The thing you look out for as a hotshot, of course, is fire. Hotshots trade stories of ones that got out of control, narrow escapes, legendary fires from the past. I loved to hear about the blazes that went back before our time.
The one that you heard the most about was South Canyon. That was sort of the model of what could go wrong for a wildland firefighter in the Southwest. It had all the elements we saw every day: wind, storm, flame, steep slopes, chaparral. But those elements had come together in a few short minutes and killed fourteen firefighters. Before I joined up, Granite Mountain had even gotten a trip together—called a “staff ride,” which all hotshot crews do as part of their training—to go visit Storm King Mountain, where the fire happened, in central Colorado, just to study the terrain and study the decisions those firefighters had made. The Granite Mountain crew wanted to honor their sacrifice by learning from it.
South Canyon began with a drought. On July 2, 1994, after two years of low rainfall, a lightning strike ignited a wildfire near the base of Storm King Mountain, which is part of the Rocky Mountain system. Like many lightning fires, it started high up on a ridge, this time in a thicket of piñon pine and juniper. It was one of forty wildfires set off by dry lightning storms in the span of a few days, and South Canyon was at first thought to be among the minor ones. The terrain was rugged and inaccessible to vehicles and lacked any possible helispot to land a chopper. No hotshots or resources were dedicated to the fight in the first two days, and the fire consumed only three acres. It was skunking along the ridgeline, making the locals nervous but doing little damage.
Left to its own devices, the fire grew. On the morning of July 5, seven firefighters hiked two and a half hours and began cutting a landing area for a helicopter on the steep slope and a firebreak to hold the fire on its southwest flank. An air tanker dropped a load of retardant. The crew worked all day and left in the evening to do maintenance on their chainsaws. They were replaced by eight smokejumpers, who parachuted in from jump planes. The smokejumpers saw that the fire had already slopped over the first fire line cut by the seven firefighters, so they started constructing a second one on the east side of the ridge.
A cold front was brewing not far from the fire zone. On July 5, the National Weather Service issued a red flag warning for the area, which meant ideal conditions for wildland fire combustion had been reached. Low humidity, dry fuel, and high, gusting winds. For the civilian, a red flag warning means “get ready to move.”
But the next morning, the meteorologist responsible for warning firefighters on the Colorado blazes about changing conditions realized the front was more powerful than he’d first imagined. It was carrying gusts of up to forty miles per hour. The winds could roll over a fire and blow it up without any advance warning. The hotshots needed to know that the weather situation was becoming potentially hazardous. The meteorologist got on the phone and made a series of urgent calls to different dispatchers. When he called Grand Junction District, which was overseeing the South Canyon Fire, they thanked him and promised to get the news out.
But the channels were bristling with updates from various crews and officials. The message was lost in the rush and never broadcast to the men and women on the ridge. Supervisors knew a cold front was moving toward them, but not its severity.
The smokejumpers had to break off around midnight on July 5 when boulders started rolling down from the top of the ridge, big enough to kill you if one caught you in the head. On the morning of July 6, the original crew and a new set of smokejumpers were joined by twenty hotshots from a Prineville, Oregon, crew. “What the hell’s that?” one of them called when they arrived at the fire around eleven a.m. “You’ve got to be kidding me. That fire’s dead!”
The firefighters began building a second helispot and cutting firebreaks. Most of them were working in a descending line across the western flank of the ridge, in dense brush that at some points grew above their head to twelve feet—so thick that the men and women couldn’t even see the bottom of the ridge. The firefighters were isolated, cocooned in a thin corridor between tall stands of oak brush. They didn’t have eyes on the fire, and no lookout had been posted to keep a good eye on the mountain. But they knew the basic rule that all hotshots learn: Don’t let a fire get below you on a slope. The reason is simple: A wildfire moves much faster upslope than down. The terrific heat flowing in front of the fire precooks the trees and brush while raising the ambient temperature. This can cause the terrain to burst into flame even before the fire reaches it. Crowning fires have been measured moving upslope at one hundred miles per hour.
Some of the smokejumpers were nervous. They were deep in the green in front of a burning fire. “Hey,” some of the men called to their supervisor, “we shouldn’t be here.” But none of them pressed the issue. “It’s that fine line between bringing up concerns and being a whiner,” said one firefighter after the tragedy.
