In 2012, I spent a season on a wildland firefighting crew based just outside California’s Sequoia National Park. Our first assignment wasn’t a wildfire but a cleanup project at Devils Postpile National Monument in the eastern Sierra Nevada, where a historic windstorm had been severe enough to uproot a distressing number of mature lodgepole pines. We were to limb the crowns of fallen trees, cut the trunks into manageable rounds, and then schlep these to hydraulic wood-splitting machines, where a crew member would crank out triangular wedges. The final step was to stack the logs so they could spend months drying in the High Sierra air to eventually become firewood for future campers. The work didn’t have the romance and danger of trying to outflank an advancing inferno, but it provided the gratification of turning arboreal debris into tinder for—one hoped—less devastating fires.