On the Burning Edge (25 page)

B
y midafternoon, the aerial firefight had become so complex that two separate planes, both carrying two- or three-person teams, had divided up Air Attack’s responsibilities. Only one plane was in the air at a time, and they rotated out when the aircraft ran out of fuel or the pilots’ Federal Aviation Administration–regulated flight time expired. At 4:13, the Air Attack was Bravo 33, which also went by the moniker Arizona 16. The high-powered prop plane was orbiting around the smoke column, and on board were three highly trained aerial firefighters led by a New Mexico–based specialist named John Burfiend. By then, the winds of the outflow boundary had hit the fire’s northern edge at Peeples Valley, and the already erratic fire behavior was becoming extreme. The outflow winds would arrive at the fire’s southern end in only ten minutes. Burfiend called Marsh to confirm that Granite Mountain was in a good place to weather the coming blow-up.

“Division Alpha, Bravo 33. What’s your location?”

Marsh answered, short of breath, “Uh, the guys—uh, Granite—is making their way down the escape route from this morning. It heads south, midslope cut road. We’re ma—making our way down into the structures.”

It sounded as if Marsh was still on the ridge, out ahead of Granite Mountain, and because he’d made it clear that he and his hotshots weren’t threatened, Bravo 33 quickly put the transmission out of mind as he moved on to confirm the safety of the next resource.

Steed and the men were on the escape route, more than a half-mile still from the safety zone. As they contoured southeast along the two-track, the winds blew across Grant’s left cheek and toyed with the tails of rolled flagging the hotshots had affixed to their packs. Grant saw the flames, now well past Donut’s lookout and the place the buggies had parked. They were rushing toward Yarnell.

As the men hiked down the boulder-strewn two-track in a single-file line, Grant looked down at the boot heels of the man in front of him, trying to avoid rolling his ankle on the rounded stones cluttering the path. Steed and Granite Mountain had been moving for about fifteen minutes when the road hooked to their right above a canyon that faced Yarnell’s Glen Ilah subdivision and the Ranch House Restaurant. Granite outcrops and enormous boulders formed the basin’s off-vertical walls, and in the canyon bottom, game trails cut through brush that grew thickest near the drainages and swales that flowed toward Yarnell.

The Helms’ place sat just beyond the head of the canyon. It was the first time they’d seen it, and the ranch did look big. Multiple barns and animal pens were scattered across the spread, and light glinted off the buildings’ metal roofs. At this point, Marsh, Steed, and the crew had to make another decision. They could either stick to the two-track that wound around the ridgeline for another mile before emptying into Glen Ilah, or descend five hundred feet into the basin and go directly to the Helms’ place. Cutting through the basin could save the crew time. It looked like a fifteen-minute hike—maybe less.

Seven minutes after the evacuation
of Yarnell began, the fire hit Cordes’s second trigger point. The homeowners needed to leave immediately. Eight minutes after that, the flames overran Cordes’s third trigger point, and he gave the order for all firefighters in Yarnell to
disengage. In just fifteen minutes, the fire had covered a mile of ground, a distance Cordes had calculated would take four hours to burn.

Aerial support was one of the firefighters’ last good tactics for checking the flames before they reached town, but the smoke was too thick for Cordes or anybody else in Yarnell to help coordinate tanker and helicopter drops from the ground, which meant that Burfiend and Bravo 33 would have to take on the responsibility. It meant more radio traffic for Burfiend, who was already scanning as many as seven different frequencies and witnessing a general degradation of order that he must have felt some responsibility to turn around. He was fielding multiple calls a minute about houses that were soon to burn and air-tanker and helicopter drops.

They were losing Yarnell. Cordes’s “aw shit” ridge caught fire as the outflow boundary slammed into Yarnell, and he gave the order for all firefighters to pull out and move back to the safety zone at the Ranch House Restaurant. Donut and the Blue Ridge Hotshots had just started clearing brush around the houses, in a desperate effort to protect a few more structures, when Frisby and Trew told the hotshots to run back to the buggies and get out. Once they were loaded up and heading to the safety zone, Trew and Frisby turned their attention to herding all the remaining firefighters from the canyon. Forest Service engines and a few volunteers from Peeples Valley were also packed into the dry wash.

