by Kyle Dickman
Still, against fierce opposition, Marsh persisted. In meetings with his chiefs and city councillors, he argued that hosting a hotshot crew would lend more credibility to Prescott’s already esteemed fire department. Prescott’s department, the oldest in Arizona, dated back to the days of the Earps and counted among its alumni a governor. But there were also financial incentives for making Crew 7 into hotshots. The Wildland Division was funded primarily through grants given by state and federal agencies to towns that proactively prepared for wildfires. Provided they kept creating defensible space around Prescott, Crew 7 could still be funded by grants. But when they went to fire assignments, the city would reap the financial rewards. Every time the men worked a wildfire, the state or federal government—whoever funded the firefight—would pay the city the equivalent of low-cost rent for the crew: $39 per hour, including the men’s wages, but not fuel, equipment, or lodging when they needed it. By allowing Crew 7 to become hotshots, Prescott could continue preparing for future wildfires while at the same time offsetting the cost of hosting a fuels crew, reaping their benefits, and breaking even on the deal.
After years of battling bureaucracy and politics, Marsh and the fire department finally swayed the city council to approve his request to pursue Crew 7’s hotshot status. Now Marsh faced the much larger task of actually building a hotshot crew, a process that can take decades. First, he needed a roster that included at least six dedicated, experienced, and professional wildland firefighters—a good overhead. He’d also need a medic, a crew member capable of loading twenty firefighters and their gear into a helicopter, a pair of squad bosses to oversee nine crew members, and a captain qualified to step into the superintendent position if Marsh was injured or worse.
Marsh was hamstrung from the start. Prescott’s fire department paid its Wildland Division a dollar less per hour—$12 for most rookies—than the federal wildland crews did. With twenty other hotshot crews in the Southwest to work for, this limited Marsh’s hiring prospects. A few times, Marsh took a risk on a candidate—hiring former inmates and recovering drug users—only to have him or her relapse in the middle of the season.
But for all the odds stacked against him, Marsh had one thing to offer that no other hotshot crew in the country could: access to the city’s better-paying and more stable jobs on the red trucks. The Prescott Fire Department permitted the men who proved themselves on Crew 7 to ride along with the city engines, which required more education and experience than an entry-level wildland job. Over the years, the structural department hired thirteen Crew 7 alumni. Marsh made the most of his competitive advantage. His staff became progressively stronger as he poached men from other hotshot crews looking to make the leap to structural firefighting, and he took risks on young applicants with no fire experience at all.
Some of his best firefighters came to him just out of high school, promising that as athletes—linebackers, bull riders, wrestlers, and runners—they’d already proven that they had the toughness required of hotshots. Marsh recognized that their sports training was a good physical foundation but far from a guarantee that they could handle the marathon of a fire season. When he hired, he told the rookies, “You’re no longer an individual. Whatever you do affects twenty other guys.”
If the new hires could handle it, Marsh shaped them into firefighters with a few months of hard work. He hammered into them the fundamentals: how to swing a Pulaski, run a chainsaw, spark a backfire, and work through the pain. Marsh had helped with hiring and training long before he became superintendent, and by 2006, when Crew 7 attained Type 2 status, he was supported by eight or nine men who believed fully in his vision. Still, whenever the crew was sent to a fire, Marsh was once again forced to prove himself—this time to other crews.
“We were the redheaded stepchildren,” Maldonado said. “They didn’t want us at home, and they didn’t want us on the fire line.”
For one thing, Crew 7 looked different from other fire crews. Instead of buggies, those burly custom people movers, Crew 7 drove white twelve-passenger vans. The rigs weren’t capable of handling the wear and tear from twenty young men with fierce addictions to chewing tobacco and little allegiance to sanitation. If buggies get nasty—they do—then the vans were leagues worse. The fire gear was stored in the back, and the seats were so full of dirt that clouds of dust would puff up when the men sat down. The air-conditioning in one van didn’t work at all. As a joke, the unlucky squad assigned to the hot van tucked canned tuna fish into the functioning cooling vents of the other van—the smell was putrid. When Crew 7 rattled into fire camp, the other hotshot and handcrews immediately took notice. Most cringed.
