On the Burning Edge

by Kyle Dickman

  CHAPTER 5

  Details of Brandon and Janae Bunch’s home life came from the Bunches. Former hotshots Pat McCarty and Jeff Phelan provided biographical information on Garret Zuppiger, as did Zuppiger’s well-written and highly entertaining blog I’d Rather Be Flying! (garretjoseph.wordpress.com). Bunch, Packer, Phillip Maldonado, Heather Kennedy, McDonough, and Leah Fine all provided information contrasting the leadership styles of Marsh and Jesse Steed.

  CHAPTER 6

  Jennifer Jones explained the fundamental operations of NIFC. This reporting was supplemented by Brian Mockenhaupt’s wonderfully clear Atlantic story about the Yarnell Hill Fire, “Fire on the Mountain.” Region 3’s public information officer, Mary Zabrinski, provided basic information on the state of wildland fires in the Southwest in early May 2013, but the primary source for this chapter was meteorologist Chuck Maxwell, whom I visited at his office in Albuquerque. His early-season forecasts mapped out the movement of the fire season. Bioclimatologist Park Williams, of the Tree Ring Lab at Columbia University, provided scientific context for the warming and drying of the Southwest. Todd Lerke told me his own story of the initial attack on Thompson Ridge, and former hotshot superintendent and longtime fire researcher Fred Schoeffler gave me the growth rate of the Las Conchas Fire.

  CHAPTER 7

  Heather Kennedy told me about Scott Norris and their relationship, as well as the details about the fire-and-weather video. This reporting was supplemented by conversations with Scott’s mother, Karen, and his sister, Jo.

  CHAPTER 8

  Mike Johns, a U.S. assistant district attorney, offered invaluable context through both personal interviews and his meticulously cultivated report on the incident, “The Dude Fire.” Supplemental reporting came from Jaime Joyce, in her shocking story “Burn,” published by the nonfiction site the Big Roundtable on June 23, 2013. National Park Service–contracted helicopter pilot Chris Templeton gave sensory details about flying a JetRanger beside a collapsing column, and the video “Dude Fire Staff Ride” (youtube.com/watch?v=EaV5WKgKVH0), which highlighted the interaction between a number of surviving sources, provided quotes from a number of hotshot superintendents on scene on June 26, 1990. Ultimately, though, the primary source for this reporting was the official investigation into the Dude Fire fatalities and the many pages of handwritten interview transcripts associated with the deaths, which are available at the Wildland Fire Staff Ride Library (www.fireleadership.gov).

  CHAPTER 9

  Payson Hotshots superintendent Mike Schinstock explained his crew’s educational walk-throughs of the Dude Fire site. Heather Kennedy gave background on Scott’s fascination with prior burnovers and his relationship with Kevin Woyjeck. Context about how the Forest Service and other wildland fire agencies respond to tragedy fires came from Jim Cook, Rick Cowell, and sources who wished not to be named but who are employed by large, nationally funded educational institutes that study wildland fire. Norman Maclean’s brilliant book Young Men and Fire (University of Chicago Press) provided context for this chapter and many others in the book, as did his son John Maclean’s exceptional investigation of the tragic South Canyon Fire, Fire on the Mountain (Simon & Schuster). Bunch, Packer, and McDonough provided details about the Hart Fire, and Don Muise of the Coconino National Forest gave the ranger district’s reaction to the fire.

  CHAPTER 10

  In addition to trips inside Alpha’s and Bravo’s buggies, Bunch, the sawyer on Bravo, and McDonough, lead Pulaski on Alpha, gave me the details on the buggies’ interiors. Bunch told me the story of the chips, which was confirmed by Packer and Leah Fine. FOIA requests for Incident Action Plans (IAPs) and ICS 209s—forms that document the incident commander’s response to a fire—detailed Bea Day and her management team’s response to the Thompson Ridge Fire. These documents also specified personnel assignments and division objectives on the fire. Bunch, McDonough, and Packer all related to me their experiences on Thompson Ridge, as did the Division Zulu, Allen Farnsworth, and the photographer Kristen Honig. Videos and photos that Honig shot provided additional scenes of Granite Mountain’s experience on Thompson Ridge. Details on relative danger rates of professions came from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Between 2000 and 2013, an average of forty-six mail carriers were killed at work per year, compared with thirty-three wildland firefighters.