“Leave! Get out now!” they yelled to the fleeing firefighters.

One volunteer from the Peeples Valley Fire Department refused. He was waiting by his engine in a meadow beneath “aw shit” ridge. Frisby had to yell over the wind.

“I want you to get that truck out of here now,” Frisby told the volunteer.

“I can’t do that,” he yelled back. “There are four men still a mile out in the forest.”

The leading gusts of the outflow boundary now hit the canyon. Flames rolled toward the firefighters with such intensity that the volunteer would liken the sensation to being snuffed out by the hand of
God. Smoke blotted out the sunlight, and the canyon filled with flames. Embers rained down around them, and within seconds, spot fires were growing from the size of a quarter to ten-by-ten-foot blazes and spreading rapidly.

“You need to leave right now!” Frisby yelled to the volunteer. If he didn’t, he might never be able to. He stopped resisting and fled with his engine to the safety zone. In search of the missing Peeples Valley firefighters, Trew and Frisby took the Razor still farther up Harper Canyon. Flames were consuming brush and trees on both sides of the road when Blue Ridge’s overhead found four men hiking down the sandy drainages.
“Go, go, go!”
Frisby and Trew yelled, spurring the men to move faster.

The volunteers ran toward the trucks, near the base of the canyon, with their heads tucked into their shoulders to shield themselves from the heat. They loaded into the trucks, coughing, as the drivers sped out of Harper Canyon through smoke so thick that even with their high beams on, they couldn’t see much beyond the hoods.

The Helms’ place was always
in view at the head of the basin, but the lower the crew dropped down, the farther away their safety zone seemed to be. What had looked like a half-mile from the two-track now looked like three-quarters of a mile. The enormous boulders and head-high brush on the basin’s walls had played a trick on the hotshots’ eyes, squeezing the foreground and background into a deceptively shallow plane.

Steed led the men down a draw that at points became so steep, the sawyers and scrape had to balance their saws and tools on the uphill sides of the trunks of the forty-five-year-old scrub oaks. Pebbles and sand strewn across the granite boulders made each step treacherously slick. One at a time, the men lowered themselves down the bedrock steps, using the brush as a makeshift rope.

When the sawyer ahead of Grant moved through one particularly steep section, the crew’s new swamper waited his turn in line. Grant looked out at the blooms of black smoke rolling up the edges of the
column. He could see the owners of the Helms’ place hurrying to push their llama and their miniature donkey into the barns. He could see emergency lights strobing as fire engines raced through Yarnell, and he could see the tankers, helicopters, and Air Attack plane circling above town. The men and women in the planes had no reason to be looking down at the hotshots. The crew had told nobody of their plans to drop into the canyon, and as such, they had received no warning about how far the fire had advanced since leaving the two-track. Grant and the rest of the hotshots couldn’t see the flames. The ridge to Granite Mountain’s left blocked their view and sheltered the crew from the wind. But in the few minutes since they’d left the two-track and lost sight of the flames, the outflow boundary’s winds had moved nearly two miles south of Peeples Valley. Gusts of twenty to thirty miles per hour were now passing over northern Yarnell, and a wall of flames had pivoted, turning toward the Helms’ place and the canyon.

The fire’s size had nearly doubled since 3
P.M
., shooting the column up to thirty-eight thousand feet—nine thousand feet higher than Mount Everest. Up in the stratosphere, the supercharged mixture of heat from the flames, moisture released from vegetation, and turbulent winds had developed into a thunderstorm that now sat perched atop the column. As it had on the Dude Fire, the storm was reaching maturity. Back in town, as Donut drove Marsh’s superintendent truck to the safety zone at the Ranch House Restaurant, a barely perceptible rain began to fall, leaving ashy drops on Donut’s windshield.

“We’ve got to go now!”
Truman screamed to Lois. She was carrying an armful of things out of their Glen Ilah home to the Winnebago.

“Why?” she asked. Whatever Truman was so panicked about could wait a second. His rudeness had no justification.

“Because if we don’t, we’ll die!” he yelled.

She glanced out their picture window and saw smoke blowing through the oak trees a few blocks to the north. Suddenly, she understood.

