On the Burning Edge

by Kyle Dickman

  “I don’t see it getting better until I hit rock bottom,” Donut said months after Yarnell Hill. “I just can’t seem to get the negativity out of my mind.”

  Some family members of the other hotshots publicly questioned Donut’s role in the Yarnell fire. Though asked by investigators multiple times, Donut has never made a direct public statement on what specifically Marsh and Steed were discussing on the crew’s private network before leaving the black. In the aftermath, “Nineteen guys made that decision” became his and the City of Prescott’s mantra.

  “I will make sure that it’s known that there was no bad decision made,” Donut said. “That no one is at fault for what happened. Anyone that does come out with negative thoughts, I’ll make it known that I was there. And I know what happened. And it was just an accident. These things happen.”

  That wasn’t enough for some families.

  “He was their brother, and he owes it to them [and to those of us] trying to wrap our heads around it to start speaking up,” said Juliann Ashcraft, Andrew’s widow. She said her husband “would tell me as he laced up his boots every day, ‘They tell me Jump, I say How high? I love this community and love serving them with all I’ve got.’ I’ve been underwhelmed and upset by Donut’s actions and his lack of answers.”

  The other surviving hotshots have tended to avoid the controversy as much as possible. Renan Packer went back to parking cars at the Scottsdale golf course. He continues to apply for structural firefighting jobs. Bunch couldn’t handle the memories of Granite Mountain everywhere he looked, and he left Prescott for an arborist job in Seattle shortly after the deaths. But the dampness of the Pacific Northwest, plus black mold in his rental, threatened to make his new baby sick. The Bunches moved back to Prescott just a few months later, and in the spring of 2015 he planned to return to hotshotting.

  Heather Kennedy and Scott Norris’s family did not join the lawsuit. In their estimation, Scott had understood the risks he exposed himself to, and they didn’t believe a lawsuit would honor his wishes. Heather had the hardest time believing that he hadn’t spoken up when the crew decided to leave the black. “He knew better,” she said.

  Heather stayed with the Prescott Police Department and bought a house, as she and Scott had planned on doing together. When she moved, among the last things she took from their home was the chewing gum Scott had left in the shower on one of their final nights together. For months after Yarnell Hill, she sent him text messages. Sometimes they were updates about her life and the dogs. Mostly, they were pained. On August 20, almost two months after Scott died, she texted him:

  “Sometimes I feel as if everyday is just another step closer to seeing you again. But it’s about the journey, not the destination, right?”

  Leah Fine grew to disdain media coverage that cast Grant and the eighteen others as selfless heroes, friends to the end who died proudly doing the job they’d dreamed of. She knew that if Grant had fully understood what he was risking, he never would have signed up for Granite Mountain in the spring of 2013. He’d still be washing dishes at the Mexican restaurant while trying to find a paramedic’s job. And he would have been content to be at home with her. Leah, though, now had less reason to stay home, and in the fall after Grant died, she decided that adventure and hard work might help her cope. She decided to become a hotshot.

  Granite Mountain Hotshot superintendent Eric Marsh (red helmet) filling gas canisters during a burnout operation. Marsh’s role in the fatalities at Yarnell Hill was highly controversial. Some longtime firefighters counted him among the best firefighters they knew; others called him a “bad-decisions, good-outcome guy.” JAKOB SCHILLER

  Clayton Whitted, a former youth pastor, helped shape Granite Mountain’s uniquely religious character. Whitted was among the crew’s supervisors on June 30, 2013. JAKOB SCHILLER

  Hotshot Brandon Bunch, twenty-two, faced a tough decision in late June: stay on with the crew to make much-needed money for his family, or return home to be with his wife, Janae, for the birth of their third child. JAKOB SCHILLER

  Bob Caldwell’s intelligence was said to be high enough to merit membership in Mensa. In the minutes before the fire claimed nineteen firefighters’ lives, he was one of three hotshots who communicated with the Air Attack plane. The radio transmissions preceding Caldwell’s became known as “the mayday call.” JAKOB SCHILLER

  Afghanistan war veteran and lead firefighter of Bravo squad Travis Turbyfill sets a backfire in New Mexico. JAKOB SCHILLER

