Marsh was quiet about his pride in his crew, declining even to have them march in Prescott’s parades.6 But it showed on his truck, which would soon have custom Granite Mountain taillights. Five years after he scraped the trainee sticker off of it, most of the cars and trucks in Prescott would be decorated with the logo Marsh had designed. The circumstances, however, would be anything but celebratory.
IN THE MID-1990S CONRAD JACKSON was on the Prescott Hotshots, a Forest Service crew based outside the city. He studied science and education in college and was a substitute teacher in the off-season. When Prescott High School offered him a full-time job, his work obligations flipped. He taught chemistry during the school year, then worked on wildland fire engines in the summer. In 2000 he took a retired fire truck and used it to teach a firefighting class he created at the high school—another nod to the city’s outsized wildfire hazard.
Shortly before 3 p.m. on May 15, 2002, Jackson was preparing for that evening’s firefighting class when some of his students ran in to tell him about a forest fire that was pushing hard toward the city. They gathered on the high school’s patio to watch a constant stream of air tankers swooping at the Indian Fire four miles to the south. Class was canceled when Jackson was called to join the fight. By the end of the day, five homes had burned. Incident commanders, however, had feared that the blaze could destroy 2,000. The preparations for a wildfire in the city had paid off.
“We had a written plan, and we drilled on it for 12 years,” Darrell Willis told the Prescott Daily Courier.7
A “brush crush” organized by the Prescott Area Wildland Urban Interface Commission two years earlier had left 300 acres between Cathedral Pines and Quartz Mountain thinned enough that the crown fire dropped to the ground, providing hand crews a place to make a stand. The Prescott Fire Center, with aircraft and retardant, was just five minutes from the blaze, and the Prescott Hotshots based there happened to be home. With the fire season just starting, there was little competition for resources. Four heavy air tankers and four hotshot crews were on the blaze within an hour of it igniting.8
Still, the losses would likely have been even lower had the community been more cooperative. A prescribed burn just south of Cathedral Pines three years earlier had been shut down due to complaints about smoke from residents. Firefighters managed to burn only 30 of the 120 acres they planned to treat.9
From some members of the public, there was open hostility toward firefighters who set blazes or cut down trees to reduce hazardous fuels. “When we had the prescribed burns, we actually saw letters to the editor saying we should go out and kill Forest Service employees,” Jackson told me.
Firewise preparations saved some homes in the Indian Fire, but one burned after the woodpile beneath its deck ignited. Luck was a big part of the firefighters’ success. The blaze started late in the day, so the winds died down and the weather cooled just as it was building momentum. Dozens of slurry drops from planes allowed firefighters to cut lines that corralled the blaze by midnight.
A HANDFUL OF STUDENTS FROM JACKSON’S FIREFIGHTING class joined Eric Marsh’s fire crew.
Pat McCarty planned to be a pilot, but he joined the Granite Mountain Hotshots, then took a job on the structure firefighting side of the Prescott Fire Department. His younger brother, Daniel, who was known as “Booner” on the crew, followed in his footsteps.
After graduating from high school, Travis Turbyfill joined the U.S. Marine Corps, where he was a machine gunner and marksman. When he came home, he joined the hotshots. Ten years after taking the high school firefighting class, he was a squad boss with the crew, now married with two blond daughters.10 Andrew Ashcraft, another graduate of Jackson’s class, had the names of his four kids tattooed on his chest. A Mormon, he had a wristband reminding him to “be better,” but he was the same wisecracking spark plug he’d been in high school.11
When the city decided to require teachers to work year-round, Jackson had to choose between his job at the high school and his summers fighting fires. He took a full-time position with the Prescott Fire Department but kept teaching his fire science class. A few years later enrollment in the class dwindled, and Jackson gave the high school’s fire truck to Yavapai College for its firefighting class. But he continued teaching firefighting to Boy Scout Explorers, and one of his students there, Brendan McDonough, would also end up on the Granite Mountain Hotshots.
