To the east rose a wall of smoke more than a dozen miles wide and hundreds of feet tall. Flames spread over some 38 square miles.
Windblown sand and embers left pits in windshields and blasted a light off the side of Deputy Curtis Witte’s patrol car.6 One rookie Yuma firefighter said he only realized how hot it was when a chicken fell over dead at his feet. A state trooper reported seeing cattle with their hides burning and their skin falling off. He wanted to stop and shoot them to end their suffering, but there were still homes to evacuate. By the end of the day about 50 head of cattle had perished in the fire, and nearly 200 more were missing.
Farmers turned on their irrigation sprinklers to hold back the blaze, and cattle huddled in the shelter of the mist. Others drove tractors pulling disc harrows miles ahead of the approaching fire, trying to contain the blaze with a line of dirt. Grass fires on the plains are so fast the armies of firefighters that battle forest fires can’t respond quickly enough.
Knowing that farmers were violating his call for an evacuation and risking their own lives, Sheriff Day was torn. “The only way to get them out of there is to put them in handcuffs and drag them out,” he said. “I’m not going to do that.”
Rows of plowed soil, however, couldn’t hold back the flood of fire.
THE GRASSES ON THE PLAINS are known as one-hour fuels to firefighters—so fine that heat, lack of moisture, and wind can dry them to the point of combustion in 60 minutes. Bunchgrasses in Colorado’s sand hills grow in clumps, and their sparse spacing usually slows fires. But months of drought, days of temperatures a dozen degrees above normal, and hours of relentless wind had primed the grass, corn, and wheat stubble to burn, and too little snow had fallen over the winter to mat them down, leaving upright stalks that ignited like matchsticks. Fast grass fires usually just torch the tops of corn and grass stalks, but during the Heartstrong Fire these stalks burned like fuses into the ground. In some fields it would take years for soil moisture to return to normal levels.
With the wind behind them, flames stretched out horizontally to ignite grass and sagebrush. Yucca plants, which often resist fire, burned like candles. Gusts of wind bounced fiery tumbleweeds like flaming tires.
In the hour after it started, the Heartstrong Fire raced six miles up the plains.
“THIS FIRE’S PROBABLY 10 TIMES WORSE than I’ve ever seen,” Damon Struckmeyer thought as he approached it.
The three trucks driven by Struckmeyers—Damon and Darin in the fast-attack fire truck, Pam and Jen in the Suburban, and Del driving down from Sterling—tried to stay in touch, but there was so much radio traffic, they had trouble getting through to one another.
Pam and Jen were waiting in a makeshift staging area with some other trucks when Damon and Darin pulled in. Damon guessed that leadership on the fire was still coming together, so he didn’t contact incident command for instructions.
“Flames—let’s go after ’em,” Damon said. “There’s a need right here, so let’s just jump in and go.”
Pam climbed into the fire truck’s passenger seat. Darin and Jen strapped in on the platform between the cab and the water tank.
The wind was so hot and fast, it could have been coming from a hair dryer. Jen and Darin hunched behind the cab to shelter from it, and squeezed their eyes tight against the smoke and debris blowing into their faces.
Where the flames came up to the road, Damon angled the truck so Jen could spray them, but half the water just blew back onto her. When she couldn’t bear the heat, she would pound on the roof and shout for Damon to back off. “This is absolutely horrible,” she said.
Damon cut a barbed wire fence to chase the fire into a field. He was just a few hundred feet from a gate, but it was so submerged in smoke he couldn’t see it.
DEL STRUCKMEYER ARRIVED at the staging area in time to see the fast-attack truck turn into the field and vanish in the smoke. He cursed himself. On his drive down he’d helped a stalled water truck. If he hadn’t delayed, he would be riding with his wife. He did not like the idea of her heading into the fire without him.
DAMON DROVE ALMOST IMMEDIATELY onto a series of dunes hidden in the smoke. The sugar sand was so dry it was like trying to drive in freshly milled flour. When the wheels lost traction climbing, Damon backed up and tried another slope, hoping to get behind the flames. From the top of one hill, he’d plan how to get over the next, until suddenly it seemed like they had arrived at the center of creation. Fire whirls—tornadoes of flame—spun into the sky with the regularity of telephone poles.