  CHAPTER 11

  Fire researcher Jim Cook’s paper “Trends in Wildland Entrapment Fatalities…Revisited” was instrumental in reporting about history’s largest fire fatalities. So were Tim Egan’s The Big Burn, Stephen Pyne’s America’s Fires: A Historical Context for Policy and Practice (Forest History Society), and conversations with James Lewis, at the Forest History Society. Bioclimatologist Park Williams provided context on the impact that fire suppression and climate change are having on western forests. Harry Croft gave background on the evolution of fire management policy, Alexander Evans contextualized the role of prescribed fire in the West, and Jerry Williams’s writing underscored the onset of the era of mega-fires in his 2011 paper “Mega-Fires and the Urgency to Re-Evaluate Wildfire Protection Strategies through a Land Management Prism.” Details about the Peshtigo Fire came from Lee Sandlin’s book Storm Kings (Pantheon) and Peter M. Leschak’s book Ghosts of the Fireground (HarperCollins). Steed’s backstory came from a combination of reports by Josh Eells at Men’s Journal, Brian Mockenhaupt at The Atlantic, Steed’s personnel files, and stories told to me by hotshots he’d worked with throughout his career. McDonough told me his own story.

  CHAPTER 12

  Details about Marsh’s first years as a hotshot superintendent were told to me by his wife, Amanda, and his parents, John and Jane. Former hotshot superintendents Jim Cook, Stan Stewart, and Mark Linane contextualized what new superintendents are often exposed to during their first few years on the job. Marty Cole, Crew 7’s superintendent before Marsh, added details about Marsh’s and Granite Mountain’s particular experience. Marsh’s personnel files were the primary source for details about the tension between Marsh and Aaron Lawson, the crew’s captain before Steed, but Maldonado, Willis, and Bunch corroborated and expanded upon the tensions.

  CHAPTER 13

  Incident Action Plans and ICS 209 forms were the sources regarding the fire’s expansion; so too was information provided by Darrell Willis, who was on the scene. Heather Kennedy showed me a video of the skit mimicking the After Action Review; Janae and Brandon Bunch told me about Brandon’s last few days on Thompson Ridge; Leah Fine explained Woyjeck’s relationship with Grant McKee; and McDonough told me about his trip to Las Vegas and his decision to come to God. Maldonado, who was McDonough’s squad boss at the time, confirmed the story about McDonough and the crew’s experience in Las Vegas.

  CHAPTER 14

  Details about the crew’s off-days came from McDonough, Bunch, Packer, Leah Fine, Jo Norris, and Heather Kennedy. Chuck Maxwell’s forecasts provided information on the weather conditions in early June. Prescott’s fire history was sourced from Eric Conrad Jackson’s Prescott Fire Department and a number of local museums in the area. Details about the Indian Fire, which nearly destroyed Prescott the year that Crew 7 was created, came from the Prescott Daily Courier. Willis told me some of the history of the Prescott Area Wildland Urban Interface Commission, but the organization’s story was documented most thoroughly by Everett Warnock, in the paper “A History of the Prescott Area Wildland/Urban Interface Commission.” Interviews with firefighters and dispatchers at NIFC, Dan Bailey at the International Association of Wildland Fire, and Harry Croft placed Prescott’s challenges within the greater context of wildfires in the West. Budget numbers past and present were sourced from James Lewis at the Forest History Society and Jennifer Jones at NIFC.

  CHAPTER 15

  During a visit to the Doce Fire site with McDonough in November 2013, Donut told me the story about his close call and took me to the juniper, where he explained how the crew had saved the tree. Heather Kennedy, who heard of the incident from Scott Norris,
confirmed the severity of McDonough’s close call. The number of houses the Doce threatened, the fire size, and growth rates all came from ICS 209s and IAPs. Conversations with Incident Commander Tony Sciacca and articles from The Daily Courier and Wildfire Today supplemented this reporting. An online archive of Chris MacKenzie’s photos helped fill out the moments that took place at the alligator juniper. Stories of the hotshots sleeping at the station came from Leah Fine, Kristi Whitted, Claire Caldwell, and McDonough. Packer told me about returning to the station. Chuck Maxwell and archival weather information were the sources for fire severity in the last weeks of June.

  CHAPTER 16

  During my visits to Yarnell, Lois and Truman Ferrell told me about watching the Yarnell Hill Fire ignite and the hours and days that followed. Russ Shumate’s story came from comprehensive interview transcripts and handwritten notes from both the Arizona Department of Occupational Safety and Health Investigative Report and the Serious Accident Investigation Report. These notes, obtained through FOIA requests from the excellent independent journalist John Dougherty, among many others, also provided the foundation for all the Yarnell Hill chapters that follow. Amanda Marsh told me about her dinner with Eric Marsh on June 29, and McDonough and Jeff Bunch, the bartender, told me about the hotshots stopping to get a beer at Moctezuma’s that same night.

