• • •
Donut couldn’t see the flames behind the knoll he’d just come down from, but he knew from the moment he hit the safety zone that the fire was ripping. The smoke was dark. “I see you, Donut,” Steed called on the radio. It was good to hear his captain’s voice. Donut was running through options in his mind. The fire was winding up and would soon cut off his escape route down the two-track the crew had hiked up from Yarnell that morning. He could hightail it back toward the rest of the crew, but one look at the 800 feet of elevation he had to climb and he thought: Fuck no, I can’t outrun this.
His next option seemed worse: deploying his fire shelter, the bivy-sack-size aluminum tent that all wildland firefighters carry as a last resort. The shelters deflect heat but melt when hit directly by flames. Donut had been trained on what to do if left with no choice but to deploy. He’d throw his pack away. He’d bring a liter of water and his radio under the shelter, lie facedown and grab the fiberglass handles, and then, as he’d been instructed, he’d sing or hum or yell to anybody within earshot—just something to take his mind off the pain. He’d have to paw at the ground beneath his mouth and bury his nose in the cooler air below. Firefighters can survive interior temperatures of around 300 degrees, but not much hotter. Deployments have occurred 1,239 times since wildland firefighters started using the shelters in the 1960s, and only 22 have died.
The dozer push should have been big enough to survive a deployment, but it wasn’t something Donut cared to test. In 1994, an Arizona hotshot who deployed considered beating his head against a rock to knock himself unconscious. If he lived, he figured, at least he’d avoid the pain and wake up after the storm passed.
“Steed, Donut. I’m calling Blue Ridge.” He’d just keyed the mic to call when Blue Ridge’s superintendent, Brian Frisby, came around the corner on his UTV. When he’d heard the weather update on the radio, he immediately left his crew to collect Donut.
Donut threw his gear in the back and handed Brian the radio: “Call Steed and Eric.”
“I’ve got Donut. The fire’s making its push. We’re going to go back and bump your buggies.” Brian mashed on the gas and raced toward the teams’ vehicles.
• • •
The Granite Mountain crew could see Donut on the UTV racing across the flats. They could see the helicopters and air tankers pivoting from Peeples Valley to Yarnell and dozens of emergency vehicles, lights flashing, speeding down Highway 89 toward Glen Ilah, the subdivision where Truman lived. It would have been difficult for the hotshots, who had been trained to help however they can, to sit idly by and watch houses burn. They would have been thinking of their fellow firefighters placing themselves in harm’s way.
With conditions changing so dramatically, Eric and the crew’s leadership—Steed, Clayton, Travis, Robert—would have gathered for a moment on the ridge to discuss their options while the other hotshots sat perched on white granite boulders watching the drama unfold.
Do we hunker down in the black and do nothing but watch Yarnell burn? Or do we head down there, do some point protection, and try to save a couple of homes? Eric would have made the decision. He couldn’t have imagined that, by heading for town, he was leading his crew toward a series of increasingly compromised circumstances, each more desperate than the last.
He radioed out that Granite Mountain was moving back toward Yarnell.
Donut drove Eric’s supe truck to the edge of Yarnell. There, he and the Blue Ridge hotshots joined a few engine companies who were wetting and widening a contingency dozer line—a last effort to stop the fire from burning straight down Highway 89.
Donut radioed to Steed. “Buggies are parked. I’m with Blue Ridge. If you guys need anything, let me know.”
“Copy. I’ll see you soon.” It was the last time Donut spoke to Steed.
• • •
“We’ve got to go now!” Truman yelled to Lois as he rushed toward their front door. She was coming out of the house, her arms full of things to load into their RV.
“Why?” she said. The smoke wasn’t blowing over the house.
“Because if we don’t, we’ll die!”
Lois snapped out of it. She could now see the black smoke blowing through the oak trees outside her living room windows.
Truman grabbed a vial of holy water he’d taken from church two months before and sprinkled it on the front door, silently saying a quick prayer before he raced toward the couple’s motor home.
