The fire was zero percent contained. It was bearing down on the northern part of Yarnell and burning everything in sight. I was hiking down Shrine Road with three other Blue Ridge hotshots when we got an urgent call from Brian on the radio.
“Get the trucks and get ’em out of there. Meet up at the Ranch House Restaurant.”
I copied that and we headed toward the trucks. “Goddamn,” I said, “they’re pulling everyone out.”
The town was quickly being engulfed. The fire’s internal winds were shooting spot fires half a mile ahead. Fire was ahead of us and above us. We had this feeling of encirclement. The fire was burning through dozens of houses. Fire-eaten roofs crashed to the ground; walls collapsed in plumes of smoke, leaving door frames smoking in front of black ruins, fire licking at the char.
Around me, townspeople ran for their cars as the fire came into the town on hot sirocco winds. Houses in Yarnell were burning in strange, piecemeal patterns—one was completely burned out while the one next door was only singed. Metal roofs melted into congealed globs of steel. Crystal glasses in cabinets bent and wilted in on themselves. Firefighters ran from door to door, yelling at people to get out.
The Blue Ridge hotshots and I pulled out of our position and began to make our way to safety. Other personnel were heading toward the restaurant, striving to get out of the fire’s path. Some didn’t want to leave. Supervisors jumped on their UTVs and zoomed along the dirt roads, shouting at the men to go. Now.
Cinders and smoke were choking the air. I could taste ash in my mouth with every breath. The evacuation was by now mandatory and immediate. Many people had left already, but any hotshot knows that it will amaze you how many people stay behind until the last moment. Some will fight you as you try to save them from certain death.
At 4:18 p.m., the long-delayed outflow winds slammed into the fire’s northern flank. The smoke on the fire line stiffened and rose up into a gray wall laced with pink-orange fire at its base. The fire turned on a dime, swerving away from the north and branching into several “heads” or flanks. It sprouted two fingers that turned and raced south and southeast. Even as the flames spread and covered a wider area, they were growing more intense. The fire was pumping a tremendous amount of brown-black smoke into the atmosphere. At 4:24 p.m., images on Doppler radar would show that the smoke plume had reached a height of about 31,500 feet, approaching the cruising altitude for commercial aircraft. By 4:33 p.m., the plume would climb to 38,700 feet.
There were intermittent dashes of rain. The crew members in the aircraft circling above, designated ASM2, noticed water mixing with ash on its windshield. They could hear thunder close by now, echoing in the cockpit before rumbling down to the terrain below. But little or no rain was reaching the fire.
Somewhere around 4:20 p.m., the crew of Granite Mountain reached a saddle of a ridge above a box canyon that was on the way to the Boulder Springs Ranch. They were on high ground with a clear view of the wildfire to the northeast. Between the ridge and the ranch was a box canyon, closed off on three sides by steep stone walls. It was filled with Gambel oak and manzanita.
In Yarnell, there was confusion about Granite Mountain’s route. Brian Frisby assumed they were heading the other way—northeast toward other burned-over ranches that lay in the black. But Eric apparently wanted to stick to his original retreat spot, the “bombproof” one. Perhaps that earlier request to redeploy in Yarnell had influenced his thinking: Boulder Springs is closer to the town. Perhaps he wanted to be in position to help save what could be saved.
What was Eric thinking at this moment? Every supervisor is constantly balancing safety and aggressiveness. How can I keep my boys alive while also doing my job? How close to the fire is safe? If a supervisor always keeps his men far away from the fire line, eventually forest and homes will burn. He will defeat the purpose of his crew. He might lose his job.
Eric was calculating time, distance, wind speed, relative humidity, and fuel type and putting those numbers through twenty years of experience fighting wildfires. From the top of the ridge, the canyon appeared to be a straight shot to the ranch. There was a wash to the right where water had cleared out a pale gash and very little vegetation grew, but it’s unclear whether Eric or Jesse spotted it.
The radios were choked with voices and static. I was trying to keep track of Granite Mountain’s movement. But there was only silence from them. As the Blue Ridge guys and I scrambled to move their trucks, the eighteen Granite Mountain crew members were on the saddle of the ridge.
