Arizona, like much of the Southwest, was in a severe drought. The monsoon, a low-pressure mass of moist air that pushes up from the Gulf of California and brings afternoon rains to the region every July, was moving into Arizona, but so far the influx of moisture had done little to cool the one-hundred-plus-degree temperatures. The monsoon cycle had yet to bring any rain either, though its arrival pretty well guaranteed lightning.
The crew reached the incident commander’s makeshift base at Yarnell’s volunteer fire station by eight a.m. The volunteers’ red trucks were in the engine bay, and a handful of 4x4 pickups from nearby state forests and local fire districts were backed into parking spaces. It was still quiet. Eric went inside for a twenty-minute briefing from the fire’s operations supervisor Todd Abel, a Prescott-area firefighter with eighteen years of experience. The blaze had been divided into eastern and western divisions, and Eric was placed in charge of the west, where Granite Mountain was assigned to work. With Eric overseeing the division, which would require him to move freely around his section of the fire, command of the hotshots fell to thirty-six-year-old captain Jesse Steed.
“Men, gaggle up!” Eric called when he returned. “It’s a long hike in, so bring plenty of water.” Then, as he always did before leading the crew into a remote fire, he told his men to call their families.
• • •
Hotshots hike in single-file lines. Steed was up front. Behind him were the four two-man saw teams and squad boss Travis Carter, followed by Donut and the six other men carrying Pulaskis and hand tools, and finally squad bosses Robert Caldwell and Clayton Whitted, who were responsible for making sure the slowest hotshots didn’t drop off the back of the line. Robert watched the boot heels of the rookie in front of him. The dust the crew kicked up stuck to the sweat on his face.
A little more than a mile in, the thin road veered left and climbed 850 feet to the crest of the Weaver Mountains, where the fire was burning. It was now nearly ten a.m. Temperatures were in the hundreds, and the last spots of shade had disappeared. Three times they stopped for water. Some hotshots, like Donut, carried thirteen quarts that day—twenty-six pounds of water that doubled the weight of their packs.
The fire, still around 300 acres, wasn’t doing much when they got there. It sat atop the ridge, which ran in a crescent shape toward Peeples Valley to the north. On the west flank, to their left, the blaze was held tight against the rim rock on the range’s crest. On the east flank, to their right, a few fingers of fire had burned down draws that drained toward the valley they’d hiked up.
The crew started building line, removing all the flammable fuel along the fire’s eastern flank. The sawyers went first, using their chainsaws to cut brush, while the swampers, the men responsible for clearing anything that has been cut, hauled it off the line and threw it down the mountain. Donut, Robert, and the rest of the hotshots followed behind, using Pulaskis, Rhinos, and rakes to clear away leaves and needles. Steed kept one ear to the radio while helping throw brush or cut line whenever he could.
Eric, who had gone ahead to scout, stood on the peak of the ridgeline above the crew, watching the fire burn north toward Peeples Valley. It was starting to build up steam. Like all seasoned firefighters, Eric was an amateur meteorologist, and he would have noticed the few small cumulus clouds, puffy seeds of thunderstorms, building to the north of the fire. Like giant vacuums, these clouds create wind, drawing in hot air and moisture rising from the desert floor as they grow. Eric knew that the bigger those clouds got, the stronger the vacuum and the faster the flames would be pulled toward the houses in Peeples Valley. It’s why the incident commander kept calling more hotshot crews, aircraft, and engines to the scene.
• • •
About the time Eric was scouting the fire, Marty Cole was “fiddle farting” in his garage in Chino Valley, a small ranching town just north of Prescott. He got the call to head to Yarnell to act as a safety officer, one of a few lead personnel converging on the fire.
Marty had worked for Prescott area fire departments for more than thirty years and is what’s known in the business as an old salt—an arbiter of firefighting culture and tradition. He started his fire career in 1980, well before the city launched its wildland-firefighting division. Back then, firefighter culture was so tribal that city, county, and federal departments refused to leave their jurisdictions. If a fire was burning inside city limits—wildland or otherwise—it was the city’s problem and nobody else’s. Marty remembers one of the first burned bodies he ever saw. “A young kid burned to death in a car fire,” he says. “Two blocks away, firefighters from the neighboring department sat inside their station and watched the smoke column rise.”
