Most of them had known one another for years. Some had watched their children grow up together or had gone to school with one another. One taught a firefighting class at Prescott High School, where several of the men who drew the trucks to the ranch had learned the craft. All of the arriving firefighters had studied wildfire with one of the men waiting for them in the canyon.
Some might have chosen to wear more formal attire for their somber reunion, but although there was barely a wisp of smoke in the air, pockets of chaparral were still burning in the mountains above them and the rubble of the town of Yarnell smoldered less than a mile to the east, so their matching fire-resistant uniforms—green pants and yellow shirts—were not only a sign of respect but a requirement to stand in the burn zone.
Nearby, 19 orange bags lay in two rows on the ground. Beyond them, scraps of charred fabric and foil peppered a 30-by-24-foot oval of ash and cinders.1 The previous afternoon 19 hotshots—the Special Forces of forest firefighting—had crawled under the sleeping bag–sized fire shelters from which the silvery fabric came. After the blaze that had trapped them in the canyon passed over, some shreds of their shelters looked like charred chewing gum wrappers.
Faint rectangles in the shape of the fire shelters marked the charred ground, like impressions left behind by tents pitched before a rainstorm. Boot prints in the burnt ground carefully orbited the door-shaped marks and weaved between them. Other prints buried beneath the ash came from feet that had frantically raced around the area before it was overrun by the waves of flame.
As the men from the trucks added their own boot prints to the scene, they looked for clues of what had happened there. Every piece of evidence they could see pointed to a rushed and frantic deployment. Three melted and scorched chainsaws lay 20 to 40 feet southeast of the site, and another was found within the perimeter, as were packs with flares known as fusees; fuel cans, most of which had exploded; and hand tools such as axes. Some of the gear was found underneath the firefighters, despite their training to bring only water bottles and radios into their shelters and to throw everything else as far as possible from their deployment site to avoid adding their own fuel to the fire.2
Most of the tools’ wooden handles were charred, some burned all the way to ash. Fiberglass had disintegrated into threads.
There were at least eight sawed stumps east of the shelters, but the farthest was just 45 feet from the deployment zone, a fraction of the distance the firefighters would have wanted to clear of vegetation to keep the flames away from their shelters. Fusees with their caps off showed they had tried to burn away other brush.
When the first paramedic landed in a helicopter after the long search for the missing hotshots, he was heartened to hear a voice coming from inside one of the shelters. When he went to investigate, he discovered that the source of the chatter was one of the hotshots’ radios. There were no survivors.
He found just seven of the firefighters fully inside their shelters.3 The others either hadn’t climbed all the way inside before the flames arrived or had tried to get out to escape the heat when the fire was on them, or their shelters had been blasted off them. Only 13 had their feet aimed at the fire, and just 10 had gloves on to protect their hands from the heat while they held down the shelters, despite their training to do both those things. Five were lying on their backs rather than their stomachs as an effective shelter deployment requires. None of them, however, appeared to have panicked and tried to outrun the fire. They may not have had time to complete everything they were trained to do as the disaster unfolded, but they held fast to the most important part.
Winds in excess of 50 miles per hour had pushed 70-foot flames nearly horizontally into the canyon that had trapped the hotshots. Investigators determined that the fire front had traveled about 100 yards in 19 seconds. A well-trained firefighter takes about 20 seconds to deploy a shelter.4
All the hotshots had holes burned through their flame-retardant clothes, which would have required temperatures of about 825 degrees Fahrenheit—nearly three times what a human can survive in any prolonged exposure.
Extreme radiant and convective heat transferred so much energy that there was no difference in the temperature between the front and lee sides of the shelters, and little between the front and back of the deployment site. Fire shelters can reflect 95 percent of radiant heat, but the foil begins delaminating from the cloth around 500 degrees Fahrenheit. Once that happens, their ability to protect their inhabitants plummets.5 The foil in the shelters melts at 1220 degrees, the fiberglass breaks down at around 1500 degrees, and the silica cloth turns brittle at 2000 degrees. At those temperatures, the condition of the shelters was likely irrelevant—most of the firefighters would have died from a single breath of superheated air.