Then the crew moved down from the saddle into the box canyon. They had to cut their way through tangled brush. Their saws were revving. As soon as they descended deeper into the chaparral, their view of the fire would have been obscured, and by the time they were approaching the floor of the canyon, it would have been blocked by the ridge wall to their left. Maybe they saw the smoke standing straight up like a cloak hanging on a hook. But that was it.
When you drop into a box canyon or into high scrub, you lose essential information about the fire: You can’t feel the wind speed on your face anymore. The canyon walls protect you from that. You can’t see what the fire’s doing. You can see the smoke wall, but that is a lagging indicator, often indicating a change in fire direction several minutes after it happens. Deep in the chaparral, you become blind to the flaming front.
Hovering over the fire was ASM2, a second fixed-wing aircraft that had relieved the first one on the scene, which had finished its shift at 2:27 p.m. ASM2 was now coordinating the air response to the fire. (The Air Attack fixed-wing aircraft had also run low on fuel and left the area at around 4:00 p.m.). In the cockpit, the pilot was telling incoming air tankers where to drop their loads when he heard a snippet on the radio while another crew member was talking with fire supervisors on the air-to-ground frequency. Suddenly, this crew member cut in. “I heard a crew in a safety zone. Do we need to call a time-out?” He wanted to know if the aircraft should abandon firefighting to do flyovers and check on the hotshot crew. A supervisor radioed back. “No, they’re in a good place. They’re safe and it’s Granite Mountain.”
The crew was making their way down into the box canyon by this time, bushwhacking through thick foliage. They had stepped out of the black and into the green. Everyone who’d been following their transmissions believed they were on the black ridge, but in fact they’d left it minutes before and their progress down into the canyon made a retreat back to the blackened two-track increasingly unfeasible.
Suddenly, Eric was on the radio: “We’re going down our escape route to our safety zone.”
“Is everything okay?” the supervisor says.
“Yes, we’re just moving.”
Eric didn’t indicate that the crew had moved off the black and into the box canyon. His voice sounded normal.
At 4:30 p.m., the outflow winds from the thunderstorm swept down from the clouds and slammed into the southern edge of the blaze. The fire now exploded and instantly turned another ninety degrees. The wall of flame was now perhaps one hundred feet at its highest. And it was moving along a new route. Just after Granite Mountain had lost sight of the fire, the fire pivoted directly at them.
The nineteen men making their way through brush that reached over their heads were completely unaware of what had happened.
The fire picked up speed. It whipped through the dry brush, carried by winds gusting to fifty miles per hour. One local later described the fire now as “both moving and flying,” so impatient to consume what was ahead of it that it had lifted from the ground and inhabited the desert air.
The human body is no match for these conditions. A body taking two consecutive breaths of three-hundred-degree air will die within seconds. Driven by cold downdrafts, the fire was sucking in the crisp new oxygen and was now burning at two thousand degrees.
A few minutes later, the flames reached the last trigger point, the final ridge before the town proper began. A supervisor made a hurried call to Air Attack.
“Drop at will!” he called into the radio. The DC-10s screamed overhead, dropping low to try to save the town, dumping thousands of gallons of retardant where the flames were biggest. Granite Mountain was now the only crew still in the hills; everyone else was retreating toward Route 89 or trying to get out of the fire’s way.
We were driving toward the restaurant on Route 89. I spotted the place, with its wide parking lot cleared of brush, with no scrub oak to burn. As I pulled into the lot, I saw firefighters sitting on the ground, spent, and old people laid out on stretchers.
But where was Granite Mountain? I had no idea they’d moved out of the black. Neither did anyone else. The focus was on saving Yarnell and not getting burned up ourselves.
In the town, the firestorm continued to rage. Branches and knifelike embers shot through the air, alighting on roofs and shattering windows. Those windows that weren’t broken melted in the heat. In the unburned section, the wind was bending the trees, turning their leaves over from green to silver and making a sound like water shooting through narrow rapids.
