Above the canyon, the pilot of Helicopter 215KA was sitting at a heliport preparing to go refuel. But then he heard Eric’s final transmissions. He immediately lifted off and radioed ASM2; they both began prowling over the flaming hills, looking for Granite Mountain. The smoke over the box canyon was so heavy by now that neither crew could see through to the ground.
The pilot: “Granite Mountain, do you copy?”
Static blared on the radio. Someone was thumbing the mic on his radio but uttering no sound.
“We’re working our way around there,” the pilot called. “We’ve got several aircraft coming to you. We’ll see if we can’t take care of business for you.”
No response.
“I need you to pay attention,” the pilot said, “and tell me when you hear the aircraft, okay? ’Cause it’s gonna be a little tough for us to see you.” With visuals gone, they would try to home in on Granite Mountain’s position by sound.
Granite Mountain’s radio clicked again and stayed down. The channel was open at their end and broadcasting. There was a loud pulsing sound, like a hammer hitting a length of sheet metal, but no voices. There was also the sound of rushing air, which must have been the firestorm moving across the canyon.
The pilot: “Division Alpha, Bravo Thirty-Three, do you hear a helicopter?”
Three fast clicks on the radio. Someone in Granite Mountain was hitting the transmit button but not saying anything.
At Boulder Springs Ranch, the “bombproof” safety zone that the fire supervisors had identified that morning, the owner was unaware of what was happening in the box canyon a couple hundred yards from her front door. She walked out of the handsome wooden home to check on her dog, who was roaming around outside. She looked to her left and saw a black wall of smoke hemmed by hot flame roaring toward the ranch. She yelled to her husband and ran for the pen where her animals—goats and a lone alpaca—were exposed. Her husband dashed to the barn, throwing open the door. With the roar of the fire concussing the air, the two herded their animals into the barn and shut the door. They raced back to their home. They weren’t inside more than a minute when the fire rushed over the ranch and began burning to the south.
Their home and the barn were unharmed. Having built with fire-resistant materials and scrupulously cleared the grounds of brush, the owners and their animals survived. The ranch had indeed proved to be bombproof.
At the restaurant, I could see the ridge of the box canyon. We were all watching the brown and black smoke coiling and twisting as flames surged up the slope. Finally the fire gained the top of the ridge and shot 150 feet in the air. I felt nauseous. If Granite Mountain was anywhere near that… I didn’t finish the thought.
I was trying to keep the dark thoughts at bay. They got out, I kept telling myself. They dropped their radios but they made it. I’ll see them soon.
Voices on the radio.
“Operations, Thirty-Three, any communication yet?”
“No, negative, Tanker One Ninety thought he heard him but I’ve been unable to get anything.”
“Do you have any firm location where they’re at?”
“No… I would say the southeast corner of the fire. That’s the best I can do for you right now.”
In Yarnell proper, it was as dark as if night had settled overhead. Security cameras sensed the alteration in light and changed from day to night mode. Vehicles moving out to Route 89 switched on their headlights to see through the drafts of smoke and embers. The emergency lights of ambulances flashed as they carried bewildered residents toward open spaces. The faces in the windows looked pale, shocked.
It was just chaos now. No order. You didn’t know where the fire was; you had the feeling that you could turn a corner and it would spring at you from a line of brush, coming at you faster than you could run, and you’d be done. Nowhere was safe.
Time started to break down. Or perhaps it was my grip on it. I was waiting for my brothers to come trudging down the road, their faces caked with smoke residue, their white teeth showing through the black.
I started talking to God in my mind. I asked him to take me and let my friends survive. I would have gladly lain down in the flames at that moment if it meant my brothers could live.
Hotshots began to measure time by the last call from Granite Mountain.
“How long’s it been?” one called to another.
“Thirty minutes?”
Fire officials initiated a medical response. They asked five paramedics and three EMTs who were stranded at the restaurant to make themselves ready. They issued a call for five medevac helicopters. They set up a triage center and notified a nearby burn unit that they might be getting injured patients from Yarnell.
I was running around scrounging up medical supplies and getting them ready for when Granite Mountain came in. They might be burned; they might need oxygen for their scarred lungs. I wanted to be ready for them. Once I’d gotten all the stuff, I monitored the radios and prayed for Jesse or Eric to say they were all right.
The fire was still raging, but Brian Frisby and Rogers Trueheart Brown, Blue Ridge’s crew captain, decided to go in on the UTVs. I helped them get their gear together and when they were ready, I went up to Brian. “Bring ’em back,” I said. “Please bring my brothers back.”