Out front, a little white truck was circling the neighborhood. Lea Way, a local nurse practitioner, was leaning out the window warning the residents. “Everybody out! Everybody get out!”
• • •
Just minutes after Donut started working with the Blue Ridge crew to hastily build a new contingency line closer to town, Blue Ridge’s superintendent and squad bosses told them to load back into the buggies. Fist-size embers sailed over the crew like a volley of flaming arrows. Radio transmissions were lost to the roar of the wind. Nothing more could be done. They’d lost Yarnell.
• • •
When the flames hit Glen Ilah, Truman and Lois had to turn on their headlights to see through the smoke as they entered the caravan of cars fleeing the subdivision. Just across the street, a tornado of fire was twirling through the neighbors’ houses. Later he’d call it the day of the dragon—a ball of flame blown from the mouth of an unseen beast. He’d lived through two wars but had never felt so close to death.
Down the street, a ninety-year-old couple, the Harts, didn’t know the fire was coming until they looked out the upstairs window and saw it engulf a house at the end of the street. They drove away in such a rush that they backed into a ditch and flipped the car. After they somehow crawled out, the sheriff found them walking dumbfounded toward town.
The traffic piled up at the stop sign across Highway 89 from the Ranch House Restaurant, where the Granite Mountain buggies and the Blue Ridge crew were heading. Truman came to a stop, then turned right and pointed his rig toward the safety of the desert below.
• • •
Since Eric’s last radio transmission, Granite Mountain had covered nearly a mile on the two-track, at some point deciding to leave the safety of the black edge. The farther the crew moved down, the thicker the smoke became. When they reached a saddle above a basin below them that was 200 yards wide, Eric lost sight of the fire. A ridge to his left would have blocked his view.
The superintendent was now faced with a choice: bail off the far side of the ridge to their right, toward the questionable safety of the desert 2,000 feet below, or keep heading down to the defensible space surrounding a ranch house, the Helms place, that he could briefly see when the smoke lifted for a moment from the saddle.
He radioed to the plane circling overhead. His transmissions, normally delivered in the deadpan of a true technician, were beginning to betray his stress. Granite Mountain, he told air attack, was moving toward the ranch house they had in sight at the foot of the basin.
Get there and everything would be OK. It didn’t look far. A fifteen-minute hike tops. Eric would have seen the homeowners outside, panicking as they pushed their llama and miniature donkey into the barn before they prepared to weather the inferno that was ripping toward them.
They hiked down the slope, another 500-foot descent through brush into a basin walled with giant granite boulders on three sides. Somewhere closer to the basin’s floor than the saddle, the flames appeared from behind the ridge to their left.
One at a time they came face-to-face with a fire that had just burned a seemingly impossible four miles in about twenty minutes. Each of them would have known what it meant. There was no exit. Looking down through the smoke over the tops of eight-foot chaparral to a fire that was ripping uphill at them, Eric must have realized that everything he’d worked for was gone. In one decision to leave the black, he went from the superintendent of the country’s only municipal hotshot crew to the only superintendent to have led nineteen elite wildland firefighters into a burnover. If
he survived, he knew every hotshot crew in the nation would be up his ass. “What were you thinking, Marsh? How did you do this?” The best he could hope for was a life sentence of crippling guilt: These kids… my kids… this situation. How did I let this happen?
• • •
Still, they kept going down. He knew that trying to outrun a fire burning uphill, the decision that killed fourteen firefighters on Colorado’s South Canyon Fire, wasn’t an option. The fastest hotshots might make it; the slowest might not. The crew would stay together.
As fast as they could, they plowed through the chaparral, their forearms shielding their faces from the plants whipping back at them. The fire had spread across the head of the basin. Steed or one of the squad bosses radioed out, frantically calling the air-attack plane and helicopter overhead. Again and again they called. When the signal finally got through, no one could decipher the calls. Just screaming: “Granite 7!”
“Whoever is yelling over the radio needs to stop,” was the response from air attack. “I can’t understand you.”
