McKee and Percin, like many in Prescott, had cleaned up their lives in the desert oasis and were known for their work on behalf of antidrug programs. McKee spoke at D.A.R.E. presentations throughout the county,18 while Percin remained close with the staff of Chapter 5, a local addiction treatment facility that would later found a scholarship in his name.19
BRIAN MISFELDT RAN INTO ROBERT in fire camp at the Doce Fire in June 2013 and saw how far the gangly teen had come.
“I’m totally in love,” he told Misfeldt. “It’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me . . . Let me show you my little boy.”
Robert was leading a crew of hotshots but still had the same goofy grin, now framed by a mustache that offset his balding head.
“Hey, you got any words of advice for me?” a teenager Misfeldt was training asked Robert.
“Yeah,” he responded, nodding toward his mentor. “You just got to be really understanding and patient with these guys.”
The firefighters laughed into the smoky night.
28
The Doce
Prescott, Arizona—June 18, 2013
THE DOCE FIRE IGNITED on June 18, 2013, just 12 days before the tragedy on Yarnell Hill.1 It started in an area popular with target shooters, near where Eric Marsh had traced Granite Mountain for his crew’s logo. By the end of the day, it had burned over the peak the hotshots had been named for.
“It was like a kick to the stomach,” Brendan McDonough said. “Like getting rid of a mascot for a famous sports team. That was our name. That was who we were. That’s how we were remembered. That was our mountain that we hiked. That was us . . . It didn’t feel good to see it burn.”
But there was more at stake than their namesake. Beyond the mountain, Donut said, “million-dollar homes . . . are about to get nuked.”
The nation’s only two very large air tankers (VLATs) painted nearly 12,000 gallons of retardant with each drop onto the flanks of the fire, helping crews hold the blaze back from the houses.2 The Granite Mountain Hotshots weren’t there and had a far less dramatic rescue mission. They focused on keeping the blaze from spreading beyond their mountain. While that meant most of it burned, they took consolation in saving a single tree. The second-largest alligator juniper in the country resides on Granite Mountain. They dug a line and burned out around the eight-foot-wide trunk. When they returned to find it had survived the fire, they took celebratory photos of themselves stacked in human pyramids and hanging from its branches.3
The photos showed a tight crew. There was the squad boss and sawyer Travis Carter—quiet, willing to take on any task, and nicknamed “Honey Badger” for his relentlessness digging and sawing.4 Anthony Rose had come to the crew from the Crown King Fire Department,5 and Joe Thurston from the Groom Creek wildland crew.6 In Prescott both worked as swampers—clearing away timber felled with chainsaws—and often commuted to work together. Travis Turbyfill was Paul Bunyan strong, but brought a copy of Goodnight Moon with him to fires so he could read it to his daughters over the phone from the fire camp.7 In 2012 he won the crew’s “Big 7,” awarded to the member who had the biggest heart.
“Turby” and the crew’s captain, Jesse Steed, were thrilled to have Billy Warneke, another marine, join the crew at the beginning of the 2013 season. He was expecting his first child in December.8 They were equally excited that they’d have another father working with them. Sean Misner was also in his first season with the crew and was expecting his first child in September. His great-grandfather, grandfather, two uncles, and a cousin were all firefighters in California.9 Dustin Deford was one of five firefighting brothers from a Montana family with 10 children.10
Kevin Woyjeck, the son of a captain in the Los Angeles County Fire Department, and the nephew of two other firefighters, grew up knowing he was going to be a firefighter, too. He was a Los Angeles County Fire Department Explorer and an EMT with an ambulance company after high school. He broke up his training with country line dancing on the weekends.11
Garret Zuppiger’s full, red beard fit with his natural affinity for fighting fires and working in the woods, and made other crew members happy that Marsh had eased up on his restrictions on facial hair.12 Scott Norris worked the off-season at a gun store, wrote witty and poetic emails describing his travels around the world, and loved studying weather.13
Chris MacKenzie had helicopter certification and calculated all the crew’s loads for their chopper rides.14 “He had this ridiculous, big, dumb calculator wristwatch straight out of the 1980s that he always wore,” former Granite Mountain crew member Doug Harwood recalled in a tribute. “We loved to tease him about that watch. He, of course, thought it rocked.”15
MacKenzie was sincerely interested in friends and strangers. “Chris had a knack for always making every conversation all about you,” Pat McCarty wrote.16
Clayton Whitted saw his job as squad boss not unlike his career as a youth minister. He was a man of God first, a hotshot second.17 “He could connect with anyone,” McCarty wrote of him. “His desire to make people happy or smile extended to everyone on the crew. Whether it was letting us drown him, shave his head, or eating something gross—he’d do it for the other guys. His Bible was covered in the names of everyone he prayed for—that included every crew member he ever worked with.”18
Eric Marsh, the leader of the hotshots, was just getting back in the action. He had been injured in a mountain biking accident and had been on “light duty” for the first couple months of the season. He was assigned as a division supervisor at the Doce, so he still wasn’t really back with his crew.