TWO OF THE FIREFIGHTERS who came to retrieve the hotshots’ bodies draped the orange bags with American flags. Others quietly walked among them whispering prayers or silent good-byes. Then the team regrouped and rotated through the tasks they’d volunteered for. Eight split into an honor guard leading to the back of a pickup, four on either side. The remaining four lifted a bag by its corners and carried it to the truck. As they approached, the other firefighters snapped to a salute. Once a bag was secured in the truck’s bed, the honor guard stood at ease, the men wiped their eyes, and the teams rotated.
The bags were marked by numbers, rather than names, as many of the bodies inside them were burned beyond recognition. Members of the honor guard were thankful they wouldn’t know which of their friends they were carrying until the investigators’ reports were released two months later. The radio the paramedic had heard the night before continued transmitting voices that repeatedly startled the crew into hopeful glances toward the deployment zone.
Once the last corpse was loaded, Darrell Willis opened the Bible he carried in his truck to Psalm 23. A former chief of the Prescott Fire Department, Willis had come out of retirement to take on the task of protecting the city from forest fires as the department’s Wildland Division chief. Under his leadership the Granite Mountain Hotshots had formed—a crew of 20 elite forest firefighters that in 2013 was the only one of 109 hotshot crews in the country to be part of a city fire department. Only one member of his crew was still alive when Willis read the psalm in the charred canyon.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.
Danny Parker, a firefighter with the Chino Valley department northeast of Prescott, fell to his knees as Willis read.
“I’m a broken man,” he said later. “Just weak and broken and humble.”
Danny asked if he could pray with the men. His voice quivered and cracked, and the other firefighters wondered how he could possibly deliver even a short invocation, given that he had lost more than anyone else at the scene.
WHEN HE WAS A CHILD in Prescott, Danny sat on his back porch with his family watching the 1972 Battle Fire as it licked over the mountains where they often hunted and picked apples. It grew into the largest blaze in Arizona history to that date. He saw the Castle Fire break that record seven years later, and the Dude Fire that grew nearly as big and killed six firefighters near Payson in 1990. After stints in the U.S. Navy and working construction, he joined the Chino Valley Fire Department.
Danny and his wife raised four children, but his son Wade followed closest in his footsteps. A photo of Wade as a child shows him wearing a firefighting costume and hosing down a small bonfire in the family’s backyard. For his school’s science fair, he built a model demonstrating the chimney effect on a house fire.
Wade excelled at every sport he tried, but baseball and bow hunting were his passions. Danny made all of his children’s bows and gave Wade his first one when the boy was three years old, then made him others as he grew bigger and stronger. The weapons are works of art—made of woods such as bird’s-eye maple, African wenge, and Brazilian yellowheart, and adorned with elk horn bow tips. Father and son would text each other photos of the tight patterns of thei
r arrows on targets. Danny also coached several of his son’s baseball teams and would get flack from family and friends for not highlighting Wade’s talents more, not that his son needed it. A grand slam that Wade hit in high school helped him secure a baseball scholarship, but his classic ballplayer’s good looks and polite demeanor—sandy brown hair, wide boys-of-summer smile, and Sunday-school manners—probably didn’t hurt.
“We always thought he’d be famous for getting to the big leagues,” his older sister, Amber, said at a church service 10 days after Danny Parker’s prayer in the burn zone. But after a year in college, Wade gave up his scholarship and moved back into the family home.
“He loved baseball, but he said he realized it was ‘time to become a man,’ ” Danny said. “He wanted to come home, pursue becoming a firefighter, get married, and have a family.”
Danny advised him to get a job on a Type 2 hand crew, the common entry into the world of fighting forest fires. “But, no, he wanted to be a hotshot,” Danny said.
