My experience was being replayed all over Yarnell. Five to seven minutes after reaching the first Yarnell trigger point, the fire blew through the second one. The distance between the two triggers was supposed to give firefighters ample time to evacuate the town in an orderly manner, but the process, in truth, had barely started by the time the flames broke through point number two. One supervisor would say later that if they had doubled the distances, they still wouldn’t have given the crews and the locals adequate time to retreat. The fire was simply moving faster than anyone could remember a wildfire moving.
On the north end of the fire supervisors made sure the last of the firefighters were moving away from the firestorm. As they rounded up the final stragglers and headed south, they realized the light behind them had turned dark. They looked over their shoulders. The wall of black smoke was four stories high, blocking out the sun. Embers were dropping around them like black hail, tapping on their helmets and igniting tiny blazes that glowed like jack-o’-lanterns. The air became suffocating.
The UTV shot through the brush, heading downhill. Two minutes later I jumped off at the spot where the Granite Mountain trucks were parked.
“If it gets hot, don’t worry about the vehicles,” Brian said. “Just move.”
He needed to get drivers. Moving all our trucks out one at a time would take too long with just one or two guys. The fleet would burn up before I could do it myself.
I’d made it. Now my mind was on our vehicles. The thought that Granite Mountain might be in danger hadn’t occurred to me; they were in the black, with good eyes on the fire. I’d gotten out by the skin of my teeth, but Eric and Jesse would take care of the others. There were decades of experience up there on that ridgeline.
On the radio, Jesse assured the Blue Ridge super that they were in the black and they were watching the fire. Eric was scouting the fire and other possible escape routes.
Everything was kosher. There was a plan.
Right about this time, up on that ridge, Chris MacKenzie picked up his cell phone and began shooting a video. In it, the boys are sitting in a field of granite boulders, the fire below them, a hot seam of lava-like orange. The crew is resting, adjusting their equipment and watching the fire that is ripping below them, sending billows of gray-brown smoke skyward. The mood on the video is relaxed but watchful; they’re safe, their packs are on, there’s chaw tucked into their cheeks, they’re marveling a little at how the nothing fire has turned into a tempest. They’re removed from the battle.
Eric’s voice can be heard on the radio. “I was just saying that I knew this was coming when I called you, and I asked what your comfort level was. I could just feel it, y’know?”
He’s talking to Jesse about the fire, how it’s moving, how they both feel about what it’s doing.
Jesse is standing nearby, out of frame. “All right, copy,” he tells Eric. “And it’s almost made it to that two-track road that we walked in on.”
At that moment, Chris hit the stop button and the video ends. It’s eighteen seconds long.
In another transmission to Jesse, Eric reported that the winds were turning “squirrely.” It was, ironically, the same word a hotshot foreman had used on the South Canyon Fire nineteen years earlier, just minutes before the fire had chased down his crew and killed them.
At 3:54 p.m., another Granite Mountain hotshot texted a family member: The fire is running at Yarnell!!! From that ridge, there was nothing they could do to stop the fire. It had already infiltrated the town and was burning it from one end to the other.
All over the hills, everything changed in an instant. A captain of another group of firefighters was running through an arroyo, with rock walls on each side ten feet high, escaping as the sound of the fire echoed in the narrow canyons. When he looked up, he saw a dense river of gray smoke and a sheet of red fire over his head, jumping the gap between the rock walls. Without the stone that protected him, he would have been charred alive. He later estimated that had he waited just one minute more to move, he would have been caught in the inferno and incinerated.
I turned the volume on the radio up all the way so I could keep track of the fire. A supervisor was asking Blue Ridge if they had time to burn a backfire and slow the wildfire.
Negative, Blue Ridge responded.
Eric heard the report and his voice broke in. He said from his vantage point the fire had almost reached the buggies. It was too late to save them—the fire was about to ignite their gas tanks and burn them to the frames. He clearly had a good eye on the fire because it was very close.
The Blue Ridge guys and I were maneuvering the Granite Mountain trucks away from the flames, moving them to Shine Road. When we got there, I saw fire engines flying past, trying to cut off the fire before it completely engulfed the town. There were houses on fire left and right, propane tanks shooting off in the near distance with eerie high-pitched whistles.
Yarnell was the focus. From what we knew, Granite Mountain was up above us, safe in the black.
At 4:04 p.m., up on the ridgeline, Wade took out his cell phone and snapped a picture of the fire—billowing tan-gray clouds shooting up into the atmosphere—and texted it to a family member: This thing is running straight for yarnel [sic] just starting evac. You can see fire on left, town on right.
The crew was now near where I’d left them, on the ridge where they’d set the backfires. They were heading southeast toward Boulder Springs Ranch, which Eric had picked out as the crew’s safe zone that morning. Their route was along the two-track road, which wasn’t a direct one; it curved around in a semicircle.
Around this time, I heard Eric’s voice on the radio. Calm, deliberate. “I want to pass on that we’re going to make our way to our escape route.” My gut tightened.
“You guys are in the black, correct?” the Blue Ridge super shot back.
“Yeah, we’re picking our way through the black… going out toward the ranch.”
Blue Ridge super: “To confirm, you’re talking about the road you saw me on with the UTV earlier, in the bottom?”
Eric again: “Yes, the road I saw you on with the Ranger.” The conversation ended. The Boulder Spring Ranch, the bombroof area that Granite Mountain had scouted that morning, was 1.6 miles away. We all believed they were moving toward it.