MARSH KNEW THE CREW as a whole was a bit hobbled as well.
Most of the Wildland Division’s funding came from grants and in reimbursements from the U.S. government for the Granite Mountain Hotshots’ work outside the Prescott department’s jurisdiction. When the hotshots worked on federal or state land, the city was paid $39.50 an hour per firefighter. Such an assignment could bring up to $200,000 into the city’s coffers. With the crew responding to more than 150 out-of-town incidents in the previous five years, that money had added up. The city had planned on the crew being reimbursed up to $1.5 million during each of the three previous years. In 2011 the hotshots’ operating costs had required only $6,975 from the general fund. The following year they had run a deficit of $68,340, but payments for fighting fires for the feds still covered more than 95 percent of the crew’s costs.19
In 2013 increasing wildfire activity around the nation was bringing in more federal and state money, moving the crew from the red toward the black. That year the city expected the hotshots to bring in $1.3 million, but their actual reimbursements were headed toward $1.6 million. The city had a nearly $240,000 surplus over its investment in the crew, not counting its costs for benefits, capital expenses such as trucks, or the matching funds it paid for grants to thin hazardous vegetation around the city.20
Part of that surplus, however, was from cost cutting by the city. In 2012 Prescott had eliminated two of the full-time positions on the crew. Those cuts, Marsh knew, presented the Granite Mountain Hotshots with an existential crisis. Among the standards for Interagency Hotshot crews was one requiring that at least seven of the firefighters be in “permanent/career” positions. After the staffing cuts, the crew had difficulty meeting that requirement.
On a checklist provided to the Southwest Coordination Center in Albuquerque that spring, the Prescott Fire Department indicated that it did have the seven required permanent firefighters on the hotshot crew, listing Christopher MacKenzie as filling the last spot.21 MacKenzie’s personnel file back in Prescott, however, indicated that he was a “temporary and seasonal” employee. And while some seasonal employees could count toward permanent/career, such employees generally qualified for most of the benefits afforded full-time firefighters. MacKenzie, however, had signed a “temporary employment acknowledgment” making him ineligible for many benefits, including health insurance with the city, as well as paid sick leave, holidays, and vaca
tions.22 Earlier in 2013 the fire department, with city approval, had reclassified MacKenzie and Andrew Ashcraft as “full-time temporary employees,” which kept the crew in compliance with the federal rules. Around the same time, Ashcraft was promoted to “lead saw,” a position that had always qualified for full-time benefits but, due to city budget cuts that had frozen positions on the crew, wasn’t supposed to this time.23 In all, 14 members of the crew were temporary seasonal employees who made between $12 and $15 an hour and had none of the benefits afforded full-time employees. The hotshots were sometimes short of the required number of “senior” firefighters qualified to fill command positions, but MacKenzie’s records showed that just five days before he and the rest of the crew headed to the Yarnell Hill Fire, he had completed the training and been recommended for certification as a Type 1 firefighter and Type 5 incident commander, which would have qualified him for that status.24
It’s not uncommon for a hotshot crew to fail to meet all of the staffing and training requirements, and they are occasionally knocked down from Type 1 to Type 2 status while they deal with them. But to Marsh, these were no small shortcomings. In his own job review that May, he noted, “It is challenging to run a nationally recognized program with minimum standards and requirements that I am unable to meet . . . I believe things are starting to change; however, I still have some big questions that need answering about staffing.”25
Wildland chief Darrell Willis responded to Marsh’s concerns about staffing and certifications: “We have all spent a lot of time and energy trying to fill the positions. It’s now time to let the system work, realize that we have done our best, and make the best of the situation.”26
There were other challenges in keeping key positions filled, Willis noted, citing a “major disruption in staffing . . . just a few days prior to the season[al] firefighters starting.”