Nobody was surprised when Wade was hired onto Prescott’s elite Granite Mountain Interagency Hotshot Crew, or when he was named the crew’s Rookie of the Year in 2012.
Father and son often hugged as they left their house for their respective firehouses, then chatted about their workdays when they were back at home. “Never lose your respect for the fire,” Danny told his son. “That’s when bad things happen. The power of the forces on this earth, they don’t care who you are.”
When they hunted together, Danny would point out fire hazards to his son, such as ravines that could trap a firefighter in a natural chimney, or clouds on the horizon that signaled weather that could turn a fire or blow it up. Thunder could make rutting elk bugle and warned of new fires ignited by lightning. Wade, like his father, worked on the side as a hunting guide, and developed a good eye for vegetation and habitat. He recognized that fire was just as often a benefit to the forests where he worked as a hazard. He told his father about areas he’d like to go back to with a bow when he didn’t have to be there carrying a chainsaw.
“He didn’t talk about the fires hardly ever. He talked about how beautiful the mountains were,” Danny said. “About this waterfall and how they bathed under it because they hadn’t had a shower in a long time.”
A week before the Yarnell Hill Fire, the Granite Mountain Hotshots worked on the Doce Fire, a 6,700-acre blaze just outside Prescott—exactly the kind of threat to the city the unit had been formed to stand up against. They got something of a hero’s welcome afterward for helping to protect more than 400 homes that the fire had threatened, and for saving the nation’s second-largest alligator juniper tree, which was located on Granite Mountain.
But much of their namesake peak had burned, and Wade confided to his father that the crew was as humbled as they were proud. “They got teased for letting their mountain burn,” Danny said.
Some would see the scorching of the mountain the hotshots were named after as an omen of what happened to them just weeks later. But before that, Danny saw something more concrete to worry about in the Doce Fire.
He was working outside on a day off from firefighting when he noticed a wisp of smoke over the mountain. Just a few hours later, the Doce Fire was racing toward the homes in the Williamson Valley. “From 50 to 5,000 acres in just three or four hours? Its rate of spread was absolutely incredible,” Danny said. “It was kind of a foretelling of what the fire behavior was going to be like.”
In the 25 years that Danny had been fighting fires, he’d noticed a change, and he told his son about it. “If you go back 30 years and watch bull riding, there were a few bulls that bucked incredibly well,” he said. “Then they started breeding these bulls to buck. Now every bull that comes out of the bucking chutes is like the better ones from 30 years ago. The same goes with fires. We’ve always had volatile fires during volatile times. But now almost all of them are that volatile.”
Danny was happy that Wade was working with men whom he knew and respected—and, more important, who he knew respected fire. Eric Marsh, the superintendent of the crew, had been eating, sleeping, and dreaming wildfire for decades. He and his wife at the time had started the Arizona Wildfire Academy in their mobile home and turned it into one of the largest and most respected schools for forest firefighters in the country. Jesse Steed, the captain of the crew, was a former gunner in the U.S. Marine Corps who had no problem hugging his men, telling them that he loved them, and then leading them through workouts that left them puking along the trail.
Wade patterned his work after some of the previous Rookies of the Year—Andrew Ashcraft and Robert Caldwell, both family men. A few weeks before the Yarnell Hill Fire he was promoted to “sawyer,” responsible for running a chainsaw, and proved as skilled with it as he was with a bow or baseball bat.
Danny was also pleased that his son’s fire crew fit so well with Wade’s reverence of family and God. When his younger brother, who dreamed of being a bull rider in rodeos, turned 18, Wade showed up with several of his crewmates and their girlfriends at the small restaurant where the family was celebrating, bearing the gift of a $500 pair of chaps. In 2012, while visiting Disneyland, he proposed to Alicia Owens, his girlfriend since he was 16. Their wedding was scheduled for October 2013.
