Two days before Granite Mountain headed to Yarnell, June 28th, I’d gone to a funeral. It was for the father of a friend of mine who I’d gotten close to during my partying days. I would crash at my friend’s house when I needed a place to sleep, and his parents—both of them strong Christians—welcomed me every single time. They always accepted and loved me for who I was and not what I happened to be doing at the time, and I’d always appreciated them for that. A week before the Yarnell fire, the father had passed away and I’d asked Jesse if I could attend the funeral. He said if the crew wasn’t working a fire, he’d do his best to let me off; I was also sick with the flu, so he told me to get checked out by a doctor. Jesse had been as good as his word, and the funeral had turned into a true celebration of the man’s life and his deep concern for other people. I was so touched by how many people turned out to pay tribute to this good man.
Two nights later, Chris, Garret Zuppiger, and I had dinner at one of our favorite restaurants, the Park Plaza Liquor & Deli. We’d had a few beers, munched on some pizza, then hit a bar on the way home for a nightcap. An average night that led to an average morning.
June 30 was my first day back. I returned filled with that feeling I’d experienced at the funeral—of how worthwhile life can be if you live it with compassion. I felt good about things.
When we got to the station, Eric was in his office. I heard him on the phone figuring out the plan for the day. The original idea was that we’d be heading to Prescott National Forest, where a wildfire had been burning for days; we’d be pre-positioned there for any flare-ups. But after a few minutes, Eric came out and told us we were assigned to Yarnell. He gave us a quick briefing and we geared up for the ride south.
It had been a tough month for the crew. We’d been working fires for twenty-eight out of the thirty days of June, and the rest of the guys had been going twelve days straight, without a break. It was an unusually active stretch for us.
I knew Yarnell. As a teenager, I’d become buddies with a kid whose family had a ranch nearby. I’d spent countless hours there, horsing around with him and our friends or target shooting in the local hills. It was a small mountain town like Prescott, just not so big or populated. When evening fell, you could feel the shape of the enormous granite boulders that crown the local ridges. Black against a blue-black starred sky.
Yarnell had been founded by a small band of gold prospectors in the 1860s. It’s a typical story from the Old West. But these prospectors—including one man, an explorer named Pauline Weaver—actually found nuggets lying on the exposed rock, which wasn’t typical at all. Hot damn, they must have thought, this is the place. They named the outcropping Rich Hill and the town became Yarnell, and it had years of plenty and it had bad times, too. During the Great Depression, the town’s population dipped to just eighteen people. Yarnell tended to attract hardy, independent-minded types, “desert refugees,” they were sometimes called. Its high altitude and cool summer temperatures made it into a retreat for people escaping Phoenix summers. “The most perfect place within the civilized world,” one of its residents described it to a newspaper reporter in the 1950s.
The town was founded on gold, but it survived because of the relief it offered from the hot gusts of the Sonoran Desert, which lies 1,700 feet below. Even the town’s motto centers on wind: “Where the desert breeze meets the mountain air.” In 2013, its population hovered around 650.
Geographically, Yarnell is slotted in between two ridges of the Weaver Mountains, with one main road—State Route 89—running through it. It’s a place most people blow past on their way to Prescott or Phoenix and forget about before the last storefront has flashed by. It’s too small to have a town council, a police department, or even a mayor—but they damn well have a fire department. You have to in central Arizona. For everything else, if something needs doing, a guy or a girl gets off their ass and does it. Simple as that.
There are old mining towns like Yarnell strung all along the highways of Arizona and New Mexico. The people there like the mountains, like the freedom, and don’t miss Boston or Chicago one bit. They sit outside their houses in the afternoon and wait for the cool breeze that often comes after lunch Talk about the chances of rain. Live their lives.
It was like a lot of places hotshots end up in the summer months. Places most people have never heard of.
I was a bit sleepy and as soon as I got in the buggy that morning. I closed my eyes and got some sleep. The hum of the tires on the road put us to sleep. Sometimes you can be on a fire for thirty-six hours straight, so you take any opportunity to rest up for it.
