by Kyle Dickman
“Dude, put those generic chips back. Get me the goods,” Bunch said to Grant, who was carrying a load of snacks to the counter. The previous month, Grant had challenged Bunch to play him in a game of disc golf. Bunch refused. The harder Grant tried to gain acceptance, the more the veterans pushed him back. Grant chided Bunch until he finally agreed to a match, but Bunch set the terms: Loser buys the winner the chips of his choice at every gas station stop for the rest of the season. Bunch won by six strokes.
Bunch grabbed a bag of Tostitos and cheese dip and piled them onto Grant’s stack, which included Zig-Zags and loose tobacco for rolling cigarettes—something to look forward to. Satisfied, Bunch stashed his chips and dip into his cardboard box, where they’d stay until the end of their assignment. He knew that after two weeks of MREs and disappointing lunches of Wonder Bread sandwiches packed with an inch and a half of deli ham, Red Delicious apples, and canned and always lukewarm juice, Bravo squad would be craving a proper snack.
—
The Thompson Ridge Fire had grown to seventy-four hundred acres in the five days since it started.
After the blaze tore through the oak field that Todd Lerke, the first incident commander, hoped would contain it, the fire jumped the roads he’d mapped out as contingency lines. Flames then spread northeast up eleven-thousand-foot Redondo Peak and threatened the Valles Caldera, a national preserve of open meadows and forests. A few historic cabins now sat directly in the line of the fire’s spread. The bigger concern, though, lay just five miles beyond the Valles Caldera: Los Alamos and its Department of Energy–run labs. Since 2000, two separate fires that had started in the Santa Fe National Forest had razed hundreds of Los Alamos homes and burned sensitive lab property, some of it rumored to house a uranium dump from World War II. The town dreaded the prospect of yet another large burn.
So did the Santa Fe National Forest. On June 2, the SWCC put Incident Commander Bea Day and her team of Southwest-based logistics, planning, safety, operations, and finance experts in charge of the fire. Nine hotshot crews were already on scene by the time Granite Mountain pulled into the fire camp outside Jemez Springs to get their assignment. Unlike the low-key Hart Fire or the one-shift-and-done prairie fire, Thompson Ridge required a robust fire camp to support the more than five hundred firefighters on scene.
Thompson Ridge was considered a Type 2 blaze, the nation’s second-highest priority. The numeric system that’s applied to the National Preparedness Level—the country’s readiness to attack wildfires—is flipped on its head to classify wildfires. Type 5 incidents, which might be a single burning tree or a campfire that requires very few resources to control, are the lowest-priority blazes. The highest are Type 1 incidents: complex, multifaceted fires that can cost many millions of dollars and may require thousands of firefighters and logistical support personnel to contain.
Classification is determined not by a blaze’s size but by its potential and complexity—towns endangered, major freeway closed, nuclear waste facility threatened. Where only a few observers may be needed to track the progress of a hundred-thousand-acre burn in Alaska’s wilderness, a four-acre fire near the suburbs of California’s San Bernardino Mountains may be deemed a Type 1 incident at its outset. Charged with orchestrating the most complicated firefights are incident management teams like Day’s. There are sixteen Type 1 teams—the most qualified—and thirty-six Type 2 teams nationwide. Management teams can vary in size from seven to seventy experts, most of whom hold full-time jobs with federal or state fire agencies. When a national forest requests a team to manage the fire, a GACC or NIFC orders the militias of logistical and tactical experts up from their agency day jobs.
Since the Incident Command System was first developed, after a rash of blazes plagued Southern California in the 1970s, NIFC’s rapid logistical deployment system has become so refined that the Federal Emergency Management Agency turns to the Fire Service, along with the National Guard and Army Corps of Engineers, to assist with disaster relief. Hurricanes Katrina and Irene, the Columbia shuttle disaster, and 9/11 all utilized NIFC’s Type 1 incident management teams.