The crew’s best chance at survival lay in a depression on the basin floor where two swales that flowed toward Yarnell met. The brush was thinnest there. Eric and Steed would have made the call. Start the chainsaws. Cut a hole in the brush big enough to deploy nineteen fire shelters. Squad bosses Robert, Clayton, and Travis would have confirmed the order with nods. This is right. This is what we have left.
A helicopter beat the air overhead, searching for the crew through the smoke. All they saw was occasional bursts of flame running and leaping up the basin.
Finally, Eric radioed air attack, his back to the superheated wind. “Our escape route has been cut off. The Granite Mountain hotshots are deploying their fire shelters.” Their chainsaws were heard ripping in the background.
• • •
The crew would have been deliberate.
The orders provided purpose. The purpose moderated panic. They’d set down their chainsaws and gasoline outside the circle of the safety zone, so that when the fuel exploded it wouldn’t damage their shelters. They’d use flares to set the brush around them on fire, a technique Wag Dodge, a Montana firefighter, famously used to save his own life on a fire that killed thirteen smoke jumpers more than sixty years earlier. It would burn the fuel out around the safety zone and keep the flames farther away from the shelters. The clearing was just sixty feet by sixty feet—a three-car garage.
They deployed their shelters in ascending order of experience. The rookies and seasonal hotshots went first; then the squad bosses, making sure their men were in. Before entering his shelter, Steed would have watched Robert, Clayton, and Travis climb into theirs. Eric went last. To protect their heads, they all pointed their feet toward the advancing flames. The grouping was so tight that the shelters touched. They followed orders. No man tried to run or buck the command. Inside the orange glow of their shelters, they would have heard each other’s encouragements over the wind. They would each have had just a few moments to think. They’d wrestle their shelters as they beat the air like wind socks. They’d clench their teeth, desperately pinning the flimsy aluminum tents to the ground as the flames passed over them and the heat became unimaginable.
• • •
Donut and the Blue Ridge hotshots parked Granite Mountain’s buggies at the Ranch House Restaurant and were watching the exodus of cars. The fire had overtaken the houses at the end of the street. Every few moments a propane tank exploded, throwing thirty-foot flames skyward. The helicopter beat the air above—searching for the crew through the smoke. The fire fight had ground to a halt. Donut, who had heard Eric’s radio transmission moments before, was in a daze.
It took more than an hour and a half for Ranger 58, a helicopter from Arizona’s Department of Public Safety, to locate the fire shelters. The first in was Eric Tarr, a paramedic. He was dropped by helicopter near the Helms place and walked 500 yards up the box canyon through the charred and barely smoking landscape. Already, more firefighters, three Forest Service men on ATVs, were converging on the basin. Minutes after arriving on the scene, Tarr checked each man’s pulse and radioed out, “I have nineteen confirmed fatalities.”
• • •
When the Prescott dispatch reached Wade Ward, a former Granite Mountain hotshot and the department’s current public information officer, they told him he needed to get to the dispatch center as fast as possible. They didn’t tell him why. As he sped to the station, all he could think of was that something had happened to his family.
When he arrived, the dispatchers were all standing at their computers, silently watching him make the long walk across the room to where a few senior-ranking Prescott fire personnel sat waiting.
“Granite Mountain deployed at the Yarnell Fire,” they told him. His first thought was Eric’s not going to be happy. There’s going to be reams of paperwork, an investigation, and the crew’s going to be put under more of a spotlight than it already was.
Then it began to sink in. These guys? Eric? Granite Mountain? No way. They’re too good.
When the call came in confirming the fatalities, Wade wrote in his notebook, “No medical needed; recovery.” From that point on, it was a race against Facebook and Twitter. The department called police officers, chaplains, and trauma specialists and sent them in teams of three to each of the victims’ families’ homes. They were dispatched in Montana, California, and a handful of cities in Arizona. Mostly, though, it was Prescott.
In its 128-year history, the city’s fire department had never had a fatality. Wade had no comparable experience to fall back on. From his pocket, he grabbed the PIO’s handbook for responding to tragedies and set about ticking off a checklist of tasks. Already the story was leaking.
