gas stoves, particularly if you're not as experienced with them, as many students aren't, can flare up, and you get a flame three, four feet high when you're lighting the stove. And that was actually a hazard. And the participant was observing this group who had four or five different stoves going, thinking, my goodness, we're on the verge of creating our own extreme wildfire event and starting this whole mountainside on fire. And he actually advises groups now to go with a butane or propane or some sort of stove where you just turn it on and light it and you get a little flame, and you don't have that flare-up thing. That was a surprise to me. It wasn't anything I'd ever thought of before. But it's a great point that we just need to evolve our thinking, right? And not just assume that, great, a stove is going to be safer. Well, it depends what kind of stove, it depends where you put it, and it depends how you use it.

George Bull (20:22): Yeah. The consequence could be a little higher than losing the hair on the back of your knuckles, which I've done a few times with a white gas stove.

Brendan Madden (20:27): Exactly. Yeah.

George Bull (20:28): Yeah, it's interesting. So what can organizations do looking ahead towards potentially more common or more extreme wildfires?

Brendan Madden (20:42): Yeah, great question, George. And it's hard to generalize, because it does depend on your context. Are you leading hiking programs, river programs, mountaineering programs? So it depends a lot on where you are and what you're doing. But generally, what I'm telling groups is learn to recognize extreme fire conditions and have processes in place to change your behaviors as an organization when conditions are extreme or they're tending towards extreme. And so that's recognizing the fuel. If you're in a place with no fuel, well, you don't really have to worry. If you're in a mountaineering program that's on rock and snowfield, there's not much fuel to worry about, and you might not have an entrapment risk at all. On the other hand, if you're in a forest with 60 percent dead trees because of pine bark beetle and that sort of thing, that might be a very flammable situation. That's good to know. Then past that, recognizing extreme conditions. One thing wildland firefighters use here in Canada is the 30-30-30 rule. Now, this is in metric, but when temperature is above 30 degrees Celsius, humidity drops below 30 percent, and the wind speed is above 30 kilometers an hour, then you're heading into extreme conditions, and you can expect extreme fire behavior if there's an ignition. In non-metric, that'd be 86 degrees Fahrenheit, humidity is 30 percent, and wind is above 19 or 20 miles an hour. And 20 mile an hour wind, that's not very strong wind. And that's a really important point. So learning to recognize those conditions and asking, okay, if I'm sending my group out in extreme conditions, is it a place with a lot of fuel? Well, that's a concern. Is it a place with really robust and easy-to-get-to escape routes and evacuation points and that sort of thing? Then that might lend me some comfort. But if I'm not sure that the escape plan is really robust, and the conditions are extreme, and there's a lot of fuel, then I'd make a really, really conscious decision about whether that group should even be there in the first place. Because, going back to the story from the start, you never want to be in a position where you're trying to outrace a wildfire.

George Bull (23:11): I remember during your webinar for the WRMC, you mentioned a program leader that worked with populations that maybe aren't as mobile or wouldn't be able to move as fast, and the worry that they expressed of, hey, maybe I as an instructor could get to the ridge or above treeline or something like that, but I'm not sure if I could get my participants above treeline. And I thought that was a really poignant point. A rocky ridge might look really close by, but even from personal experience, getting a group of participants up an off-trail wooded slope, even if it's only a quarter mile or a half a mile, can be a really big effort.

Brendan Madden (23:57): It can. And in a lot of mountain environments, your safer zones are going to be uphill. And you need to be really cautious about the idea, again, that you never want to be in a place where you're racing a fire uphill, because fires move faster uphill and we slow down. And then the other point: that participant wasn't talking about a wheelchair accessibility program or anything. They were just talking about regular beginners that just move slowly. Wildland firefighters are really scientific about calculating, okay, here's my nearest safety zone, and here's how fast I could get there walking with tools, and here's how fast I can get there downing tools and running. And they've worked that out really scientifically. Wildland firefighters also tend to be really fit. And in a lot of our groups, you might get a wide range of fitness. So the speed you can move, even without your pack, may be limited. So we need to be really thinking things through with the real limitations of who we're dealing with out there, because it's our job to take care of those people.

George Bull (25:02): Did you, in your study, encounter any groups that were incorporating wildfire safe zones into their regular briefings?

Brendan Madden (25:11): Briefings, not as much. But a safety zone is an area of safety from fire that you can get to quickly. It's a wildland firefighter concept. Wildland firefighters will even take chainsaws and bulldozers and make a clearing in the forest that they can get to if the fire should start to act in a dangerous way. Obviously, we don't take chainsaws out in our programs. Well, I suppose the SCA does. But we don't go out there expecting to make clearings in the forest in order to be safe. So my initial thought was, yeah, we're not really using this concept in outdoor programming. But what really jumped out to me from talking to our participants is that actually most of our participants were using that concept. So you have river programs who are going, well, yeah, there might be a fire on the shore, but we're on a significant body of water that's not going to burn, that actually moves us past the fire. Or mountain programs that are thinking, okay, there's a lot of snowfields we can get to if we need to take shelter from a fire. So we actually are using the concept of safety zones as an outdoor sector, which is something to really think about, because we're not being nearly as meticulous and science-based about it as wildland firefighters are. So what size does that safety zone need to be in order to really protect you from a fire? Wildland firefighters know that. We don't. And that's a gap we have to close, particularly as we are using that concept kind of semi-instinctively, but we're not using it in nearly as scientific a way as we should be.