At 4:37 p.m., Eric looked up and saw a DC-10 airplane flying east to west, preparing to drop its retardant. “That’s exactly what we’re looking for,” he radioed the pilot. “That’s where we want the retardant.” But by the time the tanker turned for its drop, the winds had shifted and the hill was shrouded in smoke. The pilot aborted the run. The hill below the pilot was now a roiling carpet of black and gray.
By this point, the fire was ripping across the ridge to Granite Mountain’s left. The canyon itself acted as a heat trap, allowing no escape for the smoke or fire that were beginning to pour through the brush. Chaparral and manzanita exploded before the flames even reached them. On the shoulders of the nearby hills, great granite boulders that have acted as sentinels for millennia burst their skins from the intense heat, shedding basketball-sized flakes of stone.
The fire was moving down into the canyon at about thirteen miles per hour. The average human being can run for short distances at a top speed of fifteen miles per hour. But that is unencumbered by packs and along a clear, flat path. The men at the floor of the canyon were wearing heavy gear and thick-soled leather boots and were caught in a place with no clear egress. If they’d spotted the wash to their right and dropped their packs, perhaps they could have outrun the flames. It would have been a very close race. But there is no evidence that they saw the wash.
Somewhere between 4:37 and 4:39 p.m., the situation changed drastically. The radio was thick with voices. Everyone was calling in homes that were endangered or blazing up. At 4:39, I was sitting in the truck when I heard Eric’s voice struggling through the static: “Breaking in on Arizona Sixteen, Granite Mountain Hotshots, we are in front of the flaming front.”
My heart froze. I’d never heard Eric’s voice like this—panicked, anguished. And the words “in front of the flaming front.” How was that even possible? Granite Mountain was supposed to be in the cold black, up on a ridge, with acres of black behind them. Untouchable. How could the wall of fire have caught them?
The transmission caused confusion in Yarnell. “Is Granite Mountain still in there?” a firefighter listening to the transmissions called out.
“Well, they’re in a safety zone,” another answered. “In the black.”
The fire must have appeared over the ridge to Granite Mountain’s left. It had also cut off the canyon’s mouth ahead of them. The escape route to the ranch was disappearing. There might have been a small opening to the west, hard by the canyon wall, but the flames were closing it quickly.
The fire had appeared out of nowhere, five stories high. To be caught in grasslands in front of a moving fire is something to be dreaded. But at least you can run. To face a voracious fire in a bramble of trees and scrub, unable to move three feet without encountering an obstacle, is simply terrifying.
Firefighters moving toward the safety of Route 89 stopped what they were doing and listened to the radio. They thought about the chainsaws audible in the background of Eric’s transmission. Why would a team retreating to a safety zone along a cold black trail be cutting with ’saws? That burring sound over the radio was a confirmation that Granite Mountain was not in the black—where there was no flammable brush to cut. They were in the green.
“I hear ’saws running,” said a firefighter listening in. “That’s not good.”
A voice broke in on the radio. The transmission was broken into fragments, but you could make it out: “Air-to-ground Sixteen, Granite Mountain. Air Attack, how do you read?”
It was an unidentified member of Granite Mountain.
A supervisor responded: “Granite Mountain, Operations on air-to-ground.”
A few seconds later, a panicked voice: “Air Attack, Granite Mountain Seven, how do you copy me?”
No rescue team could reach nineteen men in a box canyon with a wildfire bearing down on them. The only hope for relief was from the air: If a tanker could spot the crew and lay a line of retardant over them, it might buy them a little time. So Eric was calling to Air Attack, presumably to ask for a drop. But ASM2 thought Granite Mountain was in the black and safe.
Eric was back on the radio: “Air Attack, Granite Mountain Seven!” He was yelling now. The pilot—unaware of what was happening—cut in and told him to stop shouting. Another firefighter said, “That’s not good.”
“No, he’s screaming,” another agreed.
A supervisor called to the pilot. “Okay, Granite Mountain Seven sounds like they got some trouble. Uh, go ahead and get that, he’s trying to get you on the radio, let’s go ahead and see what we’ve got going on.”
Before he could call Granite Mountain, Eric was back. His voice was calmer. “Division Alpha with Granite Mountain.” He was still trying to establish contact.
The pilot called back, “Okay, uh, Division Alpha.”
