The Nulato Hills Crew fights fire with hand tools, from five villages

The Nulato Hills Crew is about 20 people from Kaltag, Nulato, Koyukuk, Galena and Ruby, and what they carry to a fire is hand tools. No engines, no bulldozers. A Type 2 hand crew cuts fireline by digging it, which is how fire gets stopped in country with no roads to drive an engine down. The Bureau of Land Management has contracted them for another season.

The crew works through Nulato Hills Enterprises, an Alaska Native owned company based in Nulato. That arrangement is newer than the work itself.

For decades the federal government hired emergency firefighter crews straight out of Alaska villages, each crew drawn from a single community that had enough qualified people to fill one. Those crews thinned out over about twenty years as other jobs appeared, as populations moved, and as the BLM applied national qualification standards to everyone who fights fire. Rather than lose the crews, the agency built a contract program instead, starting in 2017 and awarding the first three contracts in 2020. It was the first of its kind for the BLM anywhere in the country, and it has grown to nine crews based in remote Alaska communities.

The change matters most in the months when nothing is burning. An emergency firefighter got called when there was a fire and not otherwise. A contract crew can be sent to thin brush, cut fuel breaks and work on other funded projects, which turns a seasonal callout into something closer to steady work. It also means the firefighters are employees of the company rather than of the federal government.

The Nulato Hills Crew has done both kinds of work. It spent time outside Eagle on a fuels reduction project, clearing ground to make the community harder for a fire to reach. Last summer the contract crews were sent to roughly 16 wildland fires around Alaska between early June and early August, and most assignments ran at least 21 days.

Alaska's contract firefighting crews earned nearly $6 million in 2023, according to the Alaska Fire Science Consortium. The BLM's crew contract runs through March 2031, which is why each season arrives as its own order rather than a new agreement.