A photographer and hotshot turns his lens to the flames.
PHOTOS BY KYLE MILLER
WORDS BY BELLA BUTLER
Home is something we know in our bodies, a series of senses logged in our system. For Kyle Miller, it’s the smell of smoke, the crackling of burning trees and revving of chainsaws, the hearty pat of a hand on your back at the end of a long day. His home—at least in part—is among a crew who have also dedicated their lives to managing wildfire.
Miller is a captain of the Wyoming Interagency Hot Shots, an elite wildland fire crew based out of the Bighorn National Forest. What began the summer before college as a seasonal gig in northwest Montana, where he grew up, blossomed into a deep passion, and from there, a career. Now 39, Miller lives with his wife and two young children in Cody, Wyoming, but spends much of the year fighting wildfire—and photographing it.
Though headlines tend to favor wildfire news, especially during its season in the American West, an opaque wall still separates the public from some of its most intense domestic frontlines, impeding visibility, but also understanding, Miller says. Through sharing images from places where many journalists can’t even go, he’s breaking down that wall—or at least punching a hole through it.
He first brought a camera on assignment in Alaska in 2004. It was a cheap disposable, and the photos he captured of the crew’s daily jetboat commute up the Tanana River were blurry and low-quality. He bought a nicer camera, still hoping to capture the unique places his work was taking him and the action he was seeing. Two decades later, his photos have been published widely, and are currently displayed at Cody’s Buffalo Bill Center for the West in an exhibit called “Fire on the Mountain.”
There are two layers to Miller’s photos: the visual and the story. At first, his photos are striking. Heavily focused on the role light plays in the images, Miller captures how light is made soft by smoke, and how it is made brilliant by flames against a night sky. His work masterfully renders the shape and weight of a landscape and its features, and despite the surrounding drama, his images nearly always draw the eye to the subject, often a wildland firefighter.
“When I see people shooting wildfire, a lot of people are looking for big flames, and I’m really never looking for that,” Miller says. “I’m usually looking for something that makes the photo simple.” He looks for a clear subject, usually a subject doing something.
This is where the second layer begins. The strikingness of the photos is what draws you in, but the story is what asks you to linger. Evidence of his intimate understanding, Miller is a master at capturing a web of relationships—between the firefighter and the land, the land and the fire, the firefighter and the fire, and sometimes the firefighters with each other.
He says wildfire poses a bit of a contradiction in terms of home. For much of the year, it’s the thing that takes him away from one of his homes, the one he shares with his family. But in another way, it’s the element that defines home for him. One of his photos included in this gallery explains it well. Gathered at camp after an intense day working on a fire in southern Wyoming in 2016, campfire illuminates the smiling, dirt-stained faces of his crew, and moonlight strikes their hunched backs. There’s a closeness you feel in the photo—a bond Miller tries to describe with words but says he falls short of. Put simply, it’s a photo of home.
LEFT: A sawyer, silhouetted by sunrays filtering through the dense smoke and ash, cuts down a tree on the Hope Fire in Dolores, Colorado, in September 2023. The sunrays diffuse as they penetrate the wildfire haze, causing an almost ethereal glow and softening of the surroundings. RIGHT: Miller’s Wyoming Hotshots crew poses for their annual saw squad photo on a Douglas fir branch in 2014 after containing a Northern California fire. Hotshot crews are comprised of 18-25 people and are broken into squads. Most crew members fill one of two jobs: They either dig using hand tools, or they’re a sawyer. Sawyers work in teams of two, with one sawing and the other swamping (removing the material being cut). These sawyer teams make up the saw squad on a crew.
LEFT: The Wyoming Hotshots hike off the 2017 Mill Creek Fire in Hayden, Colorado, for the evening. “Our crew had parked and accessed the fire from the same location the day before and it looked like it would make for a neat shot,” Miller said. “The second day I hiked slightly ahead so I could walk around the back of the pond as the crew went by and line up this shot.” RIGHT: Titled “The Ember Tree,” this image from Wyoming in 2014 is the longest single-exposure shot Miller has ever taken. “To the eye it was almost hard to tell this tree was burning except for the occasional lonely ember drifting down,” Miller said. “We were monitoring a prescribed burn through the night in Custer State Park. Most fuels there are flashy fuels, meaning they burn out quickly, leaving us with a fairly slow night. I was able to use a pocket tripod and leave the camera with the shutter open for nearly an hour, creating the wild ember trails.”
In this 20-second single-exposure, the Alder Creek Fire burns along the Big Hole River in Montana in September of 2021 with the Pintler Mountains in the background. This was taken from what is called a spike camp, which is a small campsite where wildland firefighting crews spend the night. In order to cut down on travel time and maximize time spent working on the fire, spiking out close to the fire is fairly common.
Miller’s crew ends the day at their spike camp while working a fire in September 2016 south of Encampment, Wyoming. Spike camps are small, typically made up of just one or two hand crews that have chosen to camp closer to the fire’s edge. One of the benefits of a spike camp is the reduction in morning and evening travel times, allowing crews to unwind a little after a long shift. “This was a late-season fire with temperatures dropping to the low teens in the mornings, so a campfire at spike is almost a must-have in the evenings,” Miller said.
A sawyer watches for embers that might threaten to start a spot fire on the wrong side of the containment line while working the 2017 Strawberry Fire in Hulett, Wyoming. Sawyers play an important role on wildfires. They cut down trees that are burning to reduce the risk of hot embers blowing across fire lines and potentially starting new spot fires. They also work to create firebreaks by reducing the ground and ladder fuels that would otherwise allow fire to climb up towards the crowns of the trees. Another duty is to identify and remove snags and widow-makers (dead and dying trees that could fall on crewmembers). Sawyers undertake specialized training and must earn the appropriate certifications to operate chainsaws and to identify and mitigate hazards to ensure their own safety and crew’s safety.
Kyle Miller is a captain for the Wyoming Hotshots and a wildfire photographer. He lives in Cody, Wyoming with his family.
Bella Butler is a freelance writer from southwest Montana and the author of the Feeling Through Fire series published by Mountain Journal. She is the managing editor of Mountain Outlaw.