Wade’s phone began to ring, as it would for the next three months. It was a reporter in Ireland, then a reporter in New York. Both were trying to confirm what they’d already heard. Is it true? The greatest number of firefighter deaths since 9/11? The most professional wildland firefighters ever killed in a single incident?
He told them emphatically, “It is not confirmed.” But when a reporter friend of his from the local newspaper called, one that he often worked with on what now seemed like such insignificant stories, he asked for his help.
“Please, let us tell the families first.”
• • •
It was a race they couldn’t win. Donut was sitting in the passenger seat of Granite Mountain’s parked buggy, just staring ahead. He’d called his mother and told her that he was OK, but that’s all he could say. The details escaped him.
The phones of his dead crewmates started ringing around nine p.m. One cell phone rattled in the cup holder by the front seat, where Clayton had sat. Then it was the phones of the hotshots who’d sat in the back. The calls were from girlfriends, friends, and family members. Maybe they caught wind of the tragedy on Facebook. Maybe they’d heard it second- or third-hand from somebody else. It didn’t matter. The word was out. The Granite Mountain hotshots had deployed. The people were calling without any real hope that their message would ever be returned. They were calling to say goodbye.
The calls and texts kept coming, endless rings and vibrations and senseless jingles. Donut had to leave the buggy.
• • •
Marty Cole, the former superintendent of Granite Mountain and one of the two safety officers on the fire, leaned against the hood of his truck for a long time before he made up his mind that he wasn’t going to the site. He’d seen enough burned bodies in his career, and could remember the faces of every one of them. “I didn’t want to remember my friends like that. Not them. Not like that,” he said.
Then he changed his mind. He needed to see for himself what had happened. He drove into Glen Ilah. The burn pattern seemed to have no logic. There were houses abutting the highway that were nothing but smoldering timber and houses in the middle of the neighborhood standing untouched next to thickets of unburned brush. Wilted fruit hung from the limbs of a ch
arred apricot tree. Across from Truman and Lois’s place, one of the few houses that miraculously survived, Dan and Dorman’s garden was still green and producing squash. Their house was burned to the ground.
That first trip, Marty made it only to the gate of the road that led to the Helms place before he stopped, put it in reverse, and drove the six miles back to the incident command post. As he did, he replayed memories from over the years he’d worked with Eric Marsh. The hardheadedness, their arguments over trivial things like the color of crew T-shirts, his absolute faith in Eric’s ability as a firefighter.
Four times he made the trip to and from the command post before arriving at the ranch house a third of a mile from the site of the tragedy. The fire had hit so hard, it broke the house’s windows and oxidized the steel wagon wheels and iron bear statue on the property’s perimeter. But the house was left standing. It had defensible space.
Marty walked across the blackened flats toward the basin. The bushes looked like spent matches. The soil had a texture of iced-over snow—crispy on top and powdery underneath—and there was no smoke or heat. The fire had burned so hot and fast that the mammoth granite boulders on the basin’s flanks had cracked like eggshells.
What the hell were they doing here? Marty thought.
At the site, a sheriff stood guard. The hotshots’ pants and packs were incinerated. Their saws, Pulaskis, and Rhinos were now deformed lumps of metal. Fourteen of their shelters had been vaporized or ripped off by the wind, and many of the men lay in the fetal position, as if they were sleeping in the blackened ash. The remaining shelters were barely recognizable. The aluminum had flaked off; the glue that held them together had melted when the temperatures hit 1,200 degrees. Five hotshots lay beneath these remnants. Robert was one of them.
Marty stood in shock and listened. Again and again he heard a hissing that ended in a crack. What is that? he thought. Then it hit him. The hotshots’ radios. Somehow they were still on and functioning. He took a deep breath and went to turn them off, but the sheriff stopped him. “You can’t,” the officer told Marty, his hand on the old superintendent’s chest. For the next three months, state and federal investigators would have to examine every detail of the crew’s history up to their final moments. Something needed to be learned from this tragedy. “I’ve wanted to turn them off since we got here. But we have to leave it for the investigators.”
The Best American Magazine Writing 2014 Page 46