Wrestling Training Helped Prepare Rick Moreno For Firefighting Career
If Glenwood Community High School had an athletic hall of fame, Rick Moreno would certainly be in it.
Thirty-two years after graduating from GCHS, Moreno still holds the distinction of being one of just two Ram wrestlers to win two individual state championships. His contributions on the mat helped the Rams win their first and only team state championship in 1989 and the state runner-up trophy in 1992, his senior season.
There’s no doubt Moreno was an integral part of the Rams’ wrestling success in the late 1980s and early ‘90s. Moreno, who will turn 51 in October, still has some fond memories of his wrestling days in Glenwood and credits the sport for helping to prepare him for a career as a wildland firefighter with the United States Forest Service.
“It’s a lot like wrestling,” Moreno said recently while discussing his firefighting career. “The correlation between how you train, what you prep for, all that stuff. So much stuff you do in the background to maybe go out there for a few big fires a year, but you better be on point and you better be trained up. You do it with 20 other people right beside you who have the same mission and goals.”
Cutting His Teeth Fighting Fires
Moreno has worked with the U.S. Forest Service in multiple capacities since 1994, when he was introduced to firefighting while a student and wrestler at North Idaho College in the scenic community of Coeur d’Alene.
Following his second year at North Idaho, Moreno was presented an opportunity to work with the forest service. The job was an instant introduction to wildland firefighting.
“It was 1994 and it was a really, really busy season nationally as far as fires,” he said. “I cut my teeth right away into a pretty heavy fire season. It was just a great job, the environment – nothing was ever the same each day. I was doing things I had never done before and I just kind of started from there. I started learning about the hierarchies of wildland fire – hot shot crews and smoke jumpers.”
It was during his time in Coeur d’Alene that Moreno met his future wife, Rebecca. After a couple years at North Idaho College, where Moreno earned a seventh-place finish at the NJCAA Wrestling Championships, he took some time off and had another opportunity to work with a team of hot shot firefighters while he made decisions about his future. He intended to go to Southern Oregon University to wrestle and continue his schooling, however a late offer from Coach Danny Knight, a wrestling legend in Iowa, who had taken over the wrestling program at Mount St. Clare College in Clinton, brought Moreno back to Iowa.
NAIA National Champion
Moreno had a successful season at Mount St. Clare, winning an NAIA national championship, but the passion he had developed for firefighting was still burning and when the forest service reached out to him about a job opening with a hot shot crew in a remote area of Idaho, he listened.
“While I was there (Mount St. Clare), finishing up school right after the championships, the forest service got a hold of me,” he recalled. “I had put in for some shot crews that year and it’s really hard to get in. They gave me a call and said, ‘Hey, look, we had somebody that didn’t make it. You can get on the crew if you’re here next week.
“We packed up all of our stuff, I dropped out of school and I headed that way – back to Idaho.”
Shot crews, typically teams of 20, are known as the “special forces” of firefighting. The crews, can get deployed to any wildfire in the country, no matter where they’re based.
“You train together and you do everything together,” Moreno said. “Everything is kind of militaristic. That’s what you do, you’re a wildland firefighting force and when you’re not at a fire, you’re a national resource to help support. You can go anywhere.”
Moreno described firefighters on a shot crew as “workhorses,” who are typically deployed on 14-day assignments.
Once he joined the shot crew, Moreno knew he had found his calling.
“I loved the excitement, the danger of it – all those kind of things,” he said. “I just slowly started working my way up from being a sawyer to a squad boss to a foreman.”
During one of his stints on a shot crew, Moreno was deployed to some of largest wildland fires in the country Two of the most memorable are the Big Bar Fire (California) in 1999 and a blaze in the Okanogan National Forest in Washington.
“The Big Bar incident was memorable because I can remember for probably at least 21 days, we never saw the sun,” he said. ‘It was so sucked in – everyone was coughing and hacking. The poison oak was just unreal – they had doctors coming in shooting us with cortisone shots.
There were people with blisters all over their face because the poison oak was burning and people were breathing it in.”
The fire in Washington came on the anniversary of the 2001 Thirtymile Fire that caused multiple injuries and fatalities. Moreno was working with a team of five at the fire.
“These columns of energy, the heat, they build and build,” he said. “As it goes in the atmosphere, the atmosphere gets cooler in there. What it does, it creates a big ice cap and you can see the ice caps on top collapse on that column and all these winds go 360 degrees.
“That happened to us. It changed all the fire behavior. We got trapped and had to pull out our shelters. It was weird, probably three or four hours sitting in there. When it was all said and done, the entire hillside was nuked except for that area. We’ve had a lot of close calls, but that’s probably the scariest I’ve been in.”