“Hotshotting is a good old boys’ club, and new crews are never welcomed, especially when they’re from other agencies. Whatever Marsh went through wasn’t unique,” said Jim Cook, who was the superintendent of the Arrowhead Hotshots, out of Kings Canyon National Park, in the 1980s and 1990s. Arrowhead was among the country’s first Department of the Interior crews. “But the shit you get as an upstart isn’t for performance. It’s for tipping the world sideways.”
When Cook started Arrowhead, the established hotshot superintendents were far from welcoming toward new crews. Back then, many crews still had ties back to the hotshots’ predecessors, the Civilian Conservation Corps fire crews and the forty-man fire teams that sprang up in Oregon in the late thirties. Though these teams were effective, research on line-construction speed, logistical ease, and the simple management challenge of wrangling forty young men prompted the crew size to be cut to twenty firefighters. The first hotshot crews—the name referred to the fact that they were always given the most intense assignments—emerged in their present form in the late 1940s, after many years of wildfires threatened thousands of homes in Southern California. By the 1960s, the Forest Service, the agency primarily responsible for the creation of hotshots, had stationed nineteen crews near major western airports so they could be flown anywhere in the country within twelve hours. The maturation of President Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System nullified the Forest Service’s need to fly crews to fires. Good roads made it cheaper and more efficient to drive the men to blazes, and today hotshots rarely leave their crew buggies behind.
By the nineties, hotshots had evolved into an esteemed organization in the wildland fire community, and the crews became accelerated pipelines for career-driven firefighters. In a matter of a few large fire seasons, a hotshot could spend more than 250 shifts on fires—more than most structural firefighters spend on blazes over their entire careers. Because of their ample fire-line experience, a select few hotshots go on to highly skilled positions in fire management, becoming smoke jumpers, incident commanders, investigators of fire fatalities, or, like Cook, academics whose research can shape the future of fire-line decision-making.
Though the early hotshots were much more militarized and in vastly better condition than the civilian teams Forest Service rangers like Ed Pulaski had raised to battle violent blazes decades earlier, they still relied on only a few qualified firefighters to make decisions. The biggest difference between the new crews and the old militias came down to cultivated pride. The young hotshots believed they were the best firefighting force ever created, and that anybody who cared to claim the title needed to earn it first.
—
While Crew 7 were trying to become hotshots, during one shift on a blaze in Oregon, a firefighter from another crew grabbed a can of spray paint and drew a line in the middle of the road. Next to it he wrote, DON’T CROSS IT. Many firefighters simply refused to talk to the guys or eyed them up in the chow line. The Forest Service firefighters’ concern, whether justified or, much more likely, not, was that a municipal crew wouldn’t have their backs on the fire line. Marsh and his men were officially given a chance to prove themselves in 2007, when Crew 7 was made a hotshot training crew—one step beneath actual certification.
By then he’d changed Crew 7’s name to Granite Mountain and upgraded its second-rate gear to the best
equipment available. A sign in their gear cache read, TOTAL COST OF A WELL EQUIPPED HOTSHOT: $4,000. Marsh sold the vans and bought two $150,000 white-and-red crew hauls that, when parked beside the green trucks of the Forest Service and the yellow trucks of the Bureau of Land Management, announced that Granite Mountain was proudly different. Perhaps best of all, Marsh moved the men out of the rat-infested radiation barn by the lake and into the downtown fire station. The city gave Marsh $15,000 to fix it up. To get the most out of the money, he and the crew did much of the work themselves and cut costs wherever possible, even scrounging chairs from the side of the road or the dump. They had Steed’s brother install the linoleum floors, inlaying in the white floor black tiles that read GMIHC (Granite Mountain Interagency Hotshot Crew). If any rookie touched the black tiles, he had to do ten push-ups.
Granite Mountain’s two seasons as a hotshot-crew-in-training were intense. It started with a live certification drill, similar to the one 2013’s crew would be going through in Prescott National Forest but with considerably more scrutiny. A pair of longtime Forest Service hotshot superintendents shadowed Marsh and his firefighters as they were put through a series of tests meant to replicate any scenario hotshots might encounter on the fire line. The other superintendents threw at Marsh and his crew a drill that demanded they guide in air tankers, coordinate fire-line operations with bulldozers and a half-dozen fire engines, operate without Marsh as superintendent, and decide when it was safe to attack a blaze and when they needed to step back and watch the fire burn. The crew put out rapidly expanding spot fires, felled enormous trees, and dealt with medical emergencies in the form of bee stings, heat exhaustion, chainsaw cuts, and burns.