  The column of 2011’s monumentally destructive Las Conchas Fire darkens the skies above the town of Los Alamos, New Mexico. For fourteen hours straight, the megafire torched an acre of pines every 1.17 seconds. KRISTEN HONIG/VALLES CALDERA NATIONAL PRESERVE

  A cabin threatened by the Thompson Ridge Fire in the early hours of June 5, 2013. Three weeks before Yarnell Hill, the Granite Mountain Hotshots helped save this cabin, and others like it, from burning in New Mexico’s Valles Caldera National Preserve. KRISTEN HONIG/VALLES CALDERA NATIONAL PRESERVE

  Fully half of the nation’s air tanker fleet was fighting the Yarnell Hill Fire on June 30. Here, a specially converted DC-10 supertanker unloads eight thousand gallons of retardant. In the foreground are Granite Mountain’s buggies; the knoll in the background is Brendan “Donut” McDonough’s lookout. COURTESY OF THE NATIONAL INTERAGENCY FIRE CENTER

  For reasons that remain unclear, Granite Mountain left the safety of the already burned vegetation for a ranch near the town of Yarnell. Minutes before the fateful decision was made, hotshot Scott Norris texted this photo to his girlfriend, Heather Kennedy, along with the following note: “This fire is going to shit burning all over and expected +40 hr wind gusts from a t-storm outflow. Possibly going to burn some ranches and house.” SCOTT NORRIS

  This photo of the smoke column was shot around 4:40 P.M., within minutes of superintendent Eric Marsh’s last radio transmission. At this point in the day, fifty-mile-per-hour winds were stoking the Yarnell Hill Fire and the blaze had grown by approximately 2,700 acres in just forty minutes. COURTESY OF THE NATIONAL INTERAGENCY FIRE CENTER

  The view from an Air Attack plane circling the Yarnell Hill Fire shortly after the hotshots were burned over. The white smudge in the upper left corner of the picture is the Helms’ place. The small clearing just to the left of the wingtip is where Brendan “Donut” McDonough considered deploying his fire shelter, an aluminum blanket designed to deflect heat but not withstand direct contact with flames. COURTESY OF THE NATIONAL INTERAGENCY FIRE CENTER

  As the Granite Mountain Hotshots deployed their shelters, the fire slammed into Yarnell, burning more than a hundred homes. When the flames hit, many of the town’s 650 residents had not yet evacuated. Shot by the Air Attack. COURTESY OF THE NATIONAL INTERAGENCY FIRE CENTER

  Note the fire’s rapid increase in size after the second wind shift hits around 16:30 (4:30 P.M.). ARIZONA STATE FORESTRY

  ARIZONA STATE FORESTRY

  Investigators at the site where the hotshots deployed their fire shelters. It was roughly the size of a tennis court. The Helms’ place, the hotshots’ intended safety zone, is the unburned space on the center-right side of the picture. The burned debris beside the rock pile in the foreground is the hotshots’ equipment. WILLIAM FOLEY

  The blackened contents of one hotshot’s pack and rhino tool. Note that the wooden handles of both tools are completely burned and the pack’s cloth is nearly gone. Experts estimate that flames taller than sixty feet swept through the basin, and temperatures exceeded two thousand degrees. WILLIAM FOLEY

  The Helms’ place, Granite Mountain’s intended safety zone, after the flames passed through. Though the Yarnell Hill Fire’s intense heat cracked the buildings’ windows, the ranch survived because the homeowners had cleared their property of brush before the fire started. JOHN WACHTER

  The view from the two-track road the hotshots used as an escape route to their safety zone, the large ranch in the background. Near the point where this photo wa
s taken, the hotshots left the two-track road and moved cross-country toward the ranch, which was .6 miles away. Hampered by thick vegetation and steep terrain, Granite Mountain fell roughly a third of a mile short of the safety zone. JOHN WACHTER

  An aerial view of the Helms’ place and the basin where the men died. A bulldozer built a road into the deployment site late on the night of June 30. ARIZONA STATE FORESTRY

  Looking up at the basin from the Helms’ place. The hotshots’ descent route is the small, steep draw that ends at the flagpole. Note the ridge on the right side of the image. These massive granite boulders blocked the men’s view of the fire. JOHN WACHTER