“Those flames are taller than the power lines,” Damon thought. “It’s just a constant line of them. I didn’t realize that it was moving like this.”
The fire was about 200 feet away when Damon decided to retreat. He headed northwest toward the road they had come in on, with the fire closing in.
On his way up a hill, the truck spun out in the sand. As Damon backed down, he heard a whumpf. The truck sank up to its axles. Damon shifted between drive and reverse, but the truck sank deeper.
Despite the debris that blew in his eyes when he stepped from the cab, Damon could see the flames as bright as the sun rising behind him. Before he could close his door he felt the wind shift to the northwest. The fire turned toward him, as if it had just seen its prey. He shouted a warning to Darin and Jen, who were unsheltered on top of the truck and could hardly hear over the jet-engine roar of the fire.
Jen jumped from her perch, but her right boot got caught and came off. She landed on the sand with her foot protected only by a sock. The flames were 50 feet away and coming on fast.
“We’re all done,” she thought. “This is hot and this is fast, and there’s no way of getting out.”
She ran past the front of the truck, slamming the driver’s door shut as she went by.
“Maybe that will keep the fire from getting to Pam inside the cab,” she thought.
Running in the sand was hard, particularly with one boot.
“If I . . . just get to the fence, then I’ll be okay,” she thought “I can get at least into the ditch and get away from it.”
Then the blast from the fire hit her from behind. She crashed face-first into the ground.
“I’m going to die,” she thought.
WHEN DAMON HEARD THE DRIVER’S door slam, he guessed Jen had climbed into the cab. He ran to the compartment where he kept his fire coat and tried to pull it on, but the wind was blowing so hard, he couldn’t get his arms into the sleeves, so he dropped it and climbed onto the platform with his nephew. He grabbed a hose and set it to spray a wide fog and blasted as much water as he could into the air over their heads.
The flames were on top of the truck less than a minute after the sand had swallowed its tires.
Pam tried to get out of the cab to bring her sister-in-law inside it, but the wind pressed her door closed like rushing water. She saw Jen fall with her bootless foot in the air. Then the smoke blocked the view. She looked out the back window as her husband’s face vanished into a sphere of fire and smoke that ballooned above the truck, sucking the air from the cab.
“We’re going to be just spots in the sky,” she thought.
Without his coat, Damon could feel the flames burning his elbow, his shoulder, his face. Cinders blew into Darin’s eyes, all but blinding him.
The flames splashed over them in big waves, then rolled away.
“A bull ride . . . lasts about eight seconds,” Damon said. “This was longer.”
The heat reached Jen, facedown in the field, before the flames. She put her booted foot over the unprotected one, but her sock melted onto her skin. The flames chewed through the hip of her fire-resistant pants, then seared the skin they exposed. It burned her arm through the elbow of her jacket. The visor on her fire helmet turned to goo. The lenses of her glasses crinkled and yellowed. She could feel the skin on her face cooking.
“Lord, if you’re going to take me, take me now,” she prayed. “But if not, you’ve got to stop this fire. You’ve
got to stop the burning.”
Jen took a breath as the flames surrounded her. Superheated gas reached down her throat to take it back.
AS THE HEARTSTRONG FIRE MARCHED away from the Struckmeyers, it left behind a fog of smoke and soil blowing over the charred ground like a battlefield pummeled by artillery. Melted plastic dripped from the fire truck. The sand that had swallowed the vehicle’s tires, trapping the family in the fire, may also have helped them survive it. With the truck sunk up to its axles, the flames couldn’t get underneath it to ignite the engine or fuel tank.
Damon jumped from the platform and pulled open the driver’s door. “You girls okay in here?” he asked.
Pam said that Jen was out in front of the truck, but even with his wife’s guidance, Damon couldn’t find his sister-in-law until the wind lifted the veil of smoke long enough for him to see her lying facedown on the ground. She wasn’t moving. Damon and Darin ran to her and could see the holes burned through her fire pants and jacket. The foot exposed when she lost her boot was charred. Her hands had vanished.
But she wasn’t dead.