Marsh and Granite Mountain excelled, but they wouldn’t hear the other superintendents’ ruling for months. In the meantime, they returned to the fire line, where the tests kept coming. They stopped one fire from scorching a subdivision near Payson, on the notoriously dangerous Mogollon Rim, and another by accepting an assignment that no other crew on scene would take: a thankless and grueling job that required cutting twenty-six hundred feet of line from the rim of Idaho’s Hells Canyon to the Snake River. Despite these accomplishments, it was August 2008 before the crew heard back about the ruling on Granite Mountain’s hotshot status. At that point they were working a fire in Northern California’s Klamath National Forest, a swath of 1.7 million acres of ponderosa pine, Douglas fir, and poison oak forest that drops from nine thousand feet to the Pacific Ocean in less than fifty miles. That morning, the smoke hung in long white strips above the many river valleys cutting through the peaks.
Marsh gathered the men beside his new Dodge 4500 with its customized taillights. Next to the initials was a big T, for “training crew,” which Marsh had taped there to ensure other hotshots knew that Granite Mountain wasn’t claiming a title it hadn’t yet earned.
“I got the call,” Marsh told them. He flicked out his knife and scraped the T from the back of his truck.
“We’re hotshots,” Marsh said, allowing himself a smile. Granite Mountain was one of the only municipal hotshot crews in the country. “This honor is yours, gentlemen. You earned it. Congratulations.” Then he led his men back out to the fire line.
—
Back in Prescott during the tail end of 2013’s training drill, the single-file line of panting hotshots broke up at the top of the dusty trail in the Prescott National Forest. Renan, still gasping, followed the other hotshots in Alpha squad to their buggies. Somebody put on a Tupac album, and the heavy beats of gangster rap thumped across the campsite. As the men refilled their waters and chainsaw gas, Marsh watched, as he’d done all day, how the hotshots performed. He didn’t camp with the men that night. Not long after sunset, Marsh drove away. It was the last time many of the hotshots would see Marsh until he rejoined the crew near the end of June.
Renan and Grant climbed into the Alpha buggy. Clayton Whitted, Alpha’s squad boss, had ordered the two to keep track of each other throughout the season. They’d help each other run errands in fire camps, keep track of the other guy on the line, and even be there when the other went to the bathroom. Grant, amused by the idea of having a minder, called Renan his “battle buddy.” Cheesy and flippant, the catchphrase made a few of the senior guys laugh, but it irked others.
As rookies, Clayton had given the pair one more lowly job: unloading the other hotshots’ overnight gear. Along the ceiling of each buggy ran a shelf that held the crew’s black duffel bags, each filled with a sleeping kit, a few changes of clothes, a dozen clean socks, and various creature comforts—books, journals, men’s magazines, portable music players—to entertain them during moments of calm on the line.
“Brutal day, huh?” Renan said, tossing a bag to Grant. “Eric was riding me pretty hard back there.”
“Yeah, that sucked,” said Grant, who caught the bag and threw it into the pile outside the truck. “Did you hear Scott tearing me a new one?”
“Hilarious, man. I saw you go down and thought for sure you weren’t coming back up,” Renan said. “I was like, well, looks like I’ll have a new buggy mate. Grant’s knocked out.”
“Rookie!” one of the veterans called into the truck. “Toss me a Gato.”
Renan opened the cooler and underhanded a cold bottle of Gatorade to the veteran, who nodded in thanks.
“Nah, I just got too hot,” Grant said. “I had my yellow buttoned up to my neck.” Renan laughed at the thought of his overdressed friend sweating profusely and overheating from a wholly preventable cause.
“Puking always makes me feel better anyways,” Grant said.