Jackson wore a U.S. Forest Service belt buckle, sometimes with a golf shirt from the Prescott Fire Department—a reflection of his devotion to both wildland and structure firefighting. He kept his hair cropped close and his body honed with CrossFit classes, where he often ran into some of the hotshots.
The last time he saw any of them other than McDonough, he had popped into Station 7. The crew’s plain, gray base camp had a workshop, gym, and tile floor spelling GMIHC, for Granite Mountain Interagency Hotshot Crew, inside. Marsh had laid the tile himself, and any rookie who stepped on one of the letters had to do push-ups as penance. Jackson had dropped in to see who on the crew needed their picture taken. It was a point of pride to have the crewmembers’ photos hung alongside those of the structure firefighters in the department’s offices.
Cumulus clouds were building in the sky, and the hotshots, knowing his love of weather, ribbed him.
“Hey, Jackson,” one shouted to him. “Is it going to rain today?”
He knew they weren’t asking for a weather report, but he never passed up a chance to teach.
“Well, what’s the dew point?” he responded.
“The [relative humidity] is . . .” the firefighter started to respond.
“I don’t give a fuck what the RH is,” Jackson interrupted. “What’s the dew point?”
The hotshots admitted they didn’t know.
“So they got this little micro-lesson because they made the mistake of asking me ‘Why do you give a fuck about the dew point?’ ” he told me. “That was my last interaction with the entire crew.”
TO THE REST OF THE CREW, Brendan McDonough was “Donut”—a shortened version of his last name. After taking Jackson’s fire science class, he’d had a few wild years with plenty of drinking and doping. He spent a couple of nights in jail in December 2010 for his involvement in the theft of a radar detector and GPS from a car,12 and three months later his girlfriend gave birth to a daughter. The next month he showed up at Station 7 to ask about a job. He’d always wanted to be a firefighter and had heard Granite Mountain was hiring. Some of the firefighters on duty who knew his reputation told him there weren’t any openings, but Eric Marsh overheard the conversation and caught Donut before he left.
“Can you do an interview?” he asked. “. . . Right now?”
Donut was wearing a dirty white tank top and grungy work pants, but he sat down with the super. Marsh asked a question he posed in every interview. “When was the last time you told a lie?”
Donut told him about smoking pot and his record and his daughter. He had all the appropriate training and certifications, but he had never fought a wildfire. Marsh hired him.
From that moment forward, Donut revered Marsh as the man who gave him a second chance and drove him hard to make good on it, not just as a firefighter, but as a father and a member of the Granite Mountain family.
CLAIRE CALDWELL FIRST SAW HER HUSBAND, Robert, on Prescott’s Whiskey Row. It was ’80s night in a dive called Coyote Joes.
“They had . . . full-on neon short-shorts and sweatbands,” Claire recalled of the two hotshots spinning on each other’s shoulders on the dance floor. “They would run into the girls and not even care.”
Some of her friends were put off, but Claire, a single mom with a love of the outdoors, laughed at the horseplay.
A few weeks later, back on Whiskey Row, a friend introduced her to Robert. She told him about backpacking 100 miles around the Grand Canyon. He told her about being a hotshot.
“He had been places where no man had ever walked,” she told me. “I thought it was the mos
t attractive thing in the world.”
Robert took Claire’s hand to find a quiet corner where they could keep talking. They went home together and exchanged phone numbers. When they arranged another date at Coyote Joes, Claire went with her girlfriends and Robert came with some hotshots, but they left together after about half an hour. From that point on, when Robert was in Prescott, he and Claire were inseparable.
He warned her that his job might keep her from seeing him, or even speaking with him, for weeks. “I don’t choose your career, your path, your destiny,” she told him. “But I’m in love with you, so I accept you 100 percent for who you are and what you do. I will be your girl.”
A few weeks later, at midnight, Granite Mountain got its first out-of-town fire assignment of the season. “He put his boots on, and it was literally fire mind all of a sudden,” she said. “Boom, he was gone.”
They got engaged two months after they met.