When we stopped at the Yarnell Fire Station at around eight a.m. on June 30, I stretched and stepped out into the bright sunlight. It was hot as a rattlesnake’s belly. Damn, I thought, we’re gonna sweat out there.
I scanned the horizon until I spotted smoke. There it was, on a ridge about a mile away, light gray, barely puffing. The fire was just skunking around, not doing much of anything.
“Hell, dude, this thing looks assed out!” I called to Chris, who was yawning. “We’re going to be home in time for supper tomorrow.”
Chris laughed. “Hope so,” he said.
As ominous as the fire was to the people of Yarnell, we’d seen far worse.
Most of the guys headed off to get a briefing, to find out what the fire was doing, hash out tactics, check weather reports, and decide which radio frequency everyone was going to be on. The fire chiefs were studying a map of Yarnell and the surrounding area on an iPad loaded with Google Maps. They knew what assets were available: their own fire department with their volunteers, fourteen Type 6 fire engines, six water tenders, two bulldozers, three Type 1 hotshot crews (for attacking the fire), two Type 2 crews (for containment and mop-up), with additional crews made up of inmates from two Arizona prisons, Yuma and Lewis. From the air, officials put in the call for three airborne tankers, four SEATs, six helitankers, and the DC-10 out of Albuquerque.
The guys returned and we got in our trucks. A fellow named Gary Cordes, who was in charge of structure protection, drove with us, showing us the terrain. One place he pointed out on the map was Boulder Springs Ranch. It’s owned by a retired couple and filled with western art: huge strands of barbed wire as thick as a man’s waist, along with other curiosities. The owners had cleared the land of trees and shrubs and their structures were made of fire-resistant materials. It was an ideal safety zone, safe as anything in the area. “Bombproof,” Cordes called it. “Of course, you also have the black,” he added.
The supervisors that morning set a series of trigger points. If the fire reached a ridge one mile north of Yarnell, residents would be ordered to evacuate. A second trigger was established closer to the town—if that one was breached, firefighters themselves would be ordered to leave. The third trigger, a ridge right on the edge of Yarnell, was the last-ditch point: If the fire hit it, anyone remaining in the town was to retreat immediately.
In Boise, Idaho, 860 miles away, officials at the National Interagency Coordination Center were watching the fire. The NICC is a clearinghouse for wildland firefighters. Every blaze in the country is monitored and assessed and firefighting assets are parceled out according to availability and need. That morning, Yarnell was in the middle of the pack. It was rated as a Type 2 fire, one of several that were active in the early-morning hours.
The fire had grown again and was now roaming between three hundred and five hundred acres. People in Yarnell began making their way to the higher ground east of the town to try to get an eye on the flames. On the way, they saw firefighters and hotshots arriving.
At the briefing, the fire chiefs decided to set an anchor point at the southwest heel of the fire, to keep it from running at Yarnell. Granite Mountain got the job.
Our buggies began threading their way past mobile homes and small houses along Yarnell’s Sesame Street, everything cooking in the heat. The asphalt ran out and we were on dirt roads now, branches scraping the sides of the buggies with a nails-on-a-chalkboard sound. We parked the buggies on the side of Sesame and got out as Eric drove ahead in his supervisor’s truck to scout some more. We trudged ahead on foot and found his truck farther up the slope, parked in a clearing to keep it away from any advancing fire.
We got ready to hike in to the fire line, checking our tools and ’saws. We guzzled as much water as we could and slung extra bottles of it onto our packs. The guys made their final calls to their families before leaving their phones in the trucks—many of them didn’t carry their cells into a fire, as reception in the hills was often spotty or nonexistent.
Eric radioed back to Jesse, telling him he’d found a route in. We headed down the dirt road that led all the way to the top of the ridge, with Jesse in the lead. The hill was dusty, dried-out vegetation to our left and right, the only sounds the tramping of our feet and the occasional warble of a songbird. Tangles of chaparral. The shrubs around us had grown thick and twisted in the last fifty years. They were ten feet high in places, with pines studded here and there reaching to twenty feet.