—
Thompson Ridge was by far the largest blaze Granite Mountain had seen so far that season. Camp was set up on a helicopter landing pad atop an open ridge miles behind the flames. Tents and trailers sprawled across a few acres. On-site was a high-speed Internet hot spot, a cell-phone tower, and a portable weather-monitoring system brought by a meteorologist assigned to cover only the fire area. There were semis packed with hoses, extra shirts and pants, pumps, Pulaskis, and fuses; and semis packed with cases of Gatorade and brown-bag lunches. Portable showers sat by the mess tent, where hotshot crews from Arizona, New Mexico, and Montana stood in a long line for cafeteriastyle food served by caterers from Albuquerque.
The whole place smelled of dust and diesel, with the occasional acrid waft of urine from the Porta-Potties. Gasoline-powered generators hummed endlessly, diesel trucks rattled around camp, and a fine dust that fire boots and tires had ground to the consistency of talcum powder coated everything. If Steed had his druthers, Granite Mountain would spend as little time as possible in fire camp. Immediately after arriving on scene, Steed and the squad bosses left the men at the buggies and headed into the mass of trailers and tents for that night’s briefing. A makeshift stage had been set up in the middle of the camp, and an oversize printout map of Thompson Ridge was hung on a whiteboard. The fire’s perimeter looked like a lobster claw wrapping around Redondo Peak.
Day’s team had divided the 557 firefighters on scene into a day shift and a night shift. Gathered around the map were the overhead from fourteen different engines and hotshot crews that, like Granite Mountain, had been assigned to work through the night of June 6. Steed grabbed an information packet that Day’s team had compiled about the fire and took his place among the crowd of thirty or forty firefighters. While he waited for the briefing to begin, he flipped through the twenty-four-page packet, which included information on everything from weather forecasts and expected fire behavior to special concerns like the 188 known archaeological sites within the Thompson Ridge area.
The briefing started shortly after 5 P.M. with the incident meteorologist delivering the forecast for that night. These specially trained weathermen use a network of sensors and firefighter-provided information to create forecasts specifically for the fire site. That day, strong afternoon winds had exceeded the meteorologist’s expectations and pushed the blaze’s eastern front—the pincers—down the back side of Redondo Peak and perilously close to the historic cabins in the Valles Caldera. Day’s team had always expected the fire to move east, following the terrain and the prevailing winds, but what surprised them was how quickly the flames had closed the distance on the homes. The strong winds blew the fire through almost four thousand acres of drought-cured trees, doubling the blaze’s size in less than twenty-four hours. The forecaster predicted the winds would die down shortly after sunset, which set up a window for the firefighters to go in and protect the cabins.
Darrell Willis, the City of Prescott’s Wildland Division chief and Granite Mountain’s boss, happened to work for Day’s team. On Thompson Ridge, his role was night-operations chief, the tactical adviser who executed the big-picture strategy for how to attack the fire at night. Willis shook Steed’s and the squad bosses’ hands, but he had more pressing business to attend to. The forecaster handed him the microphone, and Willis briefed the gathered firefighters on the night’s actions.
The management team had split the fire into geographic areas. The regions, or divisions, are named alphabetically, with the first, usually the one closest to the fire’s head, dubbed Alpha (for A) and the second called Zulu (for Z). The scale leaves room for twenty-four more division breaks, should the fire continue to grow in size and complexity. There were six divisions on Thompson Ridge, and commanding each was a division chief who acted as the field general for his or her piece of the fire. That night, Willis assigned Granite Mountain, along wit
h three other hotshot crews and seven engines, to work under Allen Farnsworth, a retired Bureau of Land Management firefighter from Durango, Colorado, who was in charge of Division Zulu. Willis had tasked Farnsworth with controlling the head of the blaze, and he wanted Steed and the hotshots to try saving the houses by burning the forest.
—
It was almost 9 P.M. when Granite Mountain entered the grasslands on the western side of the Valles Caldera. The hotshots exited the buggies beside a group of hewn-timber cabins. The scenery made it obvious why the Valles Caldera has been used to portray scenes of idyllic frontier living in Tommy Lee Jones, Pierce Brosnan, and Johnny Depp films. The rounded summit of Redondo Peak served as the backdrop. Pines surrounded the meadow. A mountain stream flowed through the caldera. On the night of June 4, most of it was on fire. Darkness seemed to magnify the flames, silhouetting the cabins and the men and women protecting them. It was a classic hotshot fire: wild, dynamic, complex. Renan knew enough to act like he’d been there before. He packed another pinch of tobacco into his dry mouth and held the can out to Grant, who took it readily.