  Nineteen white hearses transported the men from Phoenix, where they were autopsied, back to the hotshots’ home base in Prescott. In temperatures that exceeded a hundred degrees, thousands of people lined the road to offer their respects to the fallen firefighters. LAURA SEGALL/GETTY IMAGES

  Brendan “Donut” McDonough, Granite Mountain’s sole survivor of the Yarnell Hill Fire, addresses a crowd of 14,400 people on July 9, 2013, at a memorial service held outside the crew’s home base in Prescott. In the foreground are alumni of the Granite Mountain Hotshots; Vice President Joe Biden looks on. DAVID KADLUBOWSKI—POOL/GETTY IMAGES

  For Turin

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  First and foremost, I owe a great debt of gratitude to the people who shared with me their own painful experiences and memories of the men they loved. I sincerely hope the book does justice to the stories passed on to me by the hotshots’ friends and family members who graciously gave me their time, the following in particular: David, Linda, and Claire Caldwell; Leah Fine; John, Jane, and Amanda Marsh; Wade Ward; Darrell Willis; Phillip Maldonado; Pat McCarty; Marty Cole; Brandon and Janae Bunch; Jeff Phelan; Todd Abel; Truman and Lois Ferrell; Steve Emery; Conrad Jackson; Karen and Jo Norris and Heather Kennedy; Kristi Whitted; Brendan McDonough; and Renan Packer. These people provided the book’s narrative—its heart.

  I also wish to thank those who told me their stories of working with Granite Mountain in the 2013 fire season and helped me understand the larger world of wildland firefighting. An incomplete list: Jim Cook, Rick Cowell, Stan Stewart, Travis Dotson, Mark Linane, Greg Overacker, Beth Melville, Tirso Rojas, Jason Schroeder, Kristen Honig, Allen Farnsworth, Dan Bailey, Dave Provincio, Carrie Dennett, Park Williams, Chuck Maxwell, John Wachter, Fred Schoeffler, Josh Barnum, Todd Haines, Todd Lerke, Harry Croft, and James Lewis. I owe a personal thanks to Jennifer Jones, the Forest Service’s public information officer, who was incredibly accommodating during both the book’s initial reporting and its fact checking. These people provided valuable information that conveyed the greater context in which the tragedy occurred.

  Personally, I must also thank a long list of people who helped produce this book. For starters, thank you to my wife and best friend, Turin. Your endless patience and support made this possible. I thank my parents, Bonnie and Paul, who taught me to love books, and my older brother, Garrett, who has been the first editor of nearly every piece I’ve written since we were kids. Sam Moulton read the manuscript cover to cover multiple times, and his sharp edits and steady encouragement exponentially improved the book. Thank you to my friends Peter Vigneron and Frederick Reimers, who read countless early drafts. Dave Costello, Abe Streep, Sean Cooper, Jonah Ogles, and Grayson Schaffer all provided thoughtful input on various chapters. Jakob Schiller provided many of the images in the book and also helped me report the story by sharing with me many of the initial contacts he’d made while photographing the crew in 2012. Thank you. Chris Keyes edited the National Magazine Award–nominated feature that was the seed for this book; Lorenzo Burke published it in Outside; Alex Heard served as a general counsel throughout the entire process; Kevin Fedarko’s input from outline to final draft was invaluable; and my remarkable copy editor, Will Palmer, added more commas than any man should ever have to and did so while providing poignant and necessary feedback on the story’s bigger picture. Reid Singer fact-checked every page of the book—a monumental effort he carried out with poise. He contributed greatly to the book. And finally, thanks to my excellent agent, Jennifer Joel, and editor, Mark Tavani, who offered clear edits and shepherded me through every step of the long process.

  NOTES

  The pages that follow document the main sources used in each chapter. I have not listed the source of every quotation, fact, or passage, but to ensure the reporting’s accuracy, the entire book was independently fact-checked. Descriptions of fire behavior and the sights and sounds of the blazes Granite Mountain fought in 2013 were informed by interviews, photos, and videos shot by firefighters on scene and by my own time on the fire line. Most information specific to the personality of Granite Mountain’s 2013 crew came from the three surviving members: Brendan “Donut” McDonough, Renan Packer, and Brandon Bunch. In total, I spent nearly a month reporting the book in Prescott. This time included countless cups of coffee at the Raven, a café where I met many sources, and multiple trips to the fire site at Yarnell. I also visited the Doce Fire site with McDonough and the Thompson Ridge Fire site with Todd Lerke.

