On the Burning Edge (21 page)

T
he forty-six-mile section of Highway 89 between Prescott and Yarnell was built in the 1920s, and it’s still rough enough to make even the road-worn carsick. It took more than an hour for Granite Mountain to travel south, up and over the Bradshaws, through the ponderosas outside Prescott, and into the heavy chaparral brush and beavertail cactus that covers the Weavers around Yarnell. Bob texted his wife, Claire, “So much for days off. Heading to a 500-acre fire in Yarnell. Love you.”

Scott texted his mom. He’d broken dinner plans with his parents the night before for another chance to see Heather. “Sorry I didn’t make it last night. I guess I was tired and fell asleep early. We’ve been reassigned to Yarnell Hill 㘺. Not very excited about it.”

Then he texted Heather: “I love you baby. Have a good weekend. I’ll try and keep you informed if I have service.”

Sometime around 6:30
A.M.
, the hotshots pulled into Yarnell. Built in 1888 during a brief gold-mining boom in the Weavers, the town has forever since tried to reinvent itself as a tourist town. Its slogan: “Where the Desert Breeze Meets the Mountain Air.” But tourism never got the economy going. If Yarnell, at forty-eight hundred feet, is cooler than Phoenix, it’s also warmer than Prescott. The town’s
greatest draw is a toss-up between the Shrine of St. Joseph, a Jesuit collection of marble Jesus statues, and the biscuits and gravy at the Ranch House Restaurant. There’s no supermarket, no gas station, and one bar that holds odd and inconsistent hours. Most days of the week, the Ranch House and two side-by-side antiques stores, one of which proudly displays the town’s logo, a rising buzzard, are the only places open for business. Their customers are most often aging Harley riders or weathered locals in jeans and cowboy hats. Still, the 650 retirees, artists, and eccentrics who call themselves Yarnellers love their home. The people here look after one another.

Geographically, the area around Yarnell is as complex as it is striking. Granite peaks rise to the east and west of town, and scattered everywhere are enormous boulders eroded into the twisted shapes of a Dalí painting. The town is perched on the very southern edge of the Colorado Plateau. Just a few hundred yards beyond the Ranch House, Highway 89 drops eighteen hundred feet over nine miles down to the Sonoran Desert, among the hottest and driest places in North America. At that precipice, one can look out over two hundred miles of desert wilderness. Watching the sunrise from the top of Yarnell Hill is often spectacular, especially during mornings when monsoonal moisture and a little smoke refract the light.

The 30th was such a morning, but Granite Mountain didn’t catch the sunrise from the Ranch House. They stopped a mile north at the volunteer fire station where Shumate, the incident commander, had been running the firefight from an informal Incident Command Post. Except for a few 4×4 trucks from the state and county that were backed into parking spots, the fire station was almost entirely empty. Granite Mountain was the first crew to arrive that morning. The field generals Shumate had called up from around the state were trickling into the station. Those who had arrived already were clutching cups of coffee while organizing the day’s firefight. To a man, they were gray-haired and had spent their careers on dangerous fires.

There was Byron Kimball, the fire-behavior analyst who studied the fuels and weather to predict how the fire would spread. Paul Musser, the former superintendent of the Flagstaff Hotshots, would
serve as one of the two operations chiefs, along with Todd Abel, a firefighter from Yavapai County who had fought fires for eighteen years near his Prescott home. While Musser commandeered additional resources, Abel would direct the on-the-ground tactics of the firefight. Gary Cordes, a mustached Yavapai County fire chief, was the structure-protection specialist for the town of Yarnell.

The fire was still effectively an initial attack. On June 30, Shumate was no closer to catching Yarnell Hill than he had been when he arrived in town on the 28th. But Shumate now looked worn thin from exhaustion. He hadn’t slept in thirty-plus hours, and he wouldn’t be able to until his replacement, a baldheaded and red-faced man named Roy Hall, arrived on scene at around 10
A.M
. to take over as incident commander. There was a lot of work to do before then.

The men gathered around a table, and Shumate spread out a spiral-bound map picked up at the local minimart—perplexingly, the best the growing incident management team had—and shared what he knew about the fire. Thus far, its storyline was short, but its potential was explosive. The fire was burning on top of a ridgeline three miles west of town. Shumate had initially deemed it too far to hike to, and the day before he had ordered a BLM helicopter to fly six firefighters from an Arizona Department of Corrections crew to the ridge. For most of the 29th, the fire crept through the understory of brush thickets, but then the wind picked up late in the afternoon and the fire size jumped from a half-acre to dozens of acres as the flames started running through the chaparral.

