He instead requested two crews of inmates from the Lewis and Yuma state prisons, a wildland fire engine, and a light helicopter to attack the blaze on Saturday morning.2 Some firefighters and residents would lament the delay in attacking the fire, which might have been easily snuffed on Friday, when it was small and the weather conditions weren’t yet driving its growth.
By sunrise Saturday the fire was between one and eight acres in size and was the only lightning ignition from the previous day that was still burning. More than 40 firefighters from the prisons—inmates, crew bosses, and corrections officers—arrived early that morning, but incident command couldn’t find a way for them to get to the blaze. It was around 11 a.m. when six members of the Lewis state prison crew, along with one BLM helitack crewman, choppered in and began putting out hot spots along a two-track jeep road on the eastern edge of the blaze.3 The rest had to watch from Yarnell when the helicopter pilot determined that the landing was too dangerous to fly anyone else in.
Two single engine air tankers (SEATs) made several slurry drops around the fire. By early afternoon firefighters on the ground and in the air had contained it at six acres. It looked like the small crew had it beat, but steadily rising winds and heat awakened the sleepy blaze. Around 4:30 it got into an island of unburnt chaparral and slopped over the two-track road that was holding it. It was outrunning the firefighters trying to corral it and burned over their Gatorade, food, and other supplies. Incident command called for a large helicopter and a heavy air tanker to slow its eastward spread, but high winds kept the aircraft grounded.
The blaze followed the ridgeline northward, growing to 100 acres by 7:38 p.m.4 During the night it spread to within a mile of the south end of Peeples Valley and 1.5 miles northwest of Yarnell.5 The fire that nobody had thought much of the evening before was suddenly serious business.
That night incident command ordered fourteen Type 6 wildland fire engines, six water tenders, two bulldozers, three heavy air tankers, four more SEATs, six helicopters, and several crews of firefighters. The incident commander asked for a “short” Type 2 Incident Management Team, including structure protection specialists to determine which homes they could defend in Yarnell and Peeples Valley, then notified the sheriff’s office to prepare for evacuations.6
But orders the team had made for resources earlier in the day were already going unfilled. Dispatch declined to send a heavy air tanker and helicopter from Prescott on Saturday afternoon, June 29, due to severe weather. One plane was grounded by an oil leak. Another sat on the tarmac in Wickenburg, just down the road from Yarnell, while dispatchers debated which fire needed it most. A VLAT was available in Albuquerque and would be unaffected by the weather, but incident command in Yarnell declined it, believing the steep terrain and coming darkness would keep it from delivering retardant effectively.
Just after 6 p.m. Russ Shumate contacted Charlie Havel at the Arizona Interagency Dispatch Center in hopes of getting two hotshot crews to Yarnell at 6 a.m. the following morning. Havel told Shumate that the fire was “sitting low” on the priority list, but he would do what he could.
At 6:21 Havel asked the Southwest Coordination Center, the Albuquerque branch of the National Incident Management System, to send two Type 1 crews to Yarnell. Four minutes later the SWCC replied that they could send only one crew, the Arizona-based Blue Ridge Hotshots. “That will be the only [hotshot crew] I have for tomorrow, though,” the SWCC stated.
At 8:10 the Arizona dispatcher contacted the SWCC to request a specific crew. “Placing order for Granite Mountain IHC.”
“Can’t accept assignment,” the SWCC responded three minutes later.
Arizona dispatch did not relent in its efforts to get another hotshot crew. “We have pushed orders for another Type 1 crew,” they reported to the SWCC at 8:49.
Havel notified Arizona fire managers and dispatchers that he had “e-mailed a resource order to Eric Marsh for Granite Mountain Crew.”7
That seemed like a bypass of the normal dispatch system, but it wasn’t surprising that Marsh accepted the assignment. The fire was in Granite Mountain’s backyard. Many of the hotshots knew people who lived around Yarnell and would do anything they could to help them. And Marsh went way back with many members of the incident command he’d be working with there.