Damon hosed a mist over her to cool her. She had pulled her hands into the sleeves of her coat to protect them, but some of her fingers were burnt to the bone. They felt like balloons about to pop, and she begged her family to ease her pain. Pam poured a bottle of water down Jen’s sleeves to cool her hands, but the fabric was still as hot as a griddle, and steam hissed through the coat, poaching the skin on Jen’s arms.
Damon hooked her up to an oxygen tank, then used the backboard to shelter her from the blasting sand. Pam radioed for help while Darin turned on every light that worked on the truck to make them easier to find.
WHEN DEL STRUCKMEYER HEARD that the fire had burned over his family, he was just half a mile away from them. He started searching the fields, but his truck bogged down in the sand. Wages firefighters driving the department’s six-by-six picked Del up and continued the search. They found truck tracks near the fence but struggled to follow them in the wind-scoured sand. By then, from listening to Pam’s and Damon’s desperate calls on the radio, he’d figured out it was his wife who was most seriously burnt.
Half a dozen trucks from other departments joined them, but in the thick smoke it was like searching in the dark.
Some 40 minutes after Pam Struckmeyer’s call for help, a gust of wind punched a hole in the blackness, and a truck of Yuma firefighters caught a glimpse of green paint. They had been within 50 yards of the Struckmeyers for half an hour without seeing even the lights flashing on the truck.
Although ambulances were waiting just a mile away, heavy fire blocked the road, forcing the Yuma crew to drive 20 miles to get to them. It took the better part of an hour to get the Struckmeyers to the Yuma District Hospital, but they spent only a few minutes there before doctors sent them to the burn unit in Greeley, again by ambulance. It was a two-hour drive, but the winds were too strong for helicopters to fly.
By the time they arrived in the burn unit, the Heartstrong Fire was dying. The winds driving the blaze calmed at around 8:30 that night. Sand and soil held aloft for hours fell to earth in deep drifts, smothering the flames. Green crops in irrigated winter wheat fields wouldn’t burn when the flames came on them.
“We saved what we could,” Chief Smith said afterward. “But I really think Mother Nature put that fire out.”
And while the flames might be out, he said, they weren’t gone.
“We’re going to see this again.”
IN GREELEY NURSES RACED JEN to a shower and laid her on a table beneath yet another set of nozzles. “I’ve got these blisters the size of balloons on me,” she thought. “What are they going to do to me?”
When they started scrubbing, the first of the daily showers she would receive for months, she screamed. “If this is what I’m in for, take me back to the fire!”
Doctors found third-degree burns on her foot, fingers, and hip, and second-degree burns over 25 percent of her body. Her legs would require skin grafts, and her fingers would require surgery to repair the tendons. Most of the five toes on her right foot would be amputated.
After a few days the superheated smoke she’d inhaled took its toll on her lungs. She suddenly couldn’t breathe without a respirator. Her condition turned critical. Doctors stabilized her, but she would spend months in the hospital and a rehabilitation center. If she had been older or less fit, they told her, she probably wouldn’t have survived.
Despite the Struckmeyers’ suffering, less than a week after it ignited, the Heartstrong Fire seemed like little more than a fuse to the most explosive series of fires in Colorado history and the West’s new endless season of wildfires.
5
Red Buffalo, Black Dragon
A QUARTER CENTURY BEFORE THE HEARTSTRONG FIRE, I stopped my car on the shoulder of a gravel road in the middle of Kansas, in the middle of the night. From a distance the “red buffalo” glowed like a miniature sun rising behind the low hills. Occasionally a wave of smoke backlit by the ruddy glow splashed over a hummock like dust on a bison’s back in front of the setting sun.
When it came into closer view, it was shaped more like a massive snake than a buffalo, or perhaps magma seeping from a mile-long crack in the dark plains.
Natural fires often burn along prairie hilltops, where lightning strikes are more frequent and the grass dries out earlier in the season than in the moister draws below. Humans, however, usually set their fires lower, where the grass grows thick and matted, to improve the forage and enrich the soil.