Shumate ordered a heavy air tanker and helicopter to keep the blaze in check, but both pilots declined the mission because strong thunderstorms had developed over the runway. So Shumate stuck with the single-engine air tankers—SEATs—available at two nearby municipal airports. By the night of the 29th, pilots had dropped more than seven thousand gallons of retardant along the fire’s flanks. This did little, and the blaze only got more volatile, at one point burning over a cache of Gatorade and extra fuel flown in to resupply the inmate crews.

By 6
A.M
. on the 30th, Yarnell Hill approached three hundred
acres and burned in the shape of a cone. Its pointed end started on the ridgetop and spread half a mile to the north. One flank hung up on the rimrock along the long crescent-shaped ridge that ran between Yarnell and Peeples Valley, and the other had rolled down into the valley at its foot. The fire’s head sat just a mile away from Double Bar A Ranch, the first seven of the forty-two homes in the Model Creek subdivision, which was soon to be impinged upon. The gathered overhead knew the fire could close the distance before six that night.

The firefighters agreed that Model Creek and Peeples Valley, a dispersed community of 428, four miles north of Yarnell, were the first priority. They’d dedicate most of the few dozen incoming resources to doing point protection—building a moat of defensible space around the ranch and letting the fire burn around it. A network of roads and isolated horse ranches in Peeples Valley gave them a decent shot at protecting the community. If the fire became increasingly unmanageable, they could use the roads for lines and intentionally burn off the lighter and flashy fuel in the pastures. Protecting Yarnell, though, was a much different situation.

“My assessment is if this fire hits Yarnell, we’re going to lose the town,” Gary Cordes, the structure-protection specialist, told the others.

He’d been scouting the area since the night before and was using an iPad and Google Earth to study the ground. The house-size rocks that added to Yarnell’s charms were now problems. Many of the homes were tucked into the boulders, so their back doors effectively opened to stone walls. Thick brush surrounded the homes and ran nearly without break to the fire’s edge. Well out of the jurisdiction of the Prescott Fire Department and the city’s progressive wildland fire policies, the homes in Yarnell, like those in most towns in the West, had almost no defensible space.

“Yarnell’s poorly positioned, and the vegetation is very decadent,” said Cordes. The area hadn’t burned in forty-five years, and beneath the chaparral were kindling piles of long-dead limbs and dried leaves.

Byron Kimball, the fire-behavior analyst, was worried, too. He later compared the brush to a kiln-dried two-by-four. Fuel moisture,
or the percentage of water in flammable materials, is the metric used to determine how ready vegetation is to burn. The fuel-moisture content of a two-by-four bought new at Home Depot is usually 10 to 12 percent.

“That same two-by-four, had it been lying on the ground at Yarnell Hill, would probably be four percent fuel moisture,” Kimball said. Fuel did not get drier than that. From very fine grass to the centuries-old junipers that grew thick near Peeples Valley, Kimball’s message was that all that vegetation was ready to burn. The men discussed the best course of action for saving Yarnell, and they didn’t like their options.

The one upside was that they had a bit of time. With the daily winds pushing the fire’s head north toward Peeples Valley, Yarnell’s five hundred homes were threatened primarily by the slowly burning flank. Barring a wind shift, Shumate estimated that the flames wouldn’t get to Yarnell until the morning of July 1.

Cordes, the structure-protection specialist, suggested that the best option for protecting Yarnell lay in a two-mile-long overgrown road that connected the town to the ridge where the fire burned. If the fire continued north toward Peeples Valley, as Cordes expected it would, then pivoted with a wind shift and ran at the town, as everybody knew was possible, firefighters should have plenty of time to burn off the road. Everyone agreed to the plan. They ordered a bulldozer to widen the road into a reliable fuel break.

Then Cordes added something else.
If the fire does make a run at Yarnell
, he said, tapping the iPad,
go here—the Helms’ place
. The twenty-to-thirty-acre Boulder Springs Ranch sat about a quarter-mile west of Glen Ilah, at the mouth of an east-facing canyon in the Weavers. The roof was metal, the siding was metal, and there were no bushes or trees flanking the barn or the main house. It was just about the only place in Yarnell with adequate defensible space.