Meanwhile, in Bravo’s buggy, Brandon Bunch, a former bull rider and fourth-year sawyer, and Wade Parker, his swamper, had pulled the type of move hotshots would talk about for years to come. That morning before their shift, Wade had bought twenty steaks, and Bunch had thrown a propane grill beneath his seat in the buggy. He knew the hotshots always camped after their training day, and that meant Meals Ready to Eat, the pre-packaged military breakfasts, lunches, and dinners that crews eat on fires. The veterans didn’t need practice eating MREs.
MREs have been a staple of the hotshot diet since they were developed, during the Vietnam War. Over the years, the variety and quality of the food has come a long way from “Ham Slice” and “Frankfurter and Beans.” Wars tend to increase the variety of MREs in circulation, and since 1993, more than 241 new items have been approved. Some, like Chicken Pesto Pasta with Patriotic Cookies, are decent. But the meals, which are heated by a water-triggered chemical reaction, always produce a nauseating stench. Granite Mountain would have plenty of opportunities to compare tasting notes on the variety of MRE flavors. Bunch and Wade knew as much. Steaks were a rare gift—one they were happy to give.
“For everybody, but the rookies gotta eat their MREs first,” Bunch said, sparking up the propane grill. “Sorry, fellas.” He happily ensured that this year’s rookies went through the same traditions he had: The veterans picked the rookies’ meals.
Anthony Rose, a second-year hotshot originally from Illinois, ripped into the boxes and started sorting through the flavors. He’d come to Granite Mountain via a firefighting position on an engine in Crown King, a 164-person community east of Prescott. He’d been picked on regularly in his rookie year. The memory of the hazing he’d weathered was still fresh, maybe even magnified by his own marginal position of power.
“Dig in, Grant,” Tony said as he tossed him an MRE.
After a long day of swinging a tool, hunger usually makes it possible to forget that MREs are little miracles of science more than they are food. But that night, Grant couldn’t get excited about eighteen-month-old, deoxygenated meat when the men he’d worked with shoulder-to-shoulder all day were celebrating the end of their training with steak.
Grant took up a spot by the campfire, where he tore into the package and chewed through powdery biscuits while Tony, Bunch, and the veterans laughed over the grilling meat.
Grant was used to being t
reated with a certain level of respect. He could agree to play the hotshots’ reindeer games while on the crew, but only if it gained him entry into the club. A charismatic kid who’d been an athlete in high school, Grant was the well-dressed and earnest one who moved with ease between all social groups. He didn’t hold grudges and didn’t see a reason for social hierarchy. When he’d first moved to Prescott, he used to join his aunt Linda and a group of her friends on morning walks, on which he was the only man and the youngest person by twenty years. Not surprisingly, the women loved it when Grant joined them, but his charms fell short on Granite Mountain. None of the hotshots cared how somebody was used to being treated. Respect had to be earned on the fire line. That took time.
CHAPTER 4
FIRST FIRE
After the crew passed its two-week critical, Granite Mountain was available to fight fires anywhere in the country. At a moment’s notice, even if rain was dousing Prescott, the hotshots could be loaded into an airplane and shipped to a fire fifteen hundred miles away. Trouble was, few fires were burning anywhere in the country, and that meant Granite Mountain stayed put in Prescott. By early May, the crew had spent weeks working in and around the station, and stagnation wasn’t good for anybody. The men wanted to do the job they’d been training to do, and the longer it took to get an assignment, the more likely it became that some bored hotshot would do something stupid and create problems for himself and the department.
Every morning, Steed started the crew’s day with the same routine. They met in the ready room, where one hotshot added daily Internet-found factoids to a whiteboard—random things about the amount of milk cows produce, or the hottest days in history—and Steed volunteered another to read aloud the situation report, a summary of all the nation’s fire activity. On May 1, activity was light, with fewer than a thousand new starts and fewer than ten of those designated as large, meaning one hundred acres or more if the fire was in timber and three hundred acres or more if it was burning in grass. Given that the Southwest was as dry as in any year in recent memory, it seemed strange that no fires were burning in the region. The last measured rainfall at Prescott’s Sundog Weather Station was .11 inch, three weeks earlier. April had been the third month in a row with less than a quarter of Prescott’s average precipitation, and Arizona’s scant winter snowpack had already melted off of even the twelve-thousand-foot peaks to the north. Whether it was a wayward spark or the men’s own restlessness, something was bound to break the calm.