Standing in the Flint Hills of Kansas, I was in the heart of the largest spread of the Great Plains to have never been plowed. Some 20 miles to my west, outside El Dorado, is the site where, in 1872, a grass fire overtook the Wheaton family, killing a young mother and her son.1 Her husband, trying to save them, endured burns so severe that his hand had to be amputated, while his daughter survived unscathed in the family’s oxcart. A few miles to the north was what 10 years after my visit would become the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve, as twenty-first-century residents saw the grassy plains less as a barren wasteland filled with peril and more as a glorious park. By then less than 4 percent of the original 170 million acres of prairie grasslands that spread from Indiana to Colorado between the Mexican and Canadian borders remained as they were before the western expansion of the United States.2
From where I parked, the “sea of grass,” growing from what was millennia ago a sea of water, rolled away in long, low waves into the darkness. The flames rose two to three feet high and lazily worked their way east. With a puff of breeze the grass rustled, and flames kicked into the air and shuffled a few feet farther across the plains, like a chorus line stepping forward on a stage. The fire was so unthreatening that a few cattle calmly munched grass nearby, slowly ambling away from the flames when they danced too close.
Native Americans stoked roiling grass fires to drive buffalo toward their waiting spears or over cliffs,3 but the bison often seemed as unfazed by small burns as the cattle I saw standing by the flames in Kansas.
At Wind Cave National Park, at the south end of the Black Hills of South Dakota, Carl Bock, now a professor emeritus at the University of Colorado, saw a group of buffalo caught by a fire. National Park Service employees had lit the fire not to herd the bison to slaughter, but to burn away some of the pines and improve the animals’ forage. They had seen, by comparing photographs taken during one of Lieutenant Colonel George Custer’s expeditions through the region with modern photos taken from the same vantage points, that ponderosa pines were overtaking the mixed-grass prairie of big bluestem, little bluestem, and side oats grama. Bock recalled that the Park Service had lit that fire on the day John Hinckley Jr. shot President Ronald Reagan in Washington, D.C.
“The bison seemed to be drawn from the park to the burn,” he told me. “As soon as it passed, they would begin to lick the ash. Just by chance a group of bison were trapped on a knoll with fire coming at them from 360 degrees.”
The buffalo were “really relaxed,” waiting until one cow saw a safe route and charged through the fire as though she was running across a river. The rest followed her, single file, and on the other side of the ribbon of flame stopped and lowered their heads to lick the just-burnt ground while it was still hot. Bock wondered whether the thick hair that bison carry on their heads, shoulders, and chests, which they do not shed, is an adaptation for confronting fire on the plains. Only one of the bison that Bock saw run through the fire was burned—a young bull that broke its neck rear-ending the animal it was following. Its backside was burned to the bone, but its front had only singed hair.
At the end of the last ice age, much of the Midwest was covered by forests. Between 8,000 and 9,000 years ago, the warming that pushed back the ice also turned forests, which are less tolerant of heat and drought than grasses, into prairies.
As opposed to the prairies farther west, where the rain shadow of the Rocky Mountains keeps the shortgrass prairies just ankle high, in the tallgrass prairies of eastern Kansas big bluestem can grow 10 feet tall and sink its roots 12 feet into the earth. Little bluestem, switchgrass, and Indian grass don’t grow quite so high, but are just as nutritious for grazers. As rich as the grasses are, three-quarters of the life on the prairie is underground, sheltered from fire. No other U.S. ecosystem sucks as much carbon from the atmosphere as the “lungs of the nation,” the prairie grasslands. And only Brazil’s rain forests, the “lungs of the earth,” are a more complex or diverse biome. Among the tallgrasses are more than 300 species of flowers and forbs—evening primrose and wine-cup, blazing star and ground plum.4
Foxes, bobcats, weasels, minks, pronghorns, and even badgers scraped out a living in the Flint Hills. For bison, the tallgrass prairie was about the best meal they could hope for. They achieved their greatest densities crowding into it to munch on new grass growing from recently burnt land in the spring and summer.5 By autumn some stalks were so tall, the herds seemed to swim through them. Though the bison once numbered more than 28 million, the last wild bison in central Kansas had been gone for a century when I stopped to stare at the flaming grass. The 13 bison the National Park Service reintroduced to the tallgrass prairie decades after my visit would never have the impact on the ecosystem that the great herds did. After the 1880s, the demise of the bison allowed grasses, and the fires they fed, to flourish on the plains.
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