ALWAYS COMFORTABLE LIVING ROUGH, Robert seemed to grow happier with each day he slept in the dirt and went without a bath. During spring break of his senior year in high school, he went to the Arizona Wildfire Academy that Eric Marsh had founded.
“He realized it was exactly the kind of thing he wanted to do,” his friend Tom Holst told me. “The academy was all he could talk about.”
Traveling to exotic and rugged landscapes, camping, working hard high in the mountains and deep in the woods—Robert had found his life’s calling. After finishing his training, Robert kept his bag packed at the foot of his bed, waiting for the chance to fight a fire.
Robert’s father, Dave, called Brian Misfeldt, who had a small company that worked on wildfires. Brian said that he would hire Robert if the teenager could walk three miles in 45 minutes wearing a 45-pound pack—the infamous pack test required of every wildland firefighter. When Brian saw the whippet-thin teenager get out of his truck at the Prescott High School track, he thought some firefighting friends were playing a joke on him.
“Here comes Waldo,” he thought. “This isn’t going to be good. He’s got these skinny arms and skinny legs and . . . a big old grin on his face.”
Brian hung a vest with weights on Robert. “Can you hold this up?” he asked.
Brian’s wife, Renee, a Forest Service firefighter, makes sure he keeps precise records. He wrote down the time as Robert took off walking fast.
“You might want to slow down,” he yelled to Robert. “You’ve got 12 laps to go.”
“At the 12th lap he still had that big old grin on his face and one of the best times I’ve ever seen,” Brian recalled.
Brian and Renee’s house was like a fire camp, filled with fire packs and Pulaskis. It was soon a second home for Robert.
When Brian had started his business, he’d flown to the East Coast and bought an old, decrepit fire truck. Robert went to work on it as soon as Brian hired him.
“He was a fantastic mechanic,” Brian said. “The kid could do anything with electronics. We always had problems, and he loved to fix them.”
Brian and Renee each had reasons to prioritize safety with their workers. Renee had lost a good friend in the 1994 disaster on Storm King Mountain. That same year a fire had trapped Brian and two other firefighters in a steep bowl of chaparral and cheatgrass in the Mackenzie Fire, about 40 miles southwest of Kingman, Arizona.13 “I turned and it was a wall of fire,” Brian recalled, “from one end of the bowl to the other.”
They crawled under their fire shelters in a boulder-strewn gully. “There was so much noise from the fire it was unbelievable. It was just a tremendous rumbling,” he said. “And then it hit. It was on our back. I remember the pain getting really bad.”
Brian managed to stay beneath his shelter, despite the burning and fear that made him want to run. “I had the boulder right there, so I was beating my head against it . . . trying to knock myself out. My lungs started burning. I didn’t want to breathe anymore.”
Brian’s shelter delaminated. He could feel his pants burning off his legs. The flames consumed so much oxygen that he couldn’t get a breath. His friends took a photo of him when he finally climbed out from under the shelter. “Because of the carbon in my lungs, my whole body had swelled up . . .” he said. “My eyes were slicked closed, my face was bubble round.”
Brian worked with a veteran of the deadly Dude Fire who had drilled into him that, as painful as the flames might be, the only chance of surviving a burnover was to stay under the fire shelter.
“And I forced that into Robert’s head,” he said. “Stay there. Do not leave. Do not run no matter how bad it gets.”
Brian was sad to see Robert move on, but proud to see him become a hotshot and happy to run into him at fires.
ZION, CLAIRE’S SON, took to his firefighting stepfather. While most of the hotshots did CrossFit on top of their punishing training hikes and runs, Claire told me that Robert and Jesse Steed, the captain of the crew, did “kidfit”—bench-pressing their children or doing pull-ups with them hanging on their backs.
The hotshots increasingly brought their wives, children, and girlfriends to barbecues and parties. Claire hit it off with Amanda Marsh, Eric’s wife, because they had both gone to Prescott College. “We should start the Granite Mountain Girls,” Amanda told her. “We’ll be there for each other.”