Two years earlier, tensions between Marsh and his captain had led the captain to resign. The year before that, the crew had had an “extraordinary situation with one of our supervisors that ended up with a resignation,” Marsh noted in his year-end evaluation.27
The federal certification checklist showing that Granite Mountain had the appropriate number of permanent employees and senior firefighters required a signature from the crew’s superintendent. In 2013, however, Marsh didn’t sign it. Jesse Steed, who had stepped into the superintendent role while Marsh was on light duty, signed it instead.
By the middle of June, Marsh was back on the roster and eager to work a fire. While he and his crew were on the Doce Fire, the National Interagency Fire Center sent a special advisory regarding fires in Arizona and New Mexico. Years of drought had resulted in fuels that could blow up quickly and burn through the night. “Firefighters should acknowledge that fire growth and fire behavior they encounter this year may exceed anything they have experienced before,” the advisory warned.
AFTER THEIR TIME ON THE DOCE FIRE, the Granite Mountain crew was just a few days away from mandatory time off, but until then, they were on call. Wade Parker had tickets to see his favorite Christian rock band, Casting Crowns, in Prescott Valley, but texted his fiancée, Alicia Owens, that he couldn’t go. “We’ve got to stay in this dumb-ass station,” he wrote. “We can’t go eat or do anything because there’s lightning in the area.”
He cheered up when Andrew Ashcraft’s wife, Juliann, brought cookies by the station, which she often did when the hotshots were there. It had been Parker’s turn to pick the flavor. He’d asked for chocolate chip–bacon.
Late in the afternoon of June 28 the Prescott National Forest called in the crew for help with a fire on Spruce Mountain, just up the road. “Hey, babe,” Parker texted to Owens. “We popped a little fire out by the last one. Sorry I wasn’t able to let you know. I love you.”
29
Where the Desert Breeze Meets the Mountain Air
THE LIGHTNING PARKER COMPLAINED OF marked the annual monsoon’s arrival in Arizona. Each summer moist air from the Gulf of Mexico pushes in from the south, displacing the dry winds that come from the west in the spring. Thunderstorms form from the wet air and desert heat. The early ones bring lightning and wind, but rarely rain.
On Friday, June 28, the first of the monsoon storms formed on the Mogollon Rim, the rugged escarpment that runs diagonally across central Arizona to southwestern New Mexico to form the southern edge of the Colorado Plateau. From the rim, the storm moved west, passing over Prescott and peppering the mountains with dry lightning. At least seven of those strikes started fires, bringing the total number of wildfires in the state to 37.1
At 5:36 that evening lightning struck the top of what would become known as Yarnell Hill, a peak in the 6,000-foot-high Weaver Mountains southwest of Prescott. The rocky slopes’ chaparral—manzanita, scrub oak, catclaw, and juniper—hadn’t burned in nearly 50 years and had grown impenetrably dense. Extreme drought and 105-degree temperatures primed the thick, boulder-strewn scrub to burn. Citizens in the town below, which had received barely two inches of rain so far that year, had been warned that they faced extreme wildfire danger for more than a month.2
BARBARA KELSO, 94, had spent seven years on the Yarnell Fire District Board, but had retired six months earlier. She was out for dinner with family in Peeples Valley, north of Yarnell, when she saw lightning strike the mountain and smoke start to rise.3 She immediately called 911.
