Spot Fires and Slop-Overs: Memoir of a Firefighter

Buck Wickham was just eighteen years old when he started working for the U.S. Forest Service in 1971. The world was a different place then, and times have definitely changed. In Spot Fires and Slop-Overs, he narrates the story of his career as a forest firefighter—from his beginnings chasing lightning fires on the Mogollon Rim of Northern Arizona through his participation on incident management teams fighting fires across the United States. Offering a candid look at Wickham’s specialized work, Spot Fires and Slop-Overs presents an engaging and fascinating memoir of one man’s time serving in the U.S. Forest Service. He presents insight into the nuts and bolts of his job throughout his tenure, and he reflects on how things are changing in the forests and in the bureaucracy of forest management. He tells about the friendships and antics he’s experienced and also shares compelling stories of what it was like to be on the ground in the nation’s forests.