On the Burning Edge

by Kyle Dickman

  Marsh introduced himself and asked the crew’s full-time firefighters to do the same. Known collectively as the overhead, these seven hotshots commanded Granite Mountain. Jesse Steed, thirty-six, was the captain, the number two in command. People called Jesse the picture-perfect hotshot, and the ex-Marine, who was six-four and more than 220 pounds, never disputed the point. Beside Jesse sat the crew’s three squad bosses: Travis Carter, thirty-one, who was a walk-on football player at the University of Arizona and still looked the part; Clayton Whitted, twenty-seven, a former youth pastor who brought church to the fire line; and Robert Caldwell, twenty-three, a Prescott local with an IQ high enough to merit his acceptance in Mensa. The final two overhead were lead firefighters Chris MacKenzie, thirty, a California-born longtime hotshot with such a laid-back demeanor that his crewmates often compared him to the Dude in The Big Lebowski, and Travis Turbyfill, twenty-seven, a moose-size man who had seen combat in Afghanistan as a Marine and was a gifted mechanic.

  “Tell us about yourselves,” Marsh said to the crew. Most of them didn’t know one another and didn’t want to speak. Marsh’s way of dealing with their shyness was to force his men to get over it. “Give us your name, how many years you’ve fought fire, and something…your favorite color, whatever you’d like,” he said.

  At twenty, Grant was the youngest guy on the crew. He played it cocky, standing, saying his name, and coolly explaining that his cousin was Bob Caldwell, one of the squad bosses. It didn’t go so easily for all the new guys.

  “Dustin DeFord,” said a redheaded rookie who sat near Grant. “My favorite color is”—DeFord paused for a second—“black. It reminds me of fire.”

  “That’s nice, Dustin,” Marsh said. “Thank you. Now please sit the fuck down.”

  —

  There are 114 twenty-person hotshot crews nationwide, but the vast majority are stationed in the West. In New Mexico and Arizona, there are a total of twenty. With a forty-one-year-old U.S. Forest Service crew stationed on the town’s north end, Prescott has two. Hotshots make up less than 5 percent of the estimated fifty-six thousand federal and state wildland firefighters who battle blazes every summer. The remainder work on engines, less-qualified crews, water tenders, and aircraft, and as support staff. While the media often likens hotshots to the special forces of wildland firefighting, it’s an imperfect comparison. Unlike joining the Navy SEALs or the Army Rangers, which demand years of training, hotshot crews can accept new hires within a matter of days. On paper, becoming a hotshot requires only two basic courses, which can be completed online in hours, and the physical ability to hike three miles in forty-five minutes while carrying a forty-five-pound pack. What separates hotshots from the other wildland firefighters is that they specialize in fighting America’s largest and most dangerous blazes.

  No job in the firefighting profession requires its men and women to spend so much time on the edge of an active burn. Over the course of a thirty-year career, a hotshot might fight eight hundred to one thousand fires. By contrast, a structural firefighter may battle only eighty over that same period. At its best, the job is the greatest adventure of many hotshots’ lives. At its worst, it varies little from the hard labor of a chain gang. For weeks, crews work sixteen-hour days in soaring temperatures, using chainsaws and hand tools like Pulaskis and shovels to build control lines, or linear barriers clear of flammable materials, around wildfires. There are female hotshots, but usually no more than one or two on a given crew, and the overwhelming majority are young men in their twenties and thirties. Some are college-educated, having quit high-paying finance jobs in search of a simpler lifestyle in the woods, while others have left behind farms, reservations, or the inner city to make a year’s salary in eight months of work.

  Crew cultures tend to be militaristic. Among the standard twenty-head crew, at least seven are highly trained permanent firefighters—the overhead. Among them are emergency medical technicians, men and women with decades of fire-line experience, and chainsaw operators capable of cutting down trees as thick as some bridge pilings.

  During the first few weeks of fire season, the overhead lead the new hotshots through a series of runs, hikes, and workouts that get the men into the best shape of their lives. Fitness is a matter of safety on the fire line: It’s required for moving efficiently through the mountains, but it’s also mandatory should a firefighter have to outrun a blaze. Granite Mountain called this intensive training period the two-week critical, and it culminated in a drill at the end of April meant to test the hotshots’ new skills and fitness.

