Megafire: The Race to Extinguish a Deadly Epidemic of Flame

Contents

Title Page

Contents

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

Everybody’s Hometown

Yarnell Hill

Fuses and Bombs

Prescott

Our Greatest Ally, Our Fiercest Foe

Heartstrong

Red Buffalo, Black Dragon

Crazy Woman

The Bigger Blowup

The Crowded Forest

Mansions in the Slums

The Blackline

Slop-Over

Off to the Races

Red Zones

Turning Up the Heat

Playing with Fire

Nuclear Frying Pan

The Vanishing Forest

The Fire-Industrial Complex

Photos

High Park

Firebugs

Forest Jihad

Extended Attack

Mountain Shadows

Firestorm

Seeing Red

Never Winter

Black Forest

Trickle Down

Backfire

Frontier Days

Defusing the Time Bomb

The Doce

Where the Desert Breeze Meets the Mountain Air

The Perfect Firestorm

Trigger Points

Nineteen

Blowback

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

About the Author

Connect with HMH

Copyright © 2017 by Michael Kodas

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

hmhbooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-0-547-79208-8

The Hotshot Prayer written by Patricia Huston, as adapted by Brendan Donut McDonough. Copyright © 2002 by Patricia Huston. Adaptation copyright © 2013 by Brendan Donut McDonough. Reprinted by kind permission of Patricia Huston and Brendan Donut McDonough.

Cover design by Brian Moore

Cover photograph © Kevork Djansezian / Getty Images

eISBN 978-0-547-79212-5

v2.0620

To Melvin, who taught me to respect the men and women who do hard, dangerous work; and to Anita, who taught me to care about them.

For the 19 fallen Granite Mountain Hotshots and the other 30 wildland firefighters who perished while I reported this book.

Prologue

THE FOURMILE CANYON FIRE BROKE OUT on Labor Day 2010, while my wife and I were moving into a cottage in the Colorado Chautauqua, a National Historic Landmark and park overlooking Boulder.

Our home for the year at the foot of the Flatirons—pinnacles of red rock that define the city’s skyline—carries a rugged, rustic status. The historic dining hall and auditorium 100 yards below our cottage hosted Teddy Roosevelt a century before we moved to the park and bands such as Los Lobos after we arrived. At night we listened to the concerts from the easy chairs on the cottage’s front porch while staring at the lights of the city sprawling below a forest of stars. In the morning we looked out on hot air balloons ascending in the sunrise. On game days we could see the crowds and hear the cheers in the stands of the University of Colorado’s football stadium. The panorama of dark mountain forests descending to the glowing city highlighted what made Boulder County one of the fastest-growing counties in the West.

The cottage’s interior was as rough-hewn as the Rockies. Ancient knob-and-tube electrical wiring drooped from the ceilings. A cockeyed brass chandelier seemed like it might burst into flame if you looked at it wrong. The windows sat off kilter in their sills. Stinkbugs and box elder beetles didn’t even have to slow down to fly inside through the gaps. Sunlight beamed between the slats into the dim, dusty interior.

Between the wiring, the wood, and the trees surrounding the cabin, our new life seemed almost designed to burn, but the charm of the location all but blinded us to that. We raved about the delicious apples that fell from the tree overhanging the front gardens, but never discussed the fire hazard posed by the pine needles that piled up in the corners of the roof and the century-old clapboards.

As we unloaded our boxes, we heard the first planes and choppers buzz over our heads on their way to the wildfire that was already devouring homes. We listened to a police scanner on a laptop and wondered how quickly the ancient wooden cabin would ignite if a firebrand landed on it. I quit unpacking and climbed to the top of the First Flatiron. From there, more than 1,000 feet above our new home, I could see the column of smoke rising five miles away.

On the shoulder of Flagstaff Mountain, farther west, I joined nearly 100 other Boulder residents looking out on the flames spreading over Sunshine Canyon and Sugarloaf Mountain. The vista was similar to the one I had over the city from my porch, but the scene wasn’t nearly so idyllic. Instead of balloons in the sunrise, we watched air tankers paint red crescents in the sky just above the flaming pines. We could see some of the more palatial homes in the canyons and watched as the fire worked its way among them. The houses didn’t explode, but gradually showed a tiny bit of red around their bases or on their roofs.

That one’s going up, someone would shout as soon as they saw the slightest glow. Sometimes the houses burned fast, but usually it took 30 minutes or more for them to become fully engulfed. Despite covering dozens of wildfires, and fighting them over a summer, this was the first one I saw destroy people’s homes.

The Fourmile Canyon Fire burned 169 residences and was the first of four fires in four years that would break the most destructive fire record in Colorado. While it never threatened Chautauqua or our cottage, it did burn away many of the ideas I had about wildfire. The houses of Fourmile Canyon would be rebuilt long before I filled those voids in my understanding.