In the two or three seconds that elapsed with the pilot’s response, something changed again. Eric’s voice was again bordering on shouting. ’Saws were ripping in the background. “Yeah, I’m here with Granite Mountain Hotshots, our escape route has been cut off. We are preparing a deployment site and we are burning out around ourselves in the brush and I’ll give you a call when we are under the sh-shelters.”
I felt sick. This cannot be happening, I thought. I wanted to scream into the radio.
Granite Mountain had realized by then that they couldn’t make the ranch.
I was speechless. I felt as if my nightmare from the Doce Fire—of being trapped by intense flames—was coming true. But it was happening to my brothers.
In the canyon, the hotshots were cutting in a crude circle while swampers rushed to drag the brush to the perimeter and throw it as far as they could. Guys were running at the edge of the circle, dripping fire onto the brush, trying to burn out a ring around themselves. As the fire roared a hundred feet high and they knew it was seconds from blowing through the circle, they heaved back and threw their ’saws deep into the thick brush. The small amount of oil inside the ’saws, if ignited, would add only a tiny fraction of heat to the firestorm that was as big as an apartment block. But this is what they were trained to do. Their minds were being starved of oxygen, confused by toxic fumes pushed ahead of the flames.
The pilot copied. “So you’re on the south side of the fire, then?”
At 4:42, Eric: “AFFIRM!”
The canyon must have been a swirling storm of cinders, smoke, and airborne poisons.
“’Kay,” the pilot shot back, “we’re gonna bring you the VLAT, okay?”
The pilot asked the VLAT to come to the southeast and orbit until he could see Granite Mountain and direct the drop. The VLAT pilot copied that and said he would keep “full eyes” on ASM2 and be ready to dump his load to help Granite Mountain. He was circling the burning hills, waiting for the drop coordinates.
If he hit them directly, perhaps they would have had a chance. Or if he had dropped the retardant on the fire line just in front of them, perhaps he could have bought them seconds. A minute, perhaps. But the fire was so powerful now that it was basically impervious to chemicals or water or any human endeavor to stop it.
The pilots in the various aircraft flying over Yarnell struggled to make out the terrain below them. Plumes of black smoke were funneling up past their windshields as if they were inside a burning silo. They knew that below them somewhere was Granite Mountain. But where in the swirling blackness were the missing hotshots? He tilted his rotors and peered down through the cinders and ash. They reported extreme fire behavior and heavy smoke on the landscape below.
The hotshots now stripped themselves of their packs. The fire was roaring like jet engines at full throttle. Manzanita and scrub oak detonated with showers of ash and bark. The men’s lungs strained for breathable air. They ripped the tightly rolled shelters from their packs, flung them out, and fell to the dusty ground, catching their handmade boots inside the silver foil and stretching out. They couldn’t hear each other with the shrieking of the inferno. The temperature soared hundreds of degrees in a matter of seconds as the flaming wall approached.
They were in front of the inferno now, crouching at its feet. The air turned poisonous and unbearably hot. Their last chance was to stay under the shelters and hope that the fire blew over them without too much damage to the frangible bodies underneath.
No one had run. They were close enough to touch each other. Their voices, if they were yelling, were drowned in the deep-throated roar of the fire. Under the darkness of the smoke plume, the circle around them brightened and the shelters, their foil rippling away in the wind that raced ahead of the fire, reflected the orange of the dancing flames.
The men turned their heads away from the superheated air. Those inside the shelters grabbed the edges of the foil and tried to force them down, trying to keep the toxic air and the flames from boiling into the tent, as the blisteringly hot gases shot past, rocking the shelters. They turned their faces to the earth and sucked in a breath. Carbon monoxide poured into the shelters, dizzying the men and clouding their brains. If they inhaled enough of it, what was happening all around would have appeared to be a dream or a form of derangement.
The fire was now seven stories high. It was hot enough to burn uranium. It swept through the scrub oak and pine, the branches making a tiny clicking noise in the deafening roar. The winds took the flames and bent them close to the earth, which increased the fire’s intensity. The terrain around the men appeared to explode into daylight.
The fire fell on them.