Truman rushed inside, grabbed a plastic bottle filled with holy
water, splashed it around the house, and said a quick and silent prayer. He went to shut the garage door. It wouldn’t shut—the power had gone out. He didn’t have time to deal with it. Outside, a white truck was circling Glen Ilah’s streets with a local nurse practitioner leaning out the window, warning people to get out.

“Bravo 33, Division Alpha,”
Marsh radioed out.

Just after 4:30, the Air Attack plane passed over Marsh and the basin en route to Yarnell. Marsh had seen the plane and knew that retardant along that drop path would help keep flames out of Yarnell.

“That’s exactly what we’re looking for,” Marsh said. “That’s where we want the retardant.”

Steed and the crew were near the basin’s bottom, walking along faint game trails that threaded through the thickest brush. The Helms’ place now lay just a third of a mile away. At Steed’s normal clip, even in such thick brush, the hotshots could cover that distance in five minutes.

By the time Marsh finished his radio transmission to Bravo 33, the winds of the outflow boundary had passed through the long valley that ran parallel to the ridge Granite Mountain had worked on all day. Rock outcrops and Donut’s lookout knob sheared the winds and the fire into a forked tongue. One of the fire’s prongs churned up the saddle where Marsh and Steed had met with Blue Ridge that morning. At the ridgetop, two-hundred-foot flames towered above the crest. The fire’s second prong raced toward Glen Ilah and the Helms’ place. When the winds reached the canyon, the constricting terrain formed a natural chimney, and the gusts accelerated to fifty-two miles per hour.

The gale pulled dry leaves from the chaparral and picked up sand from the basin floor and flung the debris toward Steed, Grant, and the rest of the crew. When the wind first hit, some men turned their shoulders to the gusts. Others slapped a hand to their heads to keep their helmets from blowing off. The high winds were deeply disconcerting, but not yet reason to panic. Steed and the hotshots had seen
the fire before they dropped off the ridge. It was almost a mile away and moving southeast into Yarnell—not toward the basin.

But moments later, smoke blew from left to right across the box canyon’s exit, cloaking the hotshots’ view of the Helms’ place. Still, Steed kept hiking. It could be drift smoke.
Let it be drift smoke
. Darkness fell over the canyon. At the first flash of orange, Steed knew what was coming.

“Breaking in on Arizona 16, Granite Mountain Hotshots!” he shouted into his radio, his voice quaking with emotion. “We are in front of the flaming front.”

Arizona 16—John Burfiend, also known as Bravo 33—didn’t respond. At the moment of Steed’s radio call, Burfiend was in the process of guiding an expensive DC-10 into a retardant drop designed to save a few hundred homes. But Steed’s overmodulated and barely comprehensible mayday call prompted Burfiend to call off the slurry drop. He didn’t know where Granite Mountain was or the extent of the crew’s problem, but he recognized panic when he heard it, and he knew that the ten thousand gallons of retardant in the plane’s belly might prove critical.

It took Burfiend seven agonizing seconds to send the DC-10 back into an orbit overhead and switch radio frequencies to respond to Steed. That seemed too long to Abel. He’d heard the urgency of Steed’s transmission. Abel stepped in to help.

“Bravo 33, Operations. You copying that on Air to Ground?”

Air to Ground 16 was the radio frequency Steed had used to call to Burfiend. Abel shortened it to “Air to Ground” and referenced the frequency to help Burfiend decipher, among the absolute audible chaos emitting from his radio, which channel he needed to pay closest attention to. At that moment, all seven of the channels he was scanning seemed to be emitting an unbroken stream of pressing radio transmissions from both the nine different aircraft he was in charge of and the ground resources who needed their support. Before Burfiend could respond to Abel, Marsh broke through the cacophony with a call from the basin.

“Air to Ground 16, Granite Mountain. How do you read?!”

Marsh’s moniker was actually Division Alpha, but at the sight of a flaming wall rushing toward him, he defaulted to the one he was most familiar with—Granite Mountain. Firefighters on scene immediately recognized Marsh’s southern drawl. Talking among themselves, one asked, “Is Granite Mountain still out in the green?” Another who’d paid close attention to the radio throughout the day knew the answer. Division Alpha had clearly said that Granite Mountain was in its safety zone: the black. What Marsh hadn’t been clear about was the fact that the crew was leaving the black for the Helms’ place.