Five years later a fire more than a thousand miles away hit even closer to home. In Lake County, California, my brother Jeff was living in a cabin similar to our onetime home in Chautauqua. During the height of the summer of 2015 the Rocky and Jerusalem Fires burned within a dozen miles of Jeff’s cabin. Then, in September, the Valley Fire burned 76,067 acres through the mountains where he lived.

We’d been seeing it all summer, he told me when I called. I saw the smoke over here and thought, ‘Oh, shit, here we go again.’

As the blaze came toward his cabin, Jeff found that his truck wouldn’t start. He was left with a tiny, two-door sports car to carry anything he wanted to save and raced away with his girlfriend’s paintings and silk screens, some jewels and gold, a few tools, and two cats (one would escape his grasp while he searched for a shelter and perish in the flames).

During the following days he did what he could to help others who were evacuating—gathering pets, turning off electricity, and leading a disabled friend away from the fire. Eventually he found himself alone on a ridgeline, where he watched the panorama of fire.

I could see for miles—almost all the way to the East Bay, Jeff, an unflappable marine veteran who served in Vietnam, said. It was like that mountain got napalmed and rocketed all at once.

By then he was certain that his own home had burned.

Going back out the last time was like driving out through the apocalypse, he said. Whole neighborhoods have just vanished. They’re gone.

By the time my niece and her mother, who live in nearby Cobb, gathered their pets and some valuables, the flames surrounding the town were so thick that they couldn’t drive through them. They parked on a golf course, where treeless greens, water hazards, and sand traps provided a refuge in the orange night. Their home survived, but many of the ones around it, and most of nearby Middletown, burned. They couldn’t return home for weeks.

The Valley Fire burned more than 1,300 homes and killed four residents,¹ one of them an acquaintance of my brother’s. It also climaxed the year in which the most land on record in the United States—10 million acres—burned in wildfires.²

I covered my first forest fire nearly 30 years before the Valley Fire burned my brother’s home. I fought fires in the Rocky Mountains a decade before the Fourmile Canyon Fire blazed outside Boulder. But the new fires were different from the ones I’d photographed, reported on, and fought years before. Some scientists and firefighters were calling the worst of them megafires, but others bristled at the term’s sensationalism and lack of scientific precision.

During the five years between the fire outside my hometown, which began the series of record-breaking fires in Colorado, and the one that burned down my brother’s cabin and topped off a year in which the most acreage in the nation burned, I tried to learn what was driving fires to be so much larger, faster, hotter, and more destructive. It seemed like that question would be easy to answer, particularly with the world’s first conference studying megafires announced soon after the fire that threatened Boulder.

But just defining megafire proved more difficult than I’d anticipated.

THE CONFERENCE WASN’T IN A VAST, western forest under a scorching summer sun, but in a hotel auditorium in Tallahassee, Florida, a week before Thanksgiving 2011. The opening speaker was the first person I had contacted about megafires—the man who had coined the term. Jerry Williams was once the national director of fire and aviation management for the U.S. Forest Service, and thus the top wildland firefighter in the United States. He was the first to warn of an explosion of wildfires that would see the amount of land burning in the United States triple since the 1970s. (During the conference scientists predicted that in some years U.S. fires would burn almost seven times the amount of land burned in an average year in the 1970s.)

My first experience with a really unimaginable fire . . . was in Northern California late in August in 1987, Williams told me when I first called him. That fire siege was made up of more than 1,000 blazes that brought every available wildland firefighter in the nation to California and led the governor to declare a state of emergency in 22 counties.

I remember saying, ‘Jesus, we will never see anything like that again,’ he told me. And the next year we saw Yellowstone.

After he retired from leading the U.S. wildfire fight, Williams led a team of international researchers that studied eight megafires around the world for the United Nations.³

We’re seeing . . . a new type of fire . . . in the U.S., Russia, Australia, Greece, South Africa, he told the assembled scientists in the opening presentation in Florida. It seems like every year we see a ‘worst one.’ And the next year we see a worse one yet. They’re unbounded.

After leaving the Forest Service, Williams became increasingly critical and outspoken about the war on wildfire that he once led. Policies promoted to protect people, homes, forests, soil, and even our air and water often backfired. Many blazes we extinguished simply set the stage for bigger and badder fires in the future.

How many of those fires were the result [of], were predisposed by, a land management decision made years earlier? Williams asked.

Continuing to fight the fires as we have, he said, was a dead end. Yet we continued to wage an increasingly costly war in which every battle we won seemed to bring a greater loss in the future.

We’re trapped by the myths of our own success, he said. Sometimes I think this is almost a religious issue, that we can somehow dominate it.

The three days following Williams’s presentation were an apocalyptic travelogue as scientists described megafires’ impacts on the atmosphere and soil, insects and flowers, economics and culture. Toward the close of the conference I sat down with 10 researchers from China, France, Portugal, Australia, Canada, and the United States in a discussion led by Dan Binkley, a forestry and ecology professor at Colorado State University. Our charge was simply to come up with a definition of megafire. But despite the hundreds of years of cumulative research the group had done on the topic, none of us were clear about what we were actually talking about.