Many of those walls have since been torn down. But the tribalism still exists, and it’s strongest within the insular world of hotshots. Marty was the superintendent of Granite Mountain from 2004 to 2005, when Eric first joined and they were trying to become a hotshot crew.
It was a humbling process. At the time, every one of the roughly one hundred hotshot crews in the nation was funded by states or the feds—the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the Bureau of Indian Affairs—and many of them had decades of tradition. Granite Mountain, a startup outfit hosted by a small town in Arizona that most other hotshots had never heard of, wasn’t exactly well received. The crew once showed up at a fire in Oregon in white ten-passenger vans. Real crews use buggies. When Granite Mountain went out to start work, a firefighter from another crew drew a line in the middle of the road with spray paint and wrote Don’t cross it.
“When I left, Eric had something to prove,” says Marty. “He was going to make that crew better than any other out there.”
• • •
From his scouting position, Eric could see one of two specially outfitted DC-10s—or VLATs, very large air tankers—fly 200 feet off the ground and drop 20,000 gallons of fire retardant between the flames and Peeples Valley.
He was concerned that the blaze could pivot and start burning down the valley toward Yarnell. If that happened, the flames would be below the crew, creating the same life-threatening situation that killed thirteen men in the Mann Gulch Fire and helped spawn the ten standard firefighting orders, among them: know what your fire is doing at all times, and base all actions on current and expected fire behavior. Eric wanted to be certain that if this event unfolded, he had a dedicated lookout to warn him about it.
“Let’s send Donut down to be a lookout,” he told Steed. Eric picked Donut because he’d been sick—a slow day could help. “We’ll send him down with Blue Ridge’s supe.”
The Blue Ridge Hotshots, a crew out of the Coconino National Forest, had arrived on the scene that morning, and Granite Mountain could see the crew’s superintendent, Brian Frisby, on an off-road utility vehicle (UTV) motoring up the two-track in the valley to meet with Eric and coordinate their efforts.
The plan they agreed on was simple. Granite Mountain would keep building line on the fire’s eastern edge while Blue Ridge used their chainsaws to widen an old road that stood between the fire and Yarnell. If the winds shifted and the blaze ran toward town, Blue Ridge could set fire to the brush between the road and the wildfire, robbing it of the fuel it needed to survive. Given the fire’s steady chug to the north, it was a contingency plan.
Donut threw his gear in the back of the UTV and got a ride to a bluff in the valley that gave him a view of the fire. “Call me on tac”—a line-of-sight radio frequency—“if you need anything,” the Blue Ridge supe told Donut when he dropped him off. “We’ve got our eyes on you.”
• • •
Donut picked a good spot. The knoll he was perched on offered a clear view of the fire and an easy escape route. Just a few hundred yards behind him there was a safety zone, a patch of bare dirt a little larger than a tennis court that a bulldozer had cleared earlier that morning just in case things went haywire. He chose a trigger point, a small drainage a quarter of a mile away. If the fire crossed it, he’d retreat.
Not that the third-year veteran felt he was in any danger. The southern edge of the fire was nearly half a mile away, moving fifty feet an hour toward him, maybe less. He ate his MRE lunch—beef stew—and at the top of every hour “slung weather,” using the red book-size kit every lookout carries to record hourly changes in conditions. He took out a thermometer on a chain, dipped the cloth-covered end into his water bottle, and swung it at arm’s length for a minute to measure the humidity and temperature. At two p.m. he scratched into the kit’s notebook: “104 degrees, 10 percent humidity, five to ten-mile an hour winds with gusts of 15 out of the S” and a note referencing the clouds: “Build up to the SW.” Then he went back to fighting off boredom.