The scrub was nothing abnormal, but it was thicker than in most places we worked. In your mind, as you walk, there’s a little calculator adding up the amount and the type of fuel around you. Square footage times height times density. I knew there was a shit-ton of chaparral ready to go up if the fire came this way.
The fire was chewing steadily north, away from our position. It was now threatening the homes of a subdivision called Model Creek in Peeples Valley. At 10:45 a.m., the fire chiefs ordered the people from Model Creek and the nearby Double Bar A Ranch evacuated. Cars rolled down the dirt roads as residents brought their dogs and cats to the nearby Muleshoe Animal Clinic for safekeeping. Bigger animals, including horses, were loaded into trailers and released into pens at a place called Hidden Springs Ranch.
We were heading toward the southwest side of the fire, which was mostly burning to the north-northeast.
There were problems in the air above us. Only two of the requested four SEATs were flying and dropping retardant. The other two were out of commission with mechanical problems. They hoped to join the fight later in the day, but every hour was critical. And at 9:40 a.m., two of the heavy tankers had been called off Yarnell and headed to another wildfire, in Kingman.
There was just too much fire across Arizona to devote everything to ours.
I kept my eyes on the trail, looking for snakes, trying to pace myself. The air felt humid, though I knew that wasn’t possible. The sun was drying out the air quick. We were at about five thousand feet, almost a mile above sea level.
When we got to the top of the ridge, we took a look at the fire. We were high enough up that we were looking level at the flames eating through the brush to the north. Eric gave us a quick briefing: The weather was super hot and windy. Homes were being threatened. It was our job to keep the flames from heading toward Yarnell and the nearby town of Glen Ilah. If things got hot, the escape route was through the black or to the “bombproof” safety zone, Boulder Springs Ranch.
“I need a short squad,” Eric said. “We got any volunteers?”
I stepped up, along with Scott Norris, Billy, and Dustin. Eric chose me as the lead.
I smiled. That felt good. It was the first time he’d ever done that.
“We’re gonna take these guys and button up the anchor, okay?”
“Sure thing,” I said.
“Okay. I’ll walk you to the heel.”
The five of us headed to the back side of the mountain, walking along the two-track road we’d come in on. (This also happened to be an old firebreak, which was a plus.) Eric pointed out the spot he wanted us to carve out as the anchor point, which was a section of an old trail. He then headed north, scouting. He told us he’d call on the radio if he needed us to change position.
Billy and I got our Pulaski tools out and began scraping at the ground, clearing a two-foot barrier down to the bare mineral soil, tearing out brush and roots and leaving a clean firebreak, while Scott and Dustin cut and swamped with a chainsaw. The old trail separated the green from the black, so we were basically cleaning up the old trail while the ’saw team cut a few feet of brush on each side, looking for any sign of heat. (This is called cold-trailing.) I wanted to dig out a few cup trenches—ditches on the downhill slope of a hill that has the possibility of burning. You dig a nice little trench, form a lip or a berm on the downslope edge, and that baby will catch material rolling down the hill that might light up brush farther down the hill. We dug a few of those.
At 10:30 a.m., the fire’s front was a 1.5-mile-long line of burning brush, still moving in a northerly direction. By 11:00, the fire had grown to 1,500 acres. Flame lengths were at fifteen to twenty feet. A DC-10 was droning overhead, dumping its loads of nearly twelve thousand gallons of retardant.
The wind was fitful, and the sun was riding high in a blue sky. Every so often I glanced at the smoke on the horizon. It was getting a little thicker and darkening. A fire is always either growing or dying out, and this one was growing.
Thirty minutes later, we’d almost cleared out the anchor point. No flames were going to get past here unless they were massive, arcing over to the chaparral on the other side. Sweat was pouring down my face as I saw Eric approaching in his yellow hard hat.
He pitched in and helped us clear the last half chain—that is, ten yards—of line.
“Looks good, Donut. Nice work.”