Around 10:30 Shumate called Darrell Willis, Marsh’s boss, and asked him to oversee firefighters protecting homes in Peeples Valley. Willis’s crews scouted the town overnight to prepare for the fire’s arrival. They found Double Bar A Ranch, just outside the town, surrounded by grass and scrub up to eight feet high. The buildings there would be hard to save, and the fire could easily move from the ranch through the Model Creek subdivision and into the town.
On the other side of the fire, structure protection specialists in Yarnell determined that at least half of the homes there couldn’t be protected at all. Most of them had no defensible space and had been built without any flame-resistant materials. Nonetheless, firefighters began positioning themselves to make a stand.
THE GRANITE MOUNTAIN HOTSHOTS ARRIVED in Yarnell before 8 a.m. Sunday. From the fire station they could see the burning ridge three miles west of the highway. Todd Abel, an operations section chief, assigned them to anchor a fire line at the south end of the blaze and then build a line to keep the fire from coming into town. Eric Marsh, who had arrived earlier, sat in on a 7 a.m. briefing with the outgoing and incoming incident commands. He was assigned to supervise Division Alpha of the fire. His crew was assigned to that division, but his responsibilities in the management team meant he once again wouldn’t be directly in charge of them. Jesse Steed, the crew’s captain, would supervise the Granite Mountain Hotshots.
The crew didn’t get a briefing or a current map of the fire, but Marsh joined the incident command team to look over a map of the area where it was burning on an iPad.8 They noted a small, tan blotch amid the green of the chaparral—Boulder Springs Ranch, where the owners had cleared so much vegetation, the dirt could be seen from space. They rode toward their assignment with Gary Cordes, who was overseeing structure protection in Yarnell and reminded them that the ranch was a “bombproof” safety zone. But, he also noted, the easiest place to escape the blaze was the black, where the fire had already burned away most of the fuel.9
The new command team, led by Roy Hall, who had nearly 40 years of experience fighting wildfires, took charge of the fire at 10:22 a.m., setting up shop in the Model Creek School in Peeples Valley. But like the day before, the firefighters were slow getting up to speed. Command team members were arriving as they could, and there just weren’t enough of them to manage a situation that was growing more complex by the minute.
The communications manager wouldn’t arrive until midday, and even then firefighters complained that there was nobody available to “clone” their radios onto the frequencies assigned by incident command. Many radios didn’t have “tone guards,” without which other radios ignored their transmissions.10 Hall said he didn’t see the communications manager at all on Sunday.
The base camp manager arrived with trailers of equipment later that afternoon,11 but by then the command post was on the verge of being overrun by the fire and the incident commander was preparing to evacuate the school. Resources remained hard to come by. A large helicopter and two heavy air tankers headed to Yarnell were diverted to other fires. A military C-130 equipped with a MAFFS loaded up with retardant in Colorado but never took off due to the weather. The dispatch center ordered two more planes, but only one of those arrived.12
By noon the fire had burned at least 1,000 acres. It was growing fast and launching an increasing number of embers to start spot fires. During the afternoon several helicopters, four SEATs, and three heavy air tankers worked the blaze from the air, soon to be joined by both of the nation’s VLATs. That still wasn’t enough. The retardant was hardly slowing the fire. The Southwest Coordination Center asked for six more large air tankers from the National Interagency Fire Center in Idaho.
“Very limited availability of [air tankers] with increasing activity in the western states,” came the response. “Unable to fill at this time.”
Marsh and his crew parked their buggies on Sesame Street, a private road with a few houses, a little after 9 a.m. They marched up the mountain for 45 minutes. An hour later the Blue Ridge Hotshots arrived at the fire.
JOY COLLURA AND SONNY “TEX” GILLIGAN were the odd couple of hiking around Yarnell. The 40-year-old Collura, who had found hiking as she recovered from health problems that included brain surgery, and the 70-year-old Tex, who was struggling with alcohol and the death of his son, often set up camp for weeks or slept in caves or mine adits as they traipsed through Arizona’s mountains. Collura’s husband encouraged his wife’s adventures because they seemed to improve her health.
