I was new to the job, but the veteran guys were telling me that it was changing. The West was changing. It was getting drier and way more dangerous. I was just too green to know it.
As a hotshot, you see the land up close. Before, I’d drive down the highway and see nothing but the blacktop. But as the weeks went by with Granite Mountain, I started to pay attention to the land. The conditions are like a palm spread out—they can tell your future.
I’d hike into the backcountry and my eye would be scanning the terrain, looking at the color of the vegetation. I noticed that in April, the terrain already looked like high summer. Brown everywhere. Streams that should be three feet wide just a trickle. Bushes not greening out the way they should because they weren’t getting enough moisture.
The West is entering a period of unprecedented dryness. The word “megadrought” is coming into common usage, and it’s a scary one for firefighters. The less rain that falls on the forests of the Southwest, the more parched the terrain gets. That means more and bigger wildfires. The numbers are sending us a warning. Since the 1970s, the total area burned in the West each year has tripled. The number of fires over ten thousand acres has increased sevenfold. And the acreage that they burn is six times greater. Since 1998, there has been only a single year when there were as few wildfires as in the most active year in the 1970s.
Climate change is increasing both the number and deadliness of wildfires. In 1989, there were about 140 large blazes per year nationwide. Today the number is almost double that. The peak season back then lasted five months. Now it’s seven-plus. Increased temperatures, earlier snowpack melt (by a full month), and drier forests are creating these monster blazes called megafires. Some of these infernos can consume nearly an acre of forest every second.
Think about that. An acre is about forty-three thousand square feet. Think of an area that size tightly packed with different species of timber and scrub. Then envision a fire coming through so fast that in the blink of an eye everything is charred out and black.
When we fought the fire at Chiricahua, a lot of the veterans, guys who’d fought hundreds of fires, said it was one of the top ten toughest, nastiest blazes they’d faced, not only because of the steep terrain, but because of the speed and intensity of the fire, driven by weather and the dryness of the fuels it was consuming. But what if these monsters become not the exception but the norm? That, for a hotshot, is not a pleasant thought.
These fires are devastating to the Southwest in a bunch of different ways. Most people think that a big fire is a natural event that has some good aspects to it. It clears the land for new growth to spring up and create new forests. But these big fires damage the trees’ ability to reproduce. For that to happen, mother trees need to drop their seeds on good ground. (Ponderosa pines, those beautiful tall trees that sometimes look like Christmas trees on stilts, can cast their seeds only about one hundred yards.) When you wipe out an entire section of trees, many times the full forest doesn’t come back. Little scrub trees and grass replace the big pines. The forest changes.
Then there’s the human element. By that, I mean the houses that we see in the hills and rural areas. There have always been some there, but now there are more of them and they’re more expensive. When people move to places like Wyoming or Nevada or Arizona, if they have enough money, they want the forest views. That means that the hills around Prescott and the small towns of Nevada, Montana, and Idaho are chock-full of new and expensive homes inserted right into the wildland. And that affects how we fight a fire. Sometimes we’re called into places like Chiricahua to protect the pristine wilderness. But more and more often, we’re going in to save property. Horse farms. Mansions.
A lot of people who come to the West love nature. Just like me, they’re converts. They love the sagebrush, the cacti, and the desert foxes, the whole thing. When they get to somewhere like Prescott, they finally get to buy a piece of it. And they feel protective of the natural beauty of the place.
So what happens? They want their home to look like it’s part of the landscape. They don’t build a defensible fire perimeter around their home, clearing the brush and trees so that a fire will be prevented from approaching their house. Why move to the West and push nature away? People want to be as close to it as possible. And clearing the land and maintaining that perimeter is a hassle.
Believe it or not, when I started telling people that I was a hotshot, some got mad at me. “Why do you guys go around burning up those beautiful forests?” one guy in Prescott said to me. “Why don’t you just let Mother Nature take her course? She’s been doing pretty good for millions of years.”
These people kill me.
“Listen,” I told him. “I didn’t put your million-dollar home in the middle of the wilderness. I didn’t call for help when the fire got too close. Maybe if you hadn’t built in the hills, I wouldn’t be out there risking my life to save your place. If we let Mother Nature take her course, you can kiss your house good-bye.”