George Bull (26:57): Since your paper has come out, I've actually reflected a little bit on a trip leader training program that I designed and managed a few years ago. It reminded me of the time and effort that I put into teaching our trip leaders about how to recognize helicopter landing zones and what a good helicopter LZ could look like. And as you're hiking, if you're in a forested area, try to keep in the back of your mind the last good place that you passed that could potentially land a helicopter. And maybe as a first step for wildfire, I would probably have added that in a similar way, like encouraging trip leaders to bring in a firefighter, talk about what a wildfire safe zone is, and then keep that in the back of your mind as you're leading your group.

Brendan Madden (27:50): Yeah. If you're feeling threatened by a rapidly moving wildfire when you're out there, your basic options are to get to a safety zone, which is a safe place in your immediate environment, or to get out of that environment with an emergency evacuation. Both of those plans have limitations that are really important to understand, and that change depending on your context and where you are. So walking or paddling your route with somebody with significant wildland firefighter experience and having them talk through the options with you is an amazing thing to do, and we should all be doing that.

George Bull (28:28): So digging more into the limitations behind things like evacuation plans or safe zones, what are some of those limitations that could get in the way of a rapid evacuation?

Brendan Madden (28:41): Yeah, what I've seen in my research is every participant I talked to had an evacuation plan for their organization. We're quite good as a sector at knowing, if I had to get a person or several people out in an emergency, how would I do that? We've built that over fifty years. We're very good at it. What I'm not seeing is organizations adapting that for a wildfire. So there's the idea of, well, what would you do if you really need to get out quickly? It's like, well, we get a helicopter and the helicopter would come get us. It's like, okay, let's pause and work through that. When there's a lot of fire activity in the area, often there's limited availability of helicopters because they're all helping fight fires. So it might take time to get one. Or if there's a lot of wind and/or a lot of smoke in your area, which is what's causing you concern, that actually may ground the aircraft, and they're not allowed to come and get you. So what we need to do is take another look at our systems and really do a deep dive on them and run some scenarios and go, well, what if choppers are our main option? What if the choppers couldn't fly? What's our backup? And we need to have backups to our backups to our backups. And the message is, if you're going to be out there in fire conditions, particularly in extreme conditions, you want to know you can get out of trouble faster than you got into it. So that's having multiple egress points from any place you are, knowing how I'd get out of here quickly if I needed to get out of here quickly. And if you can't answer that question, then maybe don't go into that area in extreme conditions.

George Bull (30:21): Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I think something that I've seen as well is we spend a lot of time as an industry thinking through medical evacuation decisions, or evacuation decisions involving one or two people. But I know the helicopters that I've drilled with in the past are not going to be able to take a group of twelve people out of the backcountry, nor are they probably going to be willing to do seven trips. So it is a really interesting thing to think about, that idea a lot of us have when we're in the field of the big red helicopter button may just not be an option, even if the weather was good.

Brendan Madden (31:00): Yeah, they may, but they may not. And it's important to also not think that that's not an option, because it might be. There were some near-miss events in northwestern Ontario this summer with canoe groups in danger of being entrapped by fires, where parks management needed to get a lot of people out very quickly, and they figured out a way to do it. They got the aircraft, they got in there, and they got the people out, and there were no fatalities. So well done, you know, Wabakimi Provincial Park and Quetico Park and the people who did those rescues. So you never know what's possible, but we don't want to rely on that. We don't want to rely on, well, if I got into trouble, somebody would swoop in here and get my whole group out really quickly with an aircraft, because that may or may not be possible. We need to have other plans, and we need to be thinking really carefully about where we're going when conditions are extreme.

George Bull (31:58): Well, thank you so much for joining the Field Debrief today, Brendan. It was great to have you on.

Brendan Madden (32:05): You bet. I'm really enjoying following the work you're doing with this, George, and you're really an innovator in the space, and it's great to be a part of it.

George Bull (32:13): Thank you. I really appreciate that. If folks want to find you or connect with you, how can they do that?

Brendan Madden (32:21): Probably finding me on LinkedIn, I would think, and either sending me a direct message on LinkedIn, that's Brendan Madden, or finding the Wilderness Climate Lab on LinkedIn and joining that discussion group, and we can carry the conversation forward from there.

George Bull (32:37): Awesome. I'll include those links in the show notes as well for anybody watching or listening.

Brendan Madden (32:43): Appreciate that.

George Bull (32:44): All right. Thank you, Brendan.

Brendan Madden (32:46): Thanks, George.