  A week into the 2013 season, Marsh gathered the men and told them about his shoulder. He couldn’t return to the fire line until it healed, which might take months. The news meant that for the first time in the decade that Marsh had been a part of the crew’s overhead, he wouldn’t take part in the drill. His injury had been too severe. He made no effort to hide his disappointment. Marsh loved being superintendent and fighting fires. Until he returned, Tom Cooley, a City of Prescott structural firefighter with many years of hotshot experience, would take over as captain, and Jesse Steed, officially the captain, would become the interim superintendent.

  The news thrilled Steed. He talked openly and often about his plan to someday take over as Granite Mountain’s superintendent, and even the temporary position gave him a chance to shape the crew. Among the first things Steed did was make the physical training punishingly intense.

  The veterans expected him to do as much. During slow shifts on the line, Steed would often pound out a few dozen squats with a chainsaw on each shoulder or do lat pulls with forty-gallon buckets of foam—the soapy substance, mixed with water, that’s used to slow a fire’s spread. He designed the hardest workouts himself. One day he led the men to a three-hundred-foot hill and made them run up in their fire boots. Then they’d sprint back down, grab a chainsaw, and repeat the “Circle” six times. The hike up Thumb Butte, an aptly named chunk of black basalt that rises above Prescott, was even harder. Steed paired the hotshots up and made the teams race the two miles and six hundred vertical feet to the top, one man carrying the other on his back.

  Most days, the intensity of Steed’s workouts made two or three guys puke from overexertion. Grant pushed himself so hard he vomited every day. In many ways, the work didn’t suit Grant. He was stylish, clean, and fastidious. Every night before bed, he’d fold and stack his firefighting clothes and place them at the foot of his bed in the order he’d put them on the next morning. Into his shoes went his socks—one designated for the right foot, one for the left—and those went next to the toilet for quick entry in the morning.

  It had been Grant’s cousin, Bob, who suggested he apply to be a hotshot. “Think of it as a stepping-stone,” Bob had told him. “Put in a few years on a badass crew like Granite Mountain and down the road it’ll help you get a job on an ambulance or engine.”

  Charming and easy with people, Grant interviewed well. Even so, Marsh had hired him only after one of his top candidates turned down the job. Grant easily completed the three-mile pack test but barely met the crew’s fitness requirements, which were many steps harder than the basic national standard. Applicants had to run a mile and a half in less than ten minutes and do seven pull-ups, forty sit-ups, and twenty-five push-ups—each series in less than a minute. Once a fiercely fit wrestler, Grant was still in good shape and had recently run a half-marathon, even stopping to smoke cigarettes on the way. With that foundation, Grant believed he could simply will his way through whatever challenges hotshotting threw at him.

  In the first week of training, Steed disproved Grant’s naïve theory. In between classes on how to correctly run a chainsaw, sharpen a tool, or take weather measurements on the fire line, the crew spent hours working out on the sweltering blacktop inside the chain-link fence surrounding the station’s compound. On any given day, they might run six miles, hike three, and do 60 pull-ups, 390 sit-ups, and 240 push-ups. Steed, who always led from the front, seemed to enjoy the men’s suff
ering.

  Sometimes, between their tenth and twelfth set of twenty-five push-ups, he would call out “Hold!” and the men would pause with their bodies prone and their noses just an inch above the ground. Grant quaked, his whole body trembling in ugly, uncontrollable shudders. Just a week into the season, he already felt poisoned by lactic acid. Bob promised him that he’d get used to the workout and the training would get easier. It’d have to, Grant thought, because if it didn’t, he’d quit.

  CHAPTER 2

  TRAINING DAY

  Just a few weeks into the season, Granite Mountain’s intensive training concluded with a live drill meant to test the hotshots’ ability to adapt to the constantly changing environment of a firefight. To ensure competence, all fire engines, hotshot crews, and air tankers—known, as all fire assets are, as “resources”—must complete such a drill every year. The City of Prescott’s Wildland Division chief, a gap-toothed and devout man named Darrell Willis, would judge the hotshots. If they passed, Granite Mountain would be certified to fight fires for the 2013 season. At 7 A.M., an hour earlier than usual, the men came to work and left the station immediately after. As they usually did, the crew’s vehicles headed out in a certain order.