Moreno said sometimes there’s no explanation for why a fire burns the way it does or the direction it travels.
“We try to corral it the best that we can,” he said. “But sometimes, you just say, ‘Why did it do that? Why did it burn there and not here?’”
Smokejumping
Moreno started “smokejumping”while working his way up to the management level.
Smokejumpers are firefighters who are brought to a remote fire by plane or helicopter for a quick response.
“The alarm goes off, we have to get suited up with all of our stuff on – our parachute. We have to do our buddy checks, get on the plane and we’re supposed to be rolling out within two minutes,” he said. “We circle the fire, get the coordinates and look at everything on the maps.
Everything is being coordinated as you’re arriving. You spot the fire, you circle over and obviously you’re looking for a good jump spot. Everybody on the plane is communicating on that, it’s not just one person making the decision. We all have to say we’re comfortable with the decision.”
After jumping from the plane and hitting the ground, the firefighters make an immediate assessment of their situation to determine if additional personnel is needed. Meanwhile, the plane circles back around and drops the needed cargo at the scene.
“Our cargo has our tools in it, sleeping bag, extra food, extra water,” Moreno said. “If we’re in the wilderness and need a cross-cut saw, we have that kicked out there. Bear spray, satellite phones – whatever we need. We’re a small workforce, but we know how to work together and get things done ”
It isn’t uncommon for smokejumpers to spend several days battling a blaze. When the deployment ends, it’s an unspoken rule that the firefighters hike their way out of the wilderness instead of being picked up by a plane or helicopter.
“Culturally, it’s ingrained in us. We pack our stuff up and we hike out. I’ve been on pack-outs over mountainous terrains and sometimes on trails where you’re just bush-whackin. The heaviest I’ve had on my back was about 148 pounds and that was a 17-mile pack-out. You’re beat up, you’re bleeding.
“It’s just an unspoken thing. If you want to be in this business, it’s what you do. There’s an unspoken level of respect that goes in there and that’s just what makes us tighter.”
Moreno’s career with the U.S. Forest Service has provided some unique career and leadership development opportunities, including travel across the country and overseas.
“The good thing about the Forest Service, you can put your fingers in so many different things,” he said. “I traveled to South Africa - I taught incident command systems over there. That’s one aspect of it, but you also have the opportunity for different training. I saw that opportunity and took advantage of those kinds of things. Like now, I’m a smokejumper, but I’m doing another detail with a national delivery team. We teach courses online to a bunch of people about the incident command system.”
Coaching Wrestling
Moreno and his wife Rebecca, a Buffalo, N.Y. native, live in Missoula, Mont., now. They have three children, all who are athletic. Meija, their oldest daughter, attended Montana State University, while her younger sister, Sarina, was a libero on the University of Montana volleyball team, where she holds the school record of digs. The Moreno’s youngest child, Izzy, is in Iowa where he wrestles for the University of Northern Iowa.
Despite his obligations with the Forest Service, Moreno found time to coach wrestling in Missoula. He started and ran a youth wrestling academy as an opportunity for Izzy and other youth in the community The academy was more successful than he had envisioned when he started it up.
“We traveled all over the country. A lot of kids bought into the program and that kind of morphed into something way bigger than I wanted,” he said. “We started having really good success on the national level and at the same time I’m still trying to maintain my full-time job here at the forest service.”
When Izzy and other wrestlers from the academy got to high school, Moreno was given the opportunity to coach their team. Like his father, Izzy won two individual state titles in high school.
“When he (Izzy) was young, I didn’t know if he was going to wrestle or not, but he was definitely exposed to it,” Moreno said. “It was his own path. I just created opportunities.”
Moreno said he’s closed the book on the wrestling chapter of his life now, but he still keeps in touch with some of his former Glenwood teammates through social media, including his former coach Bob Dyer, Jeff and Matt Dyer, Chad Stouder and Jeff Jens (Glenwood’s other two-time state champion). He occasionally makes it back to Iowa to visit family, including his parents, Miguel and Juanita, who reside in Glenwood. His brother, Mike, also a state champion at Glenwood and former college wrestler (Iowa State) and high school coach, also lives in Iowa. And, of course, with Izzy wrestling at UNI, more trips to Iowa are likely, if his job allows it.
Moreno is currently the Forest Service’s second oldest smokejumper. The mandatory retirement age is 57, but he’s uncertain how long he’ll keep jumping. Rick and Rebecca already own a lakeside retirement home.
“I still love what I’m doing, but it’s hard,” he said. “My body hurts. My knees are feeling it, my shoulders are there but I think I now offer more from the things I’ve learned and passing it on than I’m doing out there.”