  PROLOGUE

  Details about the Yarnell Hill Fire of June 30, 2013, came from interviews with Brendan “Donut” McDonough. The timeline of events was provided by the two official investigations into Yarnell Hill—the Arizona Department of Occupational Safety and Health and the Yarnell Hill Serious Accident Investigation—as well as interviews and official transcripts of interviews with McDonough, Todd Abel, and Brian Frisby that were made public through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Weather updates came from both the investigations and subsequent conversations with fire weather meteorologist Chuck Maxwell at the Forest Service’s Southwest Coordination Center.

  CHAPTER 1

  Information about the first week of Granite Mountain’s season was provided by Bunch, Packer, and McDonough. Linda Caldwell, David Caldwell, and Leah Fine provided Grant McKee’s biographical information, and a number of trips to Granite Mountain’s station allowed me to collect details about the saw shop, the ready room, and the setting. Former hotshot superintendents Rick Cowell, Mark Linane, Jim Cook, and Stan Stewart provided general background information on the hotshots and wildland firefighters, and this was supplemented by material provided by Jennifer Jones, the public information officer for the Forest Service. The total size of America’s wildland firefighting force, a surprisingly tricky number to pin down, came from Dan Bailey at the International Association of Wildland Fire. The number fifty-six thousand accounts for city, state, and county wildland firefighters, but it’s considered a conservative estimate. When volunteers are added, the number of American wildland firefighters is thought to be as high as seventy-five thousand.

  CHAPTER 2

  Details about the hotshots’ training day were provided by Bunch, Packer, and McDonough. Prescott’s Wildland Division chief, Darrell Willis, who oversaw the drill, also provided information on the hotshots’ certification process. Information about Prescott’s history came from the book Prescott Fire Department (Arcadia Publishing), by Eric Conrad Jackson, as well as visits to the courthouse square, Whiskey Row, and Prescott’s Sharlot Hall Museum. Heather Kennedy and Karen Norris told me Scott Norris’s story. Michael Thoele’s book Fire Line: The Summer Battles of the West (Fulcrum), along with Jennifer Jones, Chuck Womack, and Kari Boyd-Peak, at the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC), provided background on how the response to wildfires is coordinated. Longtime hotshot Tirso Rojas augmented my own experience on the fire line with explanations of how sawyers and swampers work. Stephen Pyne’s extraordinary book Fire: A Brief History (University of Washington Press) proved an invaluable source for the history of wild flames in North America; Timothy Egan’s The Big Burn (Houghton Mifflin) was the reference for Ed Pulaski’s backstory; and the Interagency Fire Shelter Task Group’s Wildland Fire Shelter: History and Development of the New Generation Fire Shelter was a touchstone for explanations about fire-shelter usage i
n the United States.

  CHAPTER 3

  Eric Marsh’s backstory came from interviews with his parents, John and Jane Marsh, and his wife, Amanda. His second wife, Kori Kirkpatrick, confirmed much of his early history in Prescott. Marty Cole, Phillip Maldonado, Wade Ward, and Pat McCarty—all former Crew 7 and Granite Mountain firefighters—provided background about Marsh’s mission to turn Granite Mountain into a hotshot crew, and Marsh’s personnel files were a source for performance evaluations throughout his tenure on Granite Mountain. Jim Cook contextualized hotshot culture; Packer and Bunch shared anecdotes from the night the hotshots slept out after their drill.

  CHAPTER 4

  My sources for the state of wildfires in the West came from NIFC’s daily situation report. Details about the prairie fire were supplied by multiple newspaper articles published in the Prescott Daily Courier. Bunch, McDonough, and Packer all shared with me their experiences on the fire. Weather information came from the NIFC-issued summary of the 2013 fire season and meteorologist Chuck Maxwell, who tracked the season’s development over many months. Packer provided his own story. Bunch, Heather Kennedy, Pat McCarty, and Wade Ward all corroborated Marsh’s interview practices.