I felt a surge of pride. Eric didn’t give out praise that often. I knew the anchor was tight—I’d learned enough in the last two years to tell a sloppy job from a first-rate one.
It was a tiny moment of satisfaction. I felt like I knew what I was doing. I’d earned Eric Marsh’s trust. That meant a great deal to me.
We headed back and found the main group. They were burning backfires on the upslope, lighting chaparral and letting it crackle, depriving the fire of any fuel if it doubled back to the south. A few of the guys were working their drip torches, and we watched as the flames licked up on the shrubs.
After the fire ate up about a chain of scrub oak, at 11:36 a.m., a plane flew overhead and dumped some retardant on the area, killing the burn. “Shit,” Eric said, annoyed. “What the hell are they doing?” About ten minutes later, another tanker came swooping in and laid another coat of retardant, pissing Eric off again. The pilots were clearly trying to pretreat the green sections, but they were misjudging the distance.
At noon, an ASM, or aerial supervision module—a fixed-wing aircraft with two crewmembers aboard—arrived over Yarnell. Its job was to coordinate the airborne assets in attacking the fire, manage air traffic, work on tactics, and actually lead the drop planes to their target. The crew would be another set of eyes on the fire line.
Eric decided we would go direct—head straight to the burning edge of the fire and cut line there. He and Jesse were talking. I bent down to tie my shoelace and when I looked up, Jesse motioned me over.
“Hey, Donut, what do you think of taking lookout?”
“Sure,” I said. I wasn’t particularly excited about the job. Being a lookout meant standing in the sun and baking while staring at the same patch of land. But it’s a key part of the work.
“You got your weather kit?”
Working lookout is just what it sounds like. You find an ideal spot from which to observe the fire (which is often different from where the crew is cutting line) and you watch it and the weather. You are the eyes of the crew. You measure the temperature and the probability of ignition. You monitor incoming weather and cloud formations. Basically, you’re a one-man early-warning system for any potential danger.
I looked around for a spot to perch. At first I thought I’d stay close to the crew, but as I surveyed the terrain I saw there wasn’t a natural lookout spot anywhere within fifty yards. But out farther was an opening in the brush that would give me a wide-angle view of the landscape and the fire.
I pointed it out to Jesse and Eric. “How about there?” It was a rocky outcropping in a section of flat ground, about half a mile away to the northeast, closer to where the fire was whipping ahead.
They turned their heads and nodded. Done.
I heard the sound of a UTV, and sure enough one rolled up on us. On board were two hotshots, the superintendent and a captain, from the Blue Ridge crew. Blue Ridge was based in the Coconino National Forest, near Flagstaff, and they’d been called in that day just like Granite Mountain. The crew was working about half a mile downslope from us, at the base of the hill.
Time to do the weather. I took out my wet thermometer, dipped the wick, and started spinning it. As I got my readings, the Blue Ridge guys were asking about a lookout. “That’s him,” Jesse said, pointing to me. The super, Brian Frisby, asked me if I wanted a ride to the clearing. I said, “Hell yeah.”
I relayed my weather readings to Jesse and Eric, then packed my stuff for the ride to the lookout point. “Catch you later,” I said to Eric.
Eric smiled. “This side or the other, brother.” I thought nothing of it. It was an everyday thing to say.
“Why do they call you Donut?” Brian asked. I explained as we walked toward the UTV.
The day’s strategy was clear. Granite Mountain would stay on the anchor of the fire in the southwest, while most of the resources—air and ground—would be concentrated on the “head” of the fire in the north. The boys would cut chaparral and dig line along the edge of the fire. They’d chop out a piece of line, then see if it held before moving on. We’d have three sets of eyes on the fire: me, Eric, and Jesse near the crew. We’d be linked by radio to Blue Ridge and the rest of the personnel working Yarnell, as well as the spotters in the air.
I got on the UTV along with Brian and the Blue Ridge captain. Brian whipped it around and I got my last glimpse of the boys as they headed into the brush, their bodies leaning forward, their heads tilted down. The camera in my brain clicked and I looked over Brian’s shoulder at the terrain ahead.