“This is it, boys,” Scott said, doing that odd dance young men sometimes do when excited. He bounced on his toes with his arms straight down as if he were holding buckets of water. “This is what we’ve been training for,” he said. “This is the big show.”
A four-wheel-drive fire engine with extra-high clearance rumbled past toward a stand of torching trees, and a wave of embers blew over a cabin on the edge of the meadow. Another engine crew, emergency lights flashing, cooled the sparks.
When another stand of trees got torched nearby, Grant turned to Renan and actually cupped his ears. “Holy shit!” he yelled. “That’s loud!”
There was little doubt that Granite Mountain would be working sixteen-hour shifts until Thompson Ridge was wrapped up. That might take weeks. Physically and mentally, Grant convinced himself he could handle the discomfort, but the promise of so much hard work elicited a feeling closer to dread.
Even standing before such a raw display of nature’s power, Grant, like most hotshots, didn’t consider his job unnecessarily high-risk. The flames were a source of awe—not fear.
“What are the odds of me dying in a fire?” he’d once asked his mother, to reassure her of his safety. “Think about it, Mom.”
Grant’s instincts were well founded. In spite of firefighting’s apparent dangers, compared with many other professions it’s relatively safe. Since fire agencies began keeping track of deaths in 1910, 1,075 firefighters have died on the line, a rate of about 10.5 per year. Between 2000 and 2013, 261 firefighters were killed in the line of duty—considering the fifty-six thousand men and women who are estimated to work fires every year, this is an average ratio of one death for every three thousand workers. For reference, in 2012, an average year in terms of fire-line deaths, the job was considerably lower risk than logging, commercial fishing, roofing, or garbage collection.
When considering whether to become a hotshot, Grant, of course, didn’t delve into the relative death rates of firefighters versus trash collectors. His calculus was far simpler: To survive, he needed to trust Steed and the rest of the overhead. In many ways, the relationship between superintendents and their firefighters is most similar to that between mountain guides and their clients. On a well-functioning crew, rookies warn their supervisors of hazards but must trust their leaders to interpret the risks and guide them safely through a blaze. For this reason, “I’d follow them blindly” is a widespread sentiment among firefighters, and among hotshots, “Keep your head down and shut up” is spoken as a mantra. Standing before the hundred-foot flames leaping from the forest, Grant was more than willing to do exactly as Steed told them.
Steed told him to get the drip torches. To meet the fire on their own terms, Granite Mountain and four other crews would burn out along a road that ran between the cabins and the wildfire. The majority of the hotshots would hold the line, watching the cabin side of the dirt road for spot fires, while Bob, Grant, and a few other hotshots worked the torches.
In a staggered pattern, Grant and the other burners widened the line by laying strips of fire parallel with the road. Bob went first, swinging his torch back and forth with the easy swishing motion of a horse’s tail. A line of flames spun out behind him. Grant followed a few feet from Bob. He tried to mimic his cousin’s fluid movements, but a few minutes into the operation, his wick seemed to clog. The fire stopped pouring out. He stood in a field of quickly spreading two-foot flames and shook the torch back and forth. Still nothing. He pointed the torch upward to check the wick, which further agitated the fuel mix in the steel canister and sent a burst of flame at his face. Before Grant could jerk the torch downward, the flames burst so close to his face that his eyebrows were nearly singed.
“It’s fine, Grant!” came a cautionary yell from one of the veterans. The reassurance shook Grant from his moment of stupor. The burst of flames seemed to have cleaned the wick, and when the fuel started flowing again, Grant tripped as he rushed to catch up to Bob.