  CHAPTERS 17–23

  The book From Tragedy to Recovery: The Yarnell Hill Wildfire of 2013 (Createspace), released by the Yarnell Chamber of Commerce, provided the history of Yarnell. Details of Granite Mountain and other firefighters’ experience on the Yarnell Hill Fire on June 30 came from conversations with Todd Abel, Conrad Jackson, Steve Emery, the Ferrells, and McDonough, as well as interview transcripts and notes from, among others, Abel, Russ Shumate, Byron Kimball, Gary Cordes, Paul Musser, Darrell Willis, Rance Marquez, Rory Collins, Brian Frisby, Rogers Trueheart Brown, three other Blue Ridge Hotshots, and the hikers Joy Collura and Tex Gilligan.

  Both official investigations into the tragedy provided a timeline of events for the fire and details about the number of tanker drops, weather updates, firefighter movement, and the fire’s rate of spread. Chuck Maxwell told me about the scene in Albuquerque and explained the weather phenomena in play that day. John Wachter also helped explain the day’s weather. Heather Kennedy described the weather in Prescott and provided her text message conversations with Scott Norris. Photo and video evidence from McDonough’s phone, in addition to videos recovered from Chris MacKenzie’s burned phone and camera, helped me re-create the near midair collision. It’s important to note that aviation experts speculate that the aircraft were in fact a safe distance apart. I relied on McDonough’s telling of the incident, as well as the videos and Scott Norris’s text message, because they demonstrate how the hotshots’ nerves were frayed hours before the tragedy.

  The number of firefighters on scene came from a comprehensive list of resources used to fight the blaze. Carrie Dennett, the state’s excellent public information officer, provided this list.

  Experts on Yarnell Hill will notice a slight time discrepancy between the book’s version of events and the official investigation. The investigation has McDonough getting pushed off his lookout at 3:55 P.M., but time signatures on photos that McDonough shot at Granite Mountain’s rigs, after Frisby picked him up, show that this event occurred twenty-four minutes earlier. As firefighters reported reliable cell service in the area, there’s little reason to doubt the accuracy of McDonough’s phone. Logic, too, would dictate that Steed received the fire-wide weather update at the time it was delivered (3:26 P.M.) and not twenty-four minutes after (3:50 P.M.). Cell-phone video recordings documented a number of radio conversations between Marsh and Steed that took place while the hotshots were on the ridge, and McDonough provided the details of Marsh and Steed’s radio conversation about whether to leave the safety of the black.

  The radio transmissions delivered moments before the hotshots died were recorded on a helmet-camera video shot by firefighters working near Glen Ilah. The flames’ rate of spread and the fire behavior in the basin at the time the men were killed were determined through fire-behavior analysts whose research was included in the official investigation. Calculations based on these reports were used to estimate the distance between the flames and the hotshots during the final radio conversations Steed, Marsh, Caldwell, and Abel had with Bravo 33. Details of what it’s like to deploy came from accounts by burnover survivors and from training procedures all hotshots are required to go through. A former hotshot superintendent who visited the deployment site days after the hotshots’ deaths passed on the detail of a deer racing out ahead of the flames. He found the recently burned body of a deer near the site. Post-accident reports compiled by Eric Tarr and the helicopter pilot were used to re-create the scene at the fatality site, and a body-location map plus details from the Yarnell sheriff’s department were used to describe the condition and location of each fallen hotshot.

  EPILOGUE

  Steve Emery provided me with his story. McDonough described the moments after the fatalities were reported, the funerals, and the weeks after. The scene at Mile High Middle School was described by Heather Kennedy, Karen Norris, Claire Caldwell, Bunch, Packer, Maldonado, and others. I attended the hotshots’ memorial at the stadium in Prescott Valley.

  Information about the tribute fence came from Dottie Morris, one of the founders of the Tribute Fence Preservation Project.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  KYLE DICKMAN is a former editor at Outside magazine and a former member of the firefighting crew known as the Tahoe Hotshots. He spent five seasons fighting wildfires in California. Dickman’s reporting has been nominated for a National Magazine Award. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with his wife, Turin.

  @KyleDickman