“It’s a good safety zone,” Cordes said. “Absolutely bombproof.”

Eventually the Management Team broke into smaller groups and Abel, the tactical operations chief, stepped outside with Marsh.
They’d worked fires together for the better part of a decade, and Abel had even written a positive review of Marsh’s performance on a previous blaze. A big and gentle man who preferred bow-hunting elk and antelope to most things in life, Abel wore a cowboy hat and sported a handlebar mustache. Out front of the station, they could see the Weaver Mountains and a bubble of blue smoke puffing up from atop the ridgeline.

Marsh asked Abel if it was anchored. The line around the heel of the fire needed to be started from something nonflammable—the rimrock or the cold black—to keep the flames from outflanking firefighters.

“I don’t think it is,” Abel said.

Anchoring the fire seemed like a good place to start. Abel asked Marsh if he’d be Division Alpha and oversee the western side of the blaze and anchor the fire. Making Marsh Division Alpha compartmentalized responsibility into a chain of command. Rather than having to run the crew, Marsh would take a step back, focus on the best way to contain the western side of the fire, and help coordinate the greater effort. Though Marsh and Steed would be working more or less side by side, officially Steed would have command of the hotshots while Marsh would be Abel’s point of contact and control all the resources in his division. At that point, that was only Granite Mountain.

It was a choice assignment for Marsh. He was tasked with executing Abel’s plans, but he didn’t have to answer to anybody. As division, he had the latitude to refuse assignments and choose whatever tactics best accomplished his goals on the piece of ground he oversaw. Essentially, Marsh was free to run Division Alpha as he saw fit.

“That ranch I was
telling you about, the Helms’ place, is over in that area,” Cordes said, pointing off to his left. He stood with Marsh on the edge of Yarnell, where the houses transitioned to the brush. Neither of them could see the ranch through the boulders and a wall of
chaparral nearly as tall as Marsh’s truck, but he got the idea: There was an obvious safety zone beneath the long ridge of the Weavers. “And of course, you’ve always got the black,” Cordes added.

He’d led Marsh and the hotshots through Glen Ilah, at the southern end of town. Mature oak and elm trees shaded the subdivision of a few hundred ranch-style homes, none of which looked defensible. Earlier that morning, Cordes had driven to the fire’s edge on the convoluted network of jeep trails lacing the area—the only access. He explained that the two-track Marsh and Granite Mountain wanted led to a rusting and long-abandoned road grader at the foot of the mountains before turning left and climbing 850 feet up to the ridgetop. There, at the fire’s heel, Marsh and Granite Mountain could start the task of anchoring the fire.

Granite Mountain drove until the brush on both sides of the trucks became thick enough to scratch the paint. The buggies parked in a small clearing in the chaparral, and Steed had the hotshots begin gearing up for an hour-long hike to the fire. Meanwhile, Marsh, with his smaller truck, went a half-mile closer and headed in on foot to flag a route for the men to follow. From a distance, the hotshots could see Marsh’s red helmet bobbing as he climbed up toward the ridge.

At that point, the fire was still calm. There were a few fingers of blackened fuel left behind by embers that had rolled downhill and ignited the chaparral in a few subtle drainages and draws that flowed toward the valley below. Every so often, a bush along the fire’s perimeter would flare up, but the blaze wasn’t progressing much. Wisps of smoke hung in the air like a few hundred individual campfires lit on the hill.

Shortly after 8
A.M.
, Marsh reached a saddle on the ridge below the fire’s edge, and encountered a man and a woman from the nearby town of Congress, who had hiked up to see the blaze.

“What are you doing with them pink ribbons?” the woman asked him. Marsh, who must have been surprised to see hikers so close to the fire, explained that the flagging was to mark a path in for the crew, and asked what the couple were doing up there.

They’d come up the mountain to see the fire and take pictures for
a friend of theirs, a cashier at the local gas station, they said. It quickly became clear to Marsh that they’d spent a lot of time in the area. The couple told him that they’d started hiking at Glen Ilah, bushwhacking through brush so thick “a bear couldn’t roll in it” to a thin road that ran parallel to the ridgetop. They told Marsh that if they had to do it again, they’d skip the bushwhacking and just walk in on the road that ran from the fire’s edge, along the ridgeline, straight back to Glen Ilah, and almost directly to the Helms’ place. The hikers left the mountain shortly after.