The term ‘mega’ must be used to describe the top level of fire intensity, one researcher insisted.

It’s impossible to escape a megafire, another threw out.

They’re impossible to control.

Israel [the Mount Carmel Fire of 2010] wasn’t a megafire.

I don’t see any reason that Australia [Black Saturday in 2009] wouldn’t be a megafire.

Africa burns most, one researcher noted.

You’re looking at the amount of acres burned, Dan said. But you can look at the number of lives lost.

In 2003, in Portugal, the fires had political impacts, Célia Gouveia, of the University of Lisbon, said.

The socioeconomic impact would have to be part of the definition.

The ecological impacts should be considered.

The definition should have multiple criteria: property loss, air quality, wildlife, steady-state ecosystem change, species extinction . . .

The conference program, and posters around the hotel, showed a lack of agreement even about what the word megafire should look like. Some wrote it as one word, others as two, and the conference organizers hyphenated it.

Is there a term better than ‘mega’? Dan asked.

High-impact.

Catastrophic.

Uber, one Canadian scientist said, chuckling.

Hellfire, Dan threw out, to guffaws.

The group fell into the weeds of fire science, arguing about whether burn intensity or spread velocity is a better measure of a fire’s mega-ness.

There’s an intensity there that’s sort of beyond our experience or comprehension, Dan said. Jerry Williams and his colleagues saw fires with behaviors they had never encountered before.

Snow was falling in much of the West, but the following day, while we were visiting the Tall Timbers experimental forest near Tallahassee, a fire burned into the suburbs of Reno, Nevada. My house is threatened by a megafire, Tim Brown, a scientist from the Desert Research Institute, announced with a shocked smile after calling some of his graduate students to check on his property.

The phenomenon seemed to be reinventing itself and closing in on us, even as we struggled to define it.

I returned from Tallahassee to find my home state exploding with its most destructive wildfire season in history—one that was doubly devastating when I took into account that one year burned right into the next, without the usual interruption of winter. Eventually that would drive me to consider another definition of megafire—duration. How would a year-round fire season add to the impacts that the researchers I’d sat with had listed?

Four years after the conference the U.S. Forest Service would define a megafire as a wildfire that burns at least 100,000 acres. By then, I had developed more nuanced measures. In charred forests around the world and in the endless season of flame that plagued my own backyard, I found four categories of drivers behind the flames.

Our use and management of forests left many of them overloaded with far more vegetation than naturally grew in them, as well as invasive, introduced, and exotic species that disrupted the historical cycle of fire.

Booming development into flammable landscapes provided another fuel load in the form of homes and infrastructure, filled forests with human-produced sparks and heat, and complicated firefighting and forest management.

The warming and drying climate primed many wildlands to burn and expanded fire seasons by months, often into times when few resources are available to deal with them. And humans had also expanded the fire season with sparks from power lines, vehicles, campfires, and firearms that ignited fires in months in which there was no lightning to start natural wildfires.

Political and economic decisions intended to deal with wildfires drove the flames as often as they snuffed them.

I also came to see that despite the size and ferocity of the last decade’s fires, the biggest and baddest of them are still to come. Since the turn of the millennium four different years saw more than 9 million acres burn—record amounts of land that were unthinkable just a few decades ago. Then, in 2015, wildfires spread over more than 10 million acres of U.S. forests. Fire scientists anticipate that within a few years, 12 to 15 million acres a year will burn, and U.S. Forest Service researchers warn that by mid-century that number could reach 20 million—an area nearly the size of Maine.

As I chased fires across Colorado and around the world, each conflagration illuminated at least one of the drivers of the world’s crisis of fire. But all of them came to play on Yarnell Hill, Arizona, where a small blaze killed the greatest number of professional wildland firefighters in U.S. history. Whereas my first trip to research what was bringing an exponential increase in wildfires to the planet had left me with more questions than answers, my last stop showed what is at stake if we fail to answer them.

PART I

Everybody’s Hometown

1

Yarnell Hill

Yarnell, Arizona—July 1, 2013

EARLY ON THE FIRST MORNING of Prescott, Arizona’s Frontier Days—the oldest rodeo in the world—three white pickup trucks from the city’s fire department drove across a ranch 35 miles southwest of the community filling with cowboys and cantankerous bulls. The trucks drove west on a track bulldozed overnight through what firefighters call a moonscape—land burned so black and bare that the path through it seemed to have an amber glow. The fire that had burned the Weaver Mountains the day before had been so hot it cracked the granite boulders strewn about the canyon above them. Where they stopped, only a few black and skeletal sticks remained of what had been an eight-foot-tall bramble of prickly manzanita, catclaw, mesquite, and scrub oak. A single surviving cactus rose from the ash where a dozen firefighters stepped out of the trucks.

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 their 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