Lois Farrell was sitting on her porch looking out on the Weaver range when she saw the lightning strike. Her husband, Truman, a 73-year-old U.S. Air Force veteran, had been the chief of Yarnell’s volunteer fire department until two years earlier. She pointed out the smoke to him, but neither of them were worried by it.
Four minutes after the lightning strike, the Congress Fire District’s volunteer fire department just west of the Weaver Mountains reported the fire to the Arizona Interagency Dispatch Center. A plane from the Doce Fire, still smoking near Prescott, detoured over Yarnell Hill and reported that the fire there was less than an acre in size, smoldering in a boulder field.4
A spot weather forecast that night predicted temperatures up to 104 degrees on Saturday, with low humidity and light westerly winds. If thunderstorms developed, they would likely bring wind but not rain.5
Yarnell, a former gold-mining town, barely hangs on to U.S. 89, which climbs through the center of town and then plunges into the Sonoran Desert nearly 2,000 feet below. When the fire started, residents could see the wispy smoke from the sleepy main drag, which contained a few antiques and collectible shops, a library, a senior center, a soon-to-close grocery store, and the Ranch House Restaurant. Northwest of the quiet town center, however, hundreds of homes hid on the dead-end roads weaving through dense chaparral and boulders.
“Where the Desert Breeze Meets the Mountain Air” is the town’s motto, but some locals proudly describe Yarnell as “Gays, Grays, and Strays.” Nearly 40 percent of the population is 65 or older, and the community was once popular with same-sex couples.
One resident I spoke with used different Gs to characterize the town. “It’s all God and guns around here,” he told me of a population that “just wants to be left alone.”
In 2012 more than 100 people participated in the town’s progressive Christmas dinner, and residents routinely banded together to provide meals to sick neighbors or help financially strapped residents pay their utility bills. The town’s biggest attraction, the Shrine of St. Joseph of the Mountains—featuring stations of the cross set along a path climbing through a maze of granite knobs—was beloved by Yarnell’s citizens, regardless of their religious persuasion.6
But the community of about 640 permanent residents and 100 summer homeowners was less cooperative in their preparations for wildfires.
Jim Flippen and his friend Don Mason also saw the lightning strike on Yarnell Hill on June 28, 2013, and the smoke that rose from it. Flippen had lived through the Oakland Hills firestorm in California in 1991, which had killed 25 people in a neighborhood thick with invasive grasses and imp
orted eucalyptus. “It destroyed some of the nicest homes in San Francisco,” he recalled.
When he moved to Yarnell, he kept a 25-foot perimeter cleared of vegetation around his house and had a metal roof. But some of his neighbors did nothing to prepare their properties for wildfires. “Our place would not have burned if our neighbor had done anything,” he told me after he lost his home and Mason lost two houses and his blacksmith’s shop in the Yarnell Hill Fire.
More than two-thirds of the land that burned in the fire was privately owned, and almost all of the rest was state property. Using satellite imagery, the Pacific Biodiversity Institute, in Winthrop, Washington, estimated that 89 percent of the homes in Yarnell had direct contact with the vegetation surrounding them. Only 63 percent of the buildings had any defensible space at all.7
Firefighters in central Arizona had warned about the potential for a disastrous blaze there since the 1970s. One former chief of the Yarnell Fire District had urged citizens to clean up their properties, but few had heeded the warnings. Instead, state and federal grants paid for prison crews to thin what they could. The year before the lightning strike, when the BLM offered to clear brush and trees around homes in Yarnell, only four people took advantage of the offer, and the Yarnell fire chief left a $15,000 grant for brush clearing unspent because, he said, he couldn’t get enough volunteers to do the work.8
30
The Perfect Firestorm
RUSS SHUMATE, A FIRE MANAGER with the Arizona State Forestry Division, came on Friday night as the incident commander for the Yarnell Hill Fire, but chose to take no action on it until Saturday. “Not much of a threat,” he told the state dispatch center. Volunteer firefighters from Peeples Valley, northeast of the fire, knew a trail that led to the fire and asked for the go-ahead to hike up and deal with it. But they would be working at night, in rugged terrain and heavy, volatile fuels. Shumate told them to stay off it.1
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