The fire that had started on the ridge had burned down to the drainage below, to the west of the firefighters. There were stands of Gambel oak and oak brush on the slope that had lost their twigs and leaves to the fire, but the trunks and branches—dry as tinder—remained.
Early in the afternoon, the foreman of the Oregon hotshots felt the wind shift and reported that the breeze had turned “squirrely.” The fire was still growing, now covering 127 acres. But it was one among many blazes ripping their way across central and western Colorado. The crews were several hundred yards below the top of the ridge. The bottom of the western drainage, a gully filled with brush that was, in spots, less dense than the hillside, was their escape route.
The oak was dense. The hotshots and smokejumpers had to cut spaces into the vegetation just to dispose of the cut brush. Helicopters were dumping water on hot spots from buckets extended from their bellies.
The fire entered the afternoon hours, when temperatures are hottest and wildfires are most dangerous. Later, officials would set the chances of an ember combusting a leaf or a twig on contact at 90 to 100 percent. Humidity was low, temperatures were high, the fuel was bone dry. There was only one missing element for a firestorm: wind.
Some of the smokejumpers could see down to the bottom of the gully. There was orange flame eating its way through the oak brush, and burning pinecones and branches were rolling down into the foliage. “You know what it’s going to do?” one of them said to his partner. “It’s going to back down into this draw and come up on this side at us.”
“Then why don’t we get out of here?” the other firefighter said.
There were other fires in history where flames had erupted out of a canyon and caught fleeing firefighters on a hillside, and most firefighters could tell you the details from memory. Mann Gulch stood out on this list. In 1949, in the Gates of the Mountains Wilderness, smokejumpers were walking toward a fire in Mann Gulch when a storm front blew it into a fireball, burning across three thousand acres in ten minutes. The men turned and ran with the fire at their backs, the flames sweeping up a grass-covered slope that angled at thirty-seven degrees. The men threw away their tools and their crosscut saws as they raced toward the ridgeline. The foreman, looking behind to see the flames racing and hearing the rising sound in his ears, took out his matches and lit a fire in the high grass right in front of the crew. He was hoping to create an escape fire that his men could lie down in while the more powerful firestorm swept around them.
But the men charging up behind the foreman refused to enter the escape fire. One cried, “To hell with that!” and the crew raced toward a hogback above them that was covered in boulders and rocks. The foreman lay down in the escape fire and felt the intense updrafts from the firestorm lift him bodily off the ground, not once but several times.
Of the sixteen men who ran for their lives, only two—including the foreman—escaped.
On Storm King Mountain, at around 3:20 p.m., the dry cold front that the meteorologist had warned dispatchers about arrived at the bottom of the slope. Its winds were gusting to forty-five miles per hour. When the winds hit the blaze at about 4:00 p.m., the fire blew up. It turned eastward and started to run, throwing hundred-foot flames into the sky. It jumped the fire line below the firefighters and began racing up the slope toward them, deafeningly loud. Its flames shot two hundred feet in the air, then three hundred. It was a freight train, and it was unstoppable.
Just like at Mann Gulch, the fire chased the crew, this time across the top of Hell’s Gate Ridge. It sucked the oxygen from their mouths and wrapped them in flames as its gases and heat pushed them over the ridgetop and into a canyon on the other side. A helicopter pilot shouted into his radio, but all he heard were a series of clicks. Then a single scream that lasted several seconds before the transmission ended or the radio burned up.
Two other firefighters, who’d been directing helicopters to the second helispot, a short distance from Hell’s Gate Ridge, also ran from the burning wall of flame, but their escape path was blocked by a steep, rocky chute fifty feet deep. With nowhere else to go, they plunged down into the narrow canyon. Here the fire overwhelmed them.
Twelve men and women died on Storm King Mountain, and two in the hospital a day later. For years afterward, hotshots from across the Southwest made pilgrimages to Hell’s Gate Ridge to see the landscape, to create in their minds a small film of what happened, with the key moments emphasized. They wanted to learn the lessons of South Canyon. Inscribe them in their memories.
If you’re not safe, speak your mind.
If a storm is on the way, get the hell away from the fire.
Safety first.