Donut can trace his interest in firefighting to a fire-science class he took as a fourteen-year-old kid. He came to Granite Mountain during hard times. In December 2010, he’d spent a couple of nights in jail for possession of a stolen GPS. Then, in March 2011, his girlfriend at the time gave birth to his little girl. He was working construction and taking an EMT class at the local community college at night, but on the occasions that he actually showed up for class, he mostly slept off hangovers or was still coming down from something else. “You name it, I tried it,” he says.
In mid-April, he awoke from a binge feeling the full weight of fatherhood. I need to stop this now, he thought. He asked the Prescott Fire Department if they had any openings and was directed to Eric Marsh, who was looking for five replacements. Donut told Eric the whole story—the jail time, the drugs, his dream of becoming a firefighter, his new baby. He was hired on the spot. Donut thinks he got the job because Eric “saw some of himself in me.”
By that time, Granite Mountain had been a full-fledged hotshot crew for three years. Eric had pulled off the feat by attracting experienced wildland firefighters, like Steed, with the one thing the Prescott Fire Department could offer that no other hotshot crew could: access to jobs on the city’s red trucks. Nearly a dozen Granite Mountain alumni now worked for the department as paramedics or structural firefighters—full-time, family-friendly positions that kept them closer to home. Eric, a certified instructor in both city and wildland firefighting, facilitated that transition by offering training courses throughout the year. That was especially important this season, during something of a rebuilding year, when there were nine crew members with less than two years of experience and a pair of green squad bosses in Robert Caldwell and Travis Carter. Eric’s classes got new crew members up to date on the certification Granite Mountain needed to retain its hotshot status, and the classes gave career-focused firefighters like Donut a way to become skilled hotshots and to grow out of it.
On Donut’s first full fire assignment, in 2011, Granite Mountain was flown by helicopter into Arizona’s Chiricahua Mountains, a range notorious among wildland firefighters for its steep and rugged terrain. He swung his Pulaski for two weeks, often working sixteen-hour days. The physical abuse nearly broke him, and most of the crew figured he’d wash.
After his first season, he’d proven himself to the rest of the men. Last year he got a tattoo on his calf of a frosted doughnut combined with Granite Mountain’s logo. “Now they tell me, ‘You’re slower than shit and look like a Neanderthal, but we know you won’t quit,’” Donut says. “They’re more my brothers than my actual brother.”
It’s a familiar story in hotshotting: the discipline and rigor of crew life puts wayward young men on track. But Granite Mountain had a more nurturing atmosphere than most crews. Clayton Whitted, a squad boss like Robert, was a former youth pastor at the Heights Church in Prescott. During some shifts on the fire line, the crew would openly discuss Jesus or ask Clayton to tell stories from the Bible. It was through him that Donut accepted Jesus as his savior, on a fire in New Mexico two weeks before Yarnell Hill. “Clayton, Steed, Eric—those guys had it figured out. They made people better,” Donut says. “I wanted a piece of that.”
• • •
At 3:30, Claire Caldwell, Robert’s wife, was at home in downtown Prescott, watering the pumpkins and sunflowers in her well-kept front yard. It was her last chore of the day, and she was rushing through it. She’d already dropped Zion off with his dad, where he’d stay the next couple of days, and planned to spend the evening relaxing on the couch with a bottle of wine and a movie.
The sky was nearly purple. Claire had just finished hosing down the garden when the wind hit. It was so strong that the sunflower blooms lay down across the raised beds. Moments later, the dry creek behind the Caldwells’ house filled with water for the first time that year. She texted Robert: “Hope this rain helps you guys out! You coming home tonight? Love you.”
It irritated her that he didn’t respond.
• • •
Like many Yarnell residents, Truman Farrell was standing on the edge of Highway 89 watching the wall of fire rip north through the chaparral and junipers toward the ranches and homes in Peeples Valley.
“God, it’s awful,” he said to his neighbors, Dan Schroeder and Dorman Olson, who were standing beside him with their two Scottie dogs. But it was also mesmerizing, even for Truman, a veteran of both Vietnam and Desert Storm.