Wade was in his second season with Granite Mountain when the summer of 2013 exploded with fire. Chris Hunter, a high school teacher he’d stayed in touch with, sent him a worried note. He texted her a picture of himself on a fire. “Miss Hunter,” he wrote, “I’m a hotshot. I’m good.”6
DANNY PARKER WAS THE FIRST to volunteer to retrieve the bodies of his son and the rest of the Granite Mountain Hotshots—the only family member of the fallen firefighters to join the recovery team. At the site where the hotshots made their final stand by lying on the ground, he finished his prayer and somehow rose to his feet.
“All I could do is thank him for 22 years,” he told me.
Then someone looked up at the mountain and pointed out two cracks forming a cross on the face of a huge granite boulder.
“All 19 of those boys were at the foot of the cross,” he said.
As they left the scene, the recovery team placed a more humble marker on the site—a black T-shirt with the Granite Mountain Hotshots’ logo, which they hung on the lone surviving cactus.
Danny knew that each of the men who perished on Yarnell Hill had a story as compelling as his son’s. Every one of them was loved in the tight-knit clan that grew up around Arizona’s oldest fire department. Each of them had his own family now quaking with grief. And Danny also knew that across the country and around the world, other communities were facing mass fatalities and the destruction of hundreds of homes in wildfires.
In the following months Danny would learn that Wade was the closest of the hotshots to the cross in the stone and that he had carried the bag with his son’s remains. He took some comfort in that knowledge.
But the most urgent question he and other firefighters around the nation were struggling with was left unanswered by the debris strewn at the deployment site and the investigations that followed the fire.
An hour before they crawled under their fire shelters, the Granite Mountain Hotshots were standing in what firefighters call “the black”—where most of the vegetation had already been burned away, creating a haven from the fire.7 They could see the inferno exploding below them. Yet they descended into a box canyon that any firefighter would recognize as a death trap—a natural chimney so choked with brush, they had to hack their way through it, and so oily it burned as if soaked in gasoline. What led Wade Parker and his crew to leave the safety zone where they could have easily survived the fire they could see boiling below them and descend into the canyon where they were most vulnerable to it?
The answer to that question lies as much in the century of policy decisions and the decadelong explosion of fires that led up to the disaster as it does in the decisions the hotshots made in the minutes before their deaths.
2
Fuses and Bombs
WITH NO WITNESSES to their final moments alive, mystery will always shroud the deaths of the Granite Mountain Hotshots. But other questions of what led to their annihilation have answers that are increasingly clear.
For years scientists, firefighters, and foresters have warned that disasters like the one on Yarnell Hill are all but inevitable and likely to recur with growing frequency and devastation. Their causes have been well-known and on the rise for decades.
During the century leading up to the tragedy, U.S. firefighters successfully extinguished about 99 percent of the wildfires that ignited in the United States, and that interruption of the natural fire cycle led many forests to grow unnaturally thick with timber, brush, grasses, and other fuels.1 Poorly managed timber harvests,2 overgrazing, forest pests, invasive species, and ill-conceived timber plantations are blamed for further overloading landscapes with tinder.
Climatic changes, driven to no small degree by human emissions of greenhouse gases, brought droughts and heat waves to many formerly moist woodlands. Mountain snowpack melts off weeks, and sometimes months, earlier than it did during the previous century, leaving forests dry enough to burn at times of the year when they used to be filled with streams of snowmelt. In other areas, warming trends brought pulses of precipitation that fed growth spurts of grasses and other “fine fuels” that burned intensely when arid conditions returned. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the warming and drying climate has expanded fire seasons in the western United States by 78 days between 1970 and 2015.3 Human activity on the ground has also expanded the length and range of the fire season by bringing sparks and flames to months and landscapes that have no lightning to ignite them naturally. In some woodlands that are usually blanketed with snow in winter, wildfires are now a year-round threat.
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