When the crew was returning from a long time away, Claire and some of the other GMGs would shop for food and lingerie together to make sure their men got a warm homecoming. Sometimes they would gripe about the crew’s erratic schedule and how hard it was to have them away for so long. “Welcome to a lifetime of missing Robert,” Claire wrote in her journal.
WHEN THE HOTSHOTS TRAVELED, they saw some wildfires fueled by overgrown or unhealthy forests, others exacerbated by climate-driven drought, and still others complicated by development. Sometimes political and economic factors added fuel to the fires.
But when they came back to Prescott, they seemed to land at the center of a bull’s-eye, where all those factors came into play. Arizona was warming and drying faster than any state in the contiguous United States.14 Most of the local woodlands were desperately overgrown.15
When Robert came home from faraway assignments, he would show off photos of sunsets and mountain vistas, but after nearby fires he would talk about overgrown forests and explosive fire behavior. Claire was also most troubled by the local fires, which she could sometimes smell or see.
He warned his wife about fires in chaparral. “They’re the scariest because they burn so hot and so fast and there’s so much of it, it’s hard to clear,” he told her.
The manzanita and catclaw were all but impenetrable and tore at firefighters’ clothes and skin. Central Arizona’s ponderosa pine forests, exponentially denser than they would have been naturally, were prone to explosive crown fires. A pair of photos hung on the wall of the hotshots’ station. The first, from early in the twentieth century, showed a parklike forest outside Prescott, with trees dozens or hundreds of feet apart. A photo of the same site from a century later, after the forest had been seeded to help grow Arizona’s timber industry and every fire there had been extinguished, showed an almost impenetrable wall of trees.
When Robert would drive with Claire on excursions, he would point to the hazards. “That’s going to burn,” he would say, nodding to the thick chaparral. “And that’s going to burn,” he would add, pointing to the pine forest beside it.
The surge of vegetation was matched only by the speed at which houses were springing up in it. And the people building those houses were often resistant to anyone telling them how to build, what trees to cut down, or that they should invest in their protection from wildfires.
“The hotshots had a sense of pride—they were the protectors of this area,” Claire said. “A lot of people would look at them and be upset they were chopping down the trees. People in the city would say they were living off taxpayers’ dollars. We would get stuff like that a lot.”
In 2013 Robert was promoted to squad boss
. “When he found out, he called me, he called my dad—he called like 15 people within the course of an hour,” Tom Holst recalled.
Robert had found a job that was everything he’d ever dreamed of doing with his life, allowing him to spend as much time as he could in the woods, train like an elite athlete, travel to places few humans ever saw, and develop a skill set that was part lumberjack, part scientist, part soldier. Most hotshots see the job as a stepping-stone to something else—college, off-season adventures, a job with a city firefighting department. But Robert never wanted to be anything but a hotshot.
“Don’t ever ask me to quit,” he told Claire when they first met, and she promised she never would.
But when he and Claire started talking about having a baby, he said he’d start looking into getting a job with the fire department that would keep him in Prescott.
In the meantime, both Robert and Claire helped grow the hotshot crew.
When Claire met Robert, she was working at a Mexican restaurant down the street from Whiskey Row. A week later Grant McKee, Robert’s cousin, started working at the restaurant, too. He had grown up in California, but he had often visited Prescott, where his grandparents owned a clothing store. He moved there when he was in 10th grade and lived with Robert and his parents. The wiry, confident teenager played football, boxed, wrestled, and ran a marathon. Robert encouraged him to join the hotshots. Grant applied in 2013 and got a spot when another crew member bailed out. He didn’t plan on fighting fires for long. He’d completed his EMT training and was looking forward to a career in emergency medical care.16
Later, the restaurant hired a handsome young dishwasher named John Percin, who had moved to Prescott from the suburbs of Portland, Oregon. “You should work with my husband,” Claire told him.
Percin saved up his money from the restaurant to attend the Arizona Wildfire Academy. Known as “Coach” to many of the other hotshots, Percin was devoted to his English Lab, Champ.17
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