He nodded. Brian and Rogers jumped on a UTV and Brian revved it up, then put it into gear. Other firefighters, hearing about the deployment on the radio, rushed to join them. Supervisors were repeatedly trying to raise Eric on the radio, but there was only silence. Not even static or clicking.
The UTVs zigzagged through Yarnell on their way to the two-track road. They drove through the outskirts of the town, into a pall of light-gray smoke lit by orange spot fires to their left and right. Burned-out homes showed as a series of blackened rectangles—door frames all that was left of the structures. Trucks in their driveways tottered on melted tires. The air was still choking hot and burned tree limbs crunched beneath the UTVs’ wheels. The hotshots probed ahead, calling to each other to watch the power lines, which sagged in the heat. At times it seemed like the fire ahead was not the remnants of the fire wall but a flank of it, sweeping around for another run through town.
“Fuck it,” one firefighter cried. “Let’s go for it.”
They found a dirt track. Their engines growled and the tires thudded on the rutted road as they made their way upslope. Palls of tan-gray smoke. There was less fire out there than in the town.
The crew of a helicopter known as Ranger 58 heard the radio traffic and loaded medical gear into the cabin before taking off at 5:16 p.m. They flew to the last reported position of Granite Mountain and hovered over the smoke-enshrouded hill. They spotted what looked like a backpack pump—a tank and hose that hotshots can carry into the initial attack—dropped at a nearby helispot. They reported their finding on the radio. Did it belong to Eric?
They asked me over the radio if Granite Mountain carried backpack pumps. “No, we didn’t have them today,” I said. It had to be from someone else. “Any idea where they are?”
I told them the crew should have been on the two-track going toward Boulder Springs, unless they’d broken off and headed north toward the other ranches in the black.
The radio buzzed with static.
“Can you give me the names of everyone with them?”
I started to recite the names of my brothers.
The UTVs threaded their way up a path cleared by a dozer. Everything around them was blasted and smoking. When the trail ran out, they dismounted and walked across the tops of canyon ridges, the scene in front of them peaceful now, the pale smoke from the fire lying in the valleys like morning mist, with only the ancient rocky spurs of the hills visible. They came across a few items of Granite Mountain’s gear, but the men themselves were nowhere in sight.
“Come on, Granite,” one of the firefighters called out, “let’s hear you talk.”
The Ranger 58 pilot turned his craft toward Boulder Springs Ranch. He’d recalled the earlier transmission: Granite Mountain had set this ranch as their safety zone. At 6:10 p.m., the smoke was slowly clearing and the pilot spotted something glinting down below. He realized it was a series of deployment shelters located on the floor of a box canyon. From above, the canyon looked “moonscaped,” everything except stone and hardy tree branches carbonized by the firestorm. The pilot got on the radio and called in the location. The canyon lay approximately one mile south-southeast of Granite’s last reported position.
The pilot brought his helicopter down and landed five hundred yards away from the shelters, which were being tugged across the ground by a light breeze. Eric Tarr, the flight medic, grabbed a first-aid bag and jumped out. He marched toward the shelters, talking into a radio clipped to his shoulder. The landscape was something out of a Brothers Grimm forest: partially exploded granite boulders sat alongside blackened, twisted manzanita branches. The fire was moving so fast when it came through that it didn’t have time to burn the trees themselves. Nothing green had been left behind. The ground was smoking.
Tarr had a water tube connected to a backpack and he sipped on it as he walked, trying to alleviate the terrific heat. Suddenly, he heard voices up ahead. He was stunned. It seemed inconceivable that anything could have survived what had just come through this canyon, but Tarr quickened his pace to reach the shelters. The foil was glinting and moving in the wind like silvery fish flitting through black water. Tarr called out.
As he reached the deployment zone, Tarr saw bodies laid out on the ground in a twenty-four-by-thirty-foot space, arrayed in a rough horseshoe. Seven of the hotshots were still inside their shelters. The voices he’d heard came from Granite Mountain’s radios, which were scattered on the ground. Somehow the radios had survived the flames.
Everyone at the restaurant had stopped to listen.
“Yeah, Todd,” Tarr said over the radio. “On scene. Eighteen confirmed.” He’d miscounted by one. There were actually nineteen bodies.
Boulder Springs Ranch lay six hundred yards away.
I was sitting in one of the Granite Mountain buggies. A cell phone went off behind me. I looked back. Then another. I knew the news of the tragedy was just filtering out into Prescott, and the families of the nineteen men were calling their loved ones to find out if they were safe. Each ping represented a mother or a wife or a father or brother hoping a voice they knew would answer.
I didn’t know what to do. I got out of the buggy and walked down the road until I couldn’t hear the phones’ chirping anymore.