For a group of Canberra firefighters, it was like lobbing into the set of the popular 1990s TV show Northern Exposure.
Except Zama City, population 52, in the far remote northern Alberta province, was a township under siege from fire.
For weeks as fierce wildfires raged all around it, the Canberra firies were there to support the desperate attempts by the Canadians to stem the progress of some of the largest and fiercest conflagrations in their country's history.
It has been a record-breaking summer of the worst kind for the Canadians.
More than 12 million hectares of Canadian forest have burned since April, double the size of the catastrophic bushfires of Australia's 2019-20 Black Summer.
The scale of these Canadian fires has been phenomenal. On the last weekend in July, 616 fires were still burning out of control.
The fires have crossed the border from Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba into neighbouring USA, threatening properties in Washington state, Montana and North Dakota.
The exhausted 11 strike team members arrived home last weekend after a month in the Canadian wilderness, fighting fires in conditions more akin to an alien landscape compared to their home environment.
Such was the intense heat of the fires in northern Alberta, the once-solid permafrost access roads had turned to knee-deep mud.
Even fat-tyred quad bikes, which are as common in Canada's inland north as e-scooters on Canberra's streets, were getting bogged, strike team leader Kirsten Tasker said.
"All the equipment was getting bogged; bulldozers, support vehicles, you name it," she said.
"The logistics of getting in and out of the fireground were very difficult which was why the helicopters were so important to fight the fire.
"Most days we had as many as eight choppers supporting us."
Zama City's tiny airdrome was buzzing with activity through the day and night, with helicopters slung with fire buckets on a constant refuel shuffle.
Pine forests burn differently to the eucalypts in Australia, and the thick needle-laden forest floor was constantly smouldering and then reigniting again after the crews thought they were snuffed.
"Their really tall pines have branches all the way to the ground so when the litter at the base isn't fully extinguished, they ignite at the base and the flame front then races up the tree," she said.
"The fuel structure is all the way up the tree so when a tree caught alight, it [the fire] would go from nothing to fiercely intense in 30 seconds."
So remote was the area in which they worked, it took 10 hours just to get back to Edmonton in Alberta, followed by the long trans-Pacific flight via Vancouver, in British Columbia, to Australia.
The Australian deployment to Canada was a reciprocal arrangement and involved four rotations of firefighters and specialist roles such as aviation logistics and fire behaviour analysts.
Around 120 Canadian firefighters and other specialists were deployed to Australia during the Black Summer bushfires.
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