“Look at that!” he said, as a VLAT passed overhead and unloaded its retardant just above them. “Now that’s really something to see.” Little flecks of red slurry landed on his gold Honda CRV. That morning he’d made an evacuation plan with Lois. If things got bad, he’d drive the motor home, towing the CRV, and she’d drive their pickup truck. “I think we’re going to watch Peeples Valley burn,” he said to his neighbors.
Indeed, by midafternoon, the flames had reached the doorsteps of the outer line of houses in Peeples Valley. But none of them would burn. At approximately three-fifty p.m., the wind began to shift. The thunderstorm stopped sucking in air and started blowing it out. The vacuum was now a leaf blower. Truman compares the way the fire bellowed to a volcanic eruption—a storm within a storm that was suddenly pivoting and heading straight toward Yarnell.
“Uh-oh,” he told his neighbors. “It don’t look good. That’s going right to Glen Ilah. We better go.”
• • •
“Division alpha, operations. Did you copy that weather report?”
“Affirmative,” replied Eric. “The winds are getting squirrelly up here. The dozer and retardant line have been compromised.”
Eric, who was acting as supervisor for the heel of the fire, was scouting out front of the crew on the ridgeline above Donut when the radio traffic came through.
“Are you in a good spot?”
“Affirmative. We’re in the black.”
Like Eric, the rest of the crew was in the island of ash the fire had left behind the day before. The brush was incinerated, and the chance of reburn was nil. It was the safest place they could be.
The operations supervisor requested air attack fly over Granite Mountain’s position. Once their location was confirmed, the focus of the fire fight shifted entirely to Yarnell. Granite Mountain was safe and sidelined.
• • •
Donut was less than a minute into slinging his four p.m. weather when Steed came back over the radio.
“Donut, you up?”
“Go, Steed.”
“They’re calling for a 180-degree wind shift and gusts of up to sixty miles per hour out of the northeast.”
“Copy that.”
He looked up at the approaching wall of flames and blinked. For the first time that afternoon, the wind was blowing at his face instead of his back. The flank that had been slowly backing down the valley had suddenly jumped to life. Two-foot flames had grown to twelve, and within moments the fire was running up a ridge on the east side of the valley and then south, directly at Donut.
“Steed, Donut. It hit my trigger point.” The fire had crossed the drainage on the valley floor only a quarter of a mile away. “I’m bumping back to the dozer push.”
“Alright, let me know when you get there. We’ve got eyes on you.”
&nb
sp; Donut tossed on his pack and grabbed his gear as he started wading down through the brush field and boulders toward the safety of the clearing the bulldozer had created that morning.
• • •
Eric Marsh and Granite Mountain sat in the black ash on the ridgeline above Donut and watched the fire burn for nearly an hour. They rested and ate MREs for lunch.
Chris MacKenzie, Donut’s roommate, pulled out his camera and took a handful of stills. One shot was of sawyer Andrew Ashcraft taking a photo of the fire that he’d text to his wife. Another was of the column of smoke turning from bone white to black.
The hotshots who’d brought their phones texted or called their loved ones. Another sawyer, Scott Norris, who’d come to Granite Mountain this season after four years on a Forest Service hotshot crew in Payson, Arizona, texted with his girlfriend, Heather.
Heather: “I had a weird dream I proposed to Scott last night.” Then, “Oh, hi. That was meant for Sarah!”
Scott: “I’m a little old fashioned. I think I’d like to be the one to propose.”
Scott: “Just watched a DC3 slurry bomber nearly collide midair with a Sikorsky helicopter.”
Heather: “Holy hell! That certainly would have made the news.”
Scott: “This fire is going to shit burning all over and expected 40+ mile per hour wind gust from t-storm outflow. Possibly going to burn some ranches and houses.”
And finally, when the fire was racing straight at Donut, Scott texted a final photo of flames filling the valley below them: “Holy shit! This thing is running at Yarnell!”
The Best American Magazine Writing 2014 Page 45