  Steed led the way in the superintendent’s truck, a Dodge Ram 4500. A hotshot rode with him in the passenger seat. In the years before, Marsh had customized Granite Mountain’s “supe truck,” as it was known, by welding taillights that cast the letters GMIHC, for “Granite Mountain Interagency Hotshot Crew.” Following closely behind Steed were a second small truck, called the saw truck, that carried Travis Carter, the squad boss, and another hotshot, and finally the two buggies, burly ten-person crew carriers with oversize tires and enough storage space to carry the equipment needed to support twenty men for two weeks at a time. The caravan of white-and-red wildland fire vehicles was a familiar site in downtown, and most locals didn’t give the trucks a second glance as they rumbled past the courthouse, and the 127 stately elms surrounding it, at the city’s center.

  Prescott (pronounced by locals to rhyme with “biscuit”) sits in the pine forests an hour and a half north of Phoenix, but after decades of rapid population growth, it’s no longer the strictly blue-collar town it was for much of the twentieth century. The town now has a small aerospace industry and three colleges within city limits. Hip new microbreweries and boutique coffee shops are pushing out some of the ubiquitous antiques stores, but Prescott’s defining characteristic remains its western pride. Kids here grow up dreaming of becoming bull riders and spend their summers working on cattle ranches that operate in the rangeland outside town. Many locals have roots that reach back to the city’s 1860s founding, when miners struck gold in the surrounding Bradshaw Mountains, and for a short period the town served as the territorial capital of Arizona. The Earp family and Doc Holliday stalked Prescott’s streets. It’s on Whiskey Row, a half-mile strip adjacent to the courthouse that once boasted forty bars, that the Old West feels most present.

  That morning, as the hotshots headed out of town for their drill, the elm-shaded sidewalks of Whiskey Row were empty except for a few early-season tourists taking in displays of cowboy boots and faux-Indian headdresses. Flyers touting the 126th anniversary of the world’s oldest rodeo were plastered onto the windows of the hole-in-the-wall bars that are still packed into the strip, and the buggies’ diesel engines echoed against the brick facades.

  Grant peered out of the buggy’s submarine windows as Granite Mountain’s caravan passed from Whiskey Row south into the wilder lands of the Prescott National Forest. Grant watched the housing styles change from historic Victorians to seventies-era ranch homes to double-wide trailers and finally to McMansions perched in the foothills. Just a few miles from downtown, the buildings vanished altogether. The roads, once paved and suburban, became dirt or gravel, and ponderosa pines filled the view. On the oldest trees, the bark was blackened from past fires. The hotshots, drowsy and still unaccustomed to the day’s early hours, watched the pines flicker by. Most of the men, nervous about the coming test, mentally rehearsed the skills they’d learned over the previous weeks and focused on their assigned roles. In the stillness, Grant saw an opportunity to ease the tension.

  “Hey, Chris!” he called to the cab from the dim light in the back. “What are we going to do today?”

  “You gonna learn, boy!” Chris, the lead firefighter, yelled back to his squad from the buggy’s cab. He’d said the same thing before every workout since day one. At first, Chris’s yelling terrified the rookies; now the joke was theirs, too. Anytime Chris forgot to deliver his daily message, Grant reminded the lead firefighter.

  From basic crew structure to the nation’s coordinated response to wildfires, nearly everything in wildland firefighting is organized hierarchically. There’s generally one person or organization in charge, with layers of command cascading down from the apex. It was no different on Granite Mountain.

  After Marsh was injured, Steed claimed the crew’s top position. Tom Cooley, the temporary captain, was just beneath him. The rest of the hotshots were divided into two modules, called Alpha and Bravo. Each squad of either nine or ten hotshots was assigned a buggy and contained a mix of veterans and rookies. Command of the smaller units fell to their respective squad bosses: Clayton Whitted on Alpha and Bob Caldwell on Bravo. (Travis Carter, the third squad boss, ran both Alpha’s and Bravo’s chainsaw teams.) Below Clayton and Bob were two lead firefighters—Chris on Alpha, Travis on Bravo—who could step into the squad boss role; a pair of hotshots known as sawyers, who ran chainsaw; and another pair who removed the vegetation the sawyers cut: the swampers. Rounding out the squads were the ten or eleven firefighters whose job was to use hand tools to dig fire line. These firefighters are called the scrape. At any point, a hotshot might be instructed to run saw, dig line, or swamp, and one of the nine qualified veterans might serve as a lookout posted to warn the crew of any unexpected change in fire behavior, but otherwise the men defaulted to their assigned roles.