A lot of people think that stopping a wildfire is no big deal. Call in a few air tankers, and those DC-10s come swooping overhead, their belly-mounted tanks filled with thousands of gallons of water or fire retardant, and boom, no more fire. Hotshots do love to see the tanker flying in. But it doesn’t make the fire go away.
These tankers carry a slurry made up of water and fertilizer, mixed in with a red dye that helps firefighters and pilots determine where they’ve dropped their loads. The slurry comes down and coats the trees and shrubs, making it harder for the fire to come through. But hotshots still have to go in and dig line and cut brush. The tankers can’t save the forests by themselves.
There’s another problem. Tankers—and the choppers that bring hotshots to fire lines high up in the mountains—are dangerous, and they’re expensive. A pilot can only fly a few hundred feet above the ground when he’s carrying the slurry. A lot of the time, he’s putting the aircraft through severe updrafts and plumes of hot ash rising from the fire. Those plumes cause turbulence. And the pilot is most likely flying an old propeller plane, powered by piston engines and built when Dwight D. Eisenhower was president.
Politicians love to see those gigantic DC-10s fly over the mountaintop and drop a big load of red retardant on a blaze. It shows they’re earning their pay (that’s why they’re referred to as “CNN drops”). But those tankers are often patched together from old military planes that were rescued from aviation boneyards. They’re old and they’re expensive to maintain.
All this means one thing: crashes. Between 2001 and 2013, a bunch of pilots have died in tanker accidents. Twenty-two, to be exact.
But that’s only part of the story. Since the 1994 South Canyon Fire, four hundred wildland firefighters have died in action. And forty thousand homes have been lost. If hotshots were more visible, if we didn’t disappear under the canopy of trees and fight fires out of the public eye, more people might know that number. The local people whose houses we save will do anything for us. But to most Americans, we’re invisible.
And that’s a problem. Because the fires are getting stronger. And that means more hotshots are going to die trying to fight them.
The fires aren’t just getting bigger and more frequent, they’re getting hotter. Some can burn up to three thousand degrees Fahrenheit, which is hot enough to melt titanium. There’s nothing you can do to protect against a fire that hot if it gets close to you.
Hotshots go to work with very little protection. The yellow Nomex shirts we wear (called “yellows”) are fire resistant, but they protect you only up to a couple of hundred degrees Fahrenheit. That might be okay for a grease fire in your kitchen, but in a wildfire, it’s nothing. I always thought the only protection the Nomex shirts offered was psychological.
In 1957, the U.S. Forest Service reviewed a series of tragic wildfires and came up with a set of guidelines, “Standard Firefighting Orders and 18 Watchout Situations” (called “10 & 18” in the hotshot community). They detail the proper procedures to fight wildfires safely and are to be “applied in all fire situations.” They’re still in effect today.
The main order is: “Keep one foot in the black, one in the green.” The black is the burned-over section of wildland, where the fire has already eaten through its fuel. It’s safe. The green is the untouched land, where dry sagebrush and chaparral are waiting to go up. It’s not safe. You’re always supposed to keep an escape route within reach while fighting the fire.
When I joined Granite Mountain, one of the pieces of gear I received was a fire shelter. It’s a tent made out of fire-resistant material that looks like silver tinfoil. And that’s what the outer layer is: aluminum foil that’s been bonded to silica cloth. The aluminum radiates the heat back away from you, and the silica cloth slows down the remaining heat. There’s another layer of foil inside, attached to sheets of fiberglass.
The shelters can deflect 95 percent of a flame’s radiant heat, and they’re at their best when a fire passes over you. But if the shelters are hit by flames or the gases that race in front of them, it’s a different story. They begin to delaminate at 500 degrees and the foil begins melting at 1,200 degrees.
You carry the shelter in a nylon bag in your pack and, if the fire gets too close, you’re supposed to clear as much ground around you as you can, scraping any fuel away with your Pulaski. Then the members of the crew form a tight circle, deploy their shelters, and get inside, their feet pointed out toward the flame. You grip the lower edge of the shelter with your hands so smoke and flame can’t get through. You turn your face to try to get as close to the ground as possible. That’s where the air is coolest.
And then you pray your ass off.
Aside from the Nomex shirts and the shelters, there’s really nothing else to protect a hotshot. No emergency beacons. No safe spaces. No cavalry coming to save the day.
Only the hotshot’s own intelligence and experience. And his brothers. When we go out to the fire line, we’re deeply vulnerable to the flames. Every hotshot knows that.