“We’re like an old married couple,” Collura joked about her relationship with Gilligan. “I’m married, and he’s old.”
Around 8:30 Sunday morning they hiked up Yarnell Hill behind Boulder Springs Ranch and ran into Eric Marsh hiking up the mountain from the east. “What’s the best way up?” he asked. Gilligan pointed out the jeep road nearby.
As morning passed into afternoon, they ran into him again, this time just below where the lightning strike had started the fire. The fire and retardant drops from aircraft were picking up.
“You two are going to have to get out of here soon,” Marsh warned.
Later, they passed the Granite Mountain Hotshots as the crew hiked up the two-track road. Collura took a few photos of them, but they didn’t chat. To Gilligan the crew looked spent. “It was like a death march,” he said.
Collura started to climb down a steep gully toward Boulder Springs Ranch, which they could see below them. Tex, an old desert rat who knew what Collura was getting into, headed her off. “That way’s gonna get you killed,” he said, explaining that the chaparral and boulders would be so thick it would take hours to find a way through. And if the fire got in there, the whole canyon would blow up.
They hiked out via an easier route and thought little more about the firefighters they had seen.
Marsh assigned most of his crew to burn out the scrub along the two-track road in hopes of corralling the eastern edge of the blaze. Then he led Brendan McDonough and a couple of other hotshots up the mountain to build an anchor point—a position they cleared completely and tied into the black to start their fire line.13
At 11:36 and again at 11:45, air tankers bombed the fires the crew had set.14 Marsh was peeved that they could no longer burn out a fuel break, but scrapping plans and changing tactics was part of his job.
At 11:54 the superintendent and the captain of the Blue Ridge Hotshots, Brian Frisby and Rogers Trueheart Brown, arrived on an ATV at the anchor point Marsh’s crew had built. The Blue Ridge crew had arrived at the fire before the supervisor of their division, so they lacked direction, and the safety officer wouldn’t be there until late in the day. With radio communications increasingly difficult and the two hotshot crews never having met to discuss tactics, the leaders decided to meet face-to-face. The Blue Ridge Hotshots were working less than a mile away, putting in a line with a bulldozer along the foot of the mountain. With his plan to conduct a burnout thwarted, Marsh ordered his crew to dig a line along the eastern flank of the fire—a direct attack that would put them close to the flames. They’d need a lookout. Donut had been sick for a couple days before the crew had come to Yarnell, so he drew that lighter-duty assignment. He headed down the mountain, found a knoll near a road grader on the ranchland below, and called Jesse Steed, the captain, to let him know his position and that he had his eyes on them. Several hundred yards to the north he identified a trigger point that, if the fire reached it, would prompt his own evacuation.
Marsh, in charge of Division Alpha, the southwest end of the fire, also split off from his crew. The northeast part of the blaze was in Division Zulu and put under the supervision of Rance Marquez, a BLM firefighter. The boundaries between the divisions, however, were unclear, and Marsh and Marquez argued about whose turf was where, leading to even more confusion.15
Granite Mountain was the only crew assigned to Marsh’s division, so he was still managing only his own people, but overseeing the entire area meant he wouldn’t necessarily be with them. He hiked alone up the mountain to formulate a plan.
AIRCRAFT REPORTED THAT THE EASTERN FLANK of the fire was active and moving toward Yarnell. At 1:50 the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office initiated a pre-evacuation notice for the town. Twelve minutes later Brian Klimowski with the National Weather Service in Flagstaff warned of likely thunderstorms on the east side of the fire, with wind gusts up to 45 miles per hour.16 The Incident Management Team’s fire behavior analyst relayed the warning to the division supervisors, including Marsh. At 3:26 the National Weather Service sent another warning of thunderstorms and winds from the north-northeast gusting up to 50 miles per hour.
Rain that evaporates before it hits the ground is called virga. It hangs below thunderstorms like a swinging horse’s tail. While the deluge doesn’t reach the earth, the air it evaporates into becomes cold and heavy, plunging like a waterfall void of water. The downdraft hits the ground in hard gusts and splashes out in directions that are notoriously hard to predict. The wave from the air’s collision with the ground, known as an outflow boundary, can drive a fire back, push it forward, or turn it in an unexpected direction.