  Among seasonal hotshots, the scrape is considered the bottom of the hierarchy. It’s where nearly all rookies start their fire careers. Over the course of the season, the scrape try to prove themselves capable of becoming swampers, while the swampers are trying to move up to the sawyer job, which is the most sought-after position among seasonals. Grant was in Alpha’s scrape, and since he was a rookie, the seat the veterans assigned to him was in the rear left, the bumpiest of the eight seats in the back.

  He was the first out of Alpha’s buggy when the caravan stopped at a dirt parking lot walled in by 150-foot pines. The morning was still cool, with traces of night’s humidity still in the air. The hotshots, wearing yellow fire-resistant shirts, green pants, and black hard hats, gathered around Steed. He and Marsh, who had come to supervise the drill, wore the same uniform as the men, but their helmets were red.

  Marsh stood quietly to the side and took notes on the drill while Steed spread out a map on the hood of his truck and pointed out the fake fire’s location. It sat in a saddle of the Bradshaws between the Senator Highway, a now-decrepit stagecoach road from the 1860s, and Highway 89, which runs south through the town of Yarnell and toward Phoenix. The flag fire, marked before the drill started with strips of plastic pink flagging, was a few acres and spreading quickly. Steed identified for the men their escape routes—clearly demarcated paths of retreat—and safety zones: areas cleared of flammable materials that are large enough for firefighters to weather an out-of-control blaze. Sometimes safety zones are clearings bulldozed into the “green,” the unburned vegetation beside a blaze. But more often, when a fire explodes, hotshots retreat into the cold ash left behind by the flames—the “good black.” With no chance of rekindling, it’s often the safest place to be during a rapidly intensifying fire. On the flag fire, Steed pointed inside the theoretical blaze’s perimeter. Granite Mountain’s safety zone was the good black.

  —

  Wildland firefighters bring blazes under control by building boxe
s of nonflammable things around them. In one combination or another, that means surrounding the flames with water, roads, rock, bare dirt, and already burned fuel. To do this, firefighters have a relatively short list of tools at their disposal. Engines, air tankers, and helicopters use water and retardant to either knock down the fire’s spreading head or soak the vegetation ahead of the flames to slow its growth. Hotshot crews, though, use chainsaws and hand tools to remove the vegetation and create a continuous line of bare dirt or rocks around a fire.

  The guiding principle of fire agencies is that the cheapest and most effective way to fight fires is to catch them when they’re small. They’re kept small by attacking them early. In a typical blaze, one of the country’s 826 operating fire lookouts—or, these days, someone with keen eyes and a cell phone—calls in a smoke report, and the closest available resources mount the initial response. The first wave of firefighters sent to a new blaze during peak fire season is usually designed to be overkill. On a hot and breezy June day, that first order might include three fire engines, a twenty-person handcrew, a helicopter, and an Air Attack plane that does what ground resources cannot by tracking the fire’s overall progression from above.

  Engines, limited by road access and the amount of water they can carry, can hose down the flames faster than hotshot crews can build line. As such, in hopes of slowing the fire’s spread, engines tend to lead the initial attack while the hotshot and handcrews follow behind. If the flame lengths are small, crews build lines directly on the fire’s edge. This is called “going direct,” and if crews succeed in lassoing the blaze, the tactic stops the fire where it lies. When a fire’s burning more intensely, hotshots step back anywhere from a few hundred yards to five miles and build “indirect line” by constructing firebreaks on ridges ahead of the combustion. Once the box (which is rarely actually square) is complete, hotshots burn out or back-fire, intentionally igniting the vegetation between the line and the wild flames, thereby robbing the blaze of the fuel it needs to survive.