—
As Grant burned, the other hotshots spread out along the road, with ten to fifteen feet between each man, and watched for spot fires across the line. Every so often, when a thicket of young pines burst into flames, one of the squad bosses yelled, “Eyes in the green!” For the jittery rookies, like Kevin Woyjeck, ignoring the fireworks was almost impossible. He paced about the road, glancing neurotically from the flames to the unburned meadow.
When a sound like a tropical squall bouncing off broad leaves burst from the forest, Woyjeck couldn’t resist the urge to watch the spectacle. The flames climbed into the upper branches of a fir tree and ripped well above the forest’s crowns. Embers swarmed upward in the smoke and drifted slowly back to the ground in wide and shimmering arcs. Woyjeck could feel the heat from seventy feet away. Behind the burning fir he saw, on the distant hillsides where the fire had burned hours before, thousands of embers still glowing and pulsing, as if the stars had been tinted orange and reflected off the blackness of the Jemez Mountains. Thompson Ridge was terrifying and beautiful like few things Woyjeck had seen.
“Turby?” Woyjeck said to Bravo’s lead firefighter. The erupting tree concerned the rookie.
“Yo,” Travis Turbyfill said, his typical monosyllabic response to Woyjeck’s questions. Turby, a father of two little girls, had served in Afghanistan as a Marine before coming to Granite Mountain, where he’d worked for two seasons.
“Should we go stand by the house?” Woyjeck asked.
Turby paused and looked at the rookie, as if surprised by the question. He dropped his voice an octave, jutted out his chin, and said, “Nah, let’s just stay where we’re at, spread out, and keep our eyes in the green.”
Turby wanted Woyjeck to stop watching the fireworks and keep his eyes toward the green. A spot fire could threaten not only the buildings but also the men’s safety. For the rest of the night, Granite Mountain secured the fire around a half dozen homes tucked into a stand of old-growth ponderosas. Sometime after 2 A.M., the humidity climbed, the fire calmed down, and fatigue began to override adrenaline.
To fight off drowsiness, Zup, Bunch, and his swamper Wade Parker met together on the fire line and took shots of instant coffee at the top of every hour. Zup and Bunch both carried pint-glass-size backpacking stoves in their packs, but that night, they didn’t have time to boil water. Instead they shook the packets of grounds straight into their mouths and washed the coffee down with a swallow of water. After their fourth or fifth caffeine cocktail, and almost thirty hours without sleep, delirium took a firm hold.
During one of their meetings, Renan walked up to borrow Parker’s tool, and the swamper started chuckling for no reason other than exhaustion. It grew into the sort of insane laughter that feeds on its own sound, and Zup and Bunch were soon infected. With Renan staring at them, the men from Bravo shook with hysterical laughter. Bunch was literally on his back, howling.
Renan, d
oubtful that anything could be that funny, found it mildly irritating. He had no idea what had made them lose sanity. He snatched Parker’s tool and walked back toward the house he was working beside, their laughter pealing behind. In the darkness, Renan moved slowly down the middle of the thin road as the shadows of the flames danced on the pines and white smoke drifted across the road. Suddenly, beyond the crew’s clamor and in his momentary silence, Renan felt more exhausted than he had in a very long time.
CHAPTER 11
TESTED
One of the reasons there are so many excellent photographs of the country’s wildfires is that land management agencies often hire photographers to document the action. On June 4, the Valles Caldera National Preserve hired Kristen Honig, a thirty-three-year-old planner at Los Alamos National Lab and a semi-professional photographer. The Valles Caldera was happy to have her. Honig had once been a firefighter herself, but even with her experience, Day’s management team wouldn’t let her onto the line until the fire behavior calmed down. Around midnight, it did, and Division Zulu assigned Clayton Whitted, Alpha’s squad boss, to be her minder.
Clayton had accepted a temporary detail as a task-force leader trainee, a position that helped Farnsworth—Division Zulu—orchestrate the movement of resources assigned to his section of the fire. Hotshot crews regularly offer up their most skilled firefighters when needed, and though Granite Mountain was already down a few key overhead, Steed let Clayton go for a few shifts. He trusted that Bob Caldwell, Travis Carter, and Travis Turbyfill could fill the void. The detail would provide Clayton with valuable experience.