Todd Abel confirmed with Marsh that he had received the weather reports and could see the clouds building over the smoke.
“The winds are getting squirrelly up here,” Marsh reported.17
At 3:50 Marsh called, “I’m trying to work my way off the top.”
“Just keep me updated,” Abel said. “You guys hunker and be safe and we’ll get some air support down there ASAP.”
The Granite Mountain crew had stopped for lunch where the fire had burned away most of the vegetation about a quarter mile below where Marsh had been scouting the fire. From the safety of the black they watched the weather drive the fire hard.
Donut, the lookout, saw the fire hit his trigger point and let Jesse Steed know he was moving from his post.
“OK, cool,” Steed responded.
“I’ve got eyes on you and the fire,” he radioed to Donut a few minutes later. “It’s making a good push.”
The fire was growing so ferociously that Donut worried it might overrun him as he hiked out. He was going to call for a rescue ride from the Blue Ridge Hotshots when Frisby appeared on his ATV. Donut climbed aboard but he couldn’t retreat from the area yet. Leaders of the two hotshot crews had realized that Granite Mountain’s buggies were in the path of the fire. Blue Ridge Hotshots helped Donut move the trucks, first to Shrine Road, where the dozer line the Blue Ridge crew was building started, and then, as the fire exploded, in a convoy with their own vehicles to the Ranch House Restaurant at the south end of U.S. 89. On their way out they warned other crews who had made their way up washes to engage the blaze to evacuate before it was too late. Then they joined the retreating firefighters and residents who watched the growing firestorm from the parking lot.
WHEN THE THUNDERSTORMS ARRIVED in Peeples Valley, Darrell Willis had been working there for nearly 18 hours straight.
“When I arrived, around midnight on the 29th, we were so far behind the eight ball that there was no catching up,” he told me.
Willis had no maps of the area when he took charge of protecting homes on the north end of the fire. The firefighters preparing the town overnight put in orders for trucks, planes, and crews, but they knew the paperwork wouldn’t get finished before daybreak and help wouldn’t arrive until hours after that, if it was available. The only thing they were certain would get there was the fire. “I knew that the fire was going to come into Peeples Valley,” Willis said.
It came earlier than they expected, charging toward Double Bar A Ranch before 10:30. “That’s really unusual fire behavior for that early in the morning,” he
said.
When the thunderstorms hit that afternoon, Peeples Valley seemed certain to burn.
By four that afternoon Conrad Jackson (the high school teacher turned firefighter), Willis, and several others were lined up along a road between the ranch and the oncoming flames. In the town behind the ranch, some homes stood a chance, but others had dry and oily chaparral so close that a fire could just run right onto the roof.
“There are some nice properties in there, but nobody’s done any defensible space,” Willis said. “If we can keep it on the road and not let it cross . . . to where the homes are on this side, we’ll be good. If we don’t, we’re going to lose them.”
Among the buildings about to be overrun was the Model Creek School, where incident command was set up. With the flames less than 200 yards away, Roy Hall, the incident commander, prepared to evacuate the command post and ordered all vehicles moved to the north side of the school, away from the coming flame front. Some of the firefighters raced to clear brush and flammable materials from around structures. Others hosed down encroaching flames or wet down houses. Willis decided that a burnout along the road was their only chance to save the town. “It’s the last stand,” he said.
By charring the chaparral along the road, they could starve the fire of fuel. It was a dangerous tactic—the backfire could live up to its name and spread into the town. After crews lit the brush along the road, it looked like that would happen. “We’re just constantly losing it,” Willis said. “We [can’t] keep up with the spots.”
Firefighters chased down the spot fires and slop-over where the burnout crossed the road. Whether from the wildfire or the burnout they had lit to fight it, they were about to be overrun. Willis ordered the crews to retreat. Jackson and his partner, Mark Matthews, pulled back from the ranch to a rise where they could watch the fire burning into the town.
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