On the Burning Edge (3 page)

J
ust a few weeks into the season, Granite Mountain’s intensive training concluded with a live drill meant to test the hotshots’ ability to adapt to the constantly changing environment of a firefight. To ensure competence, all fire engines, hotshot crews, and air tankers—known, as all fire assets are, as “resources”—must complete such a drill every year. The City of Prescott’s Wildland Division chief, a gap-toothed and devout man named Darrell Willis, would judge the hotshots. If they passed, Granite Mountain would be certified to fight fires for the 2013 season. At 7
A.M
., an hour earlier than usual, the men came to work and left the station immediately after. As they usually did, the crew’s vehicles headed out in a certain order.

Steed led the way in the superintendent’s truck, a Dodge Ram 4500. A hotshot rode with him in the passenger seat. In the years before, Marsh had customized Granite Mountain’s “supe truck,” as it was known, by welding taillights that cast the letters
GMIHC
, for “Granite Mountain Interagency Hotshot Crew.” Following closely behind Steed were a second small truck, called the saw truck, that carried Travis Carter, the squad boss, and another hotshot, and finally the two buggies, burly ten-person crew carriers with oversize tires and enough storage space to carry the equipment needed to support twenty men
for two weeks at a time. The caravan of white-and-red wildland fire vehicles was a familiar site in downtown, and most locals didn’t give the trucks a second glance as they rumbled past the courthouse, and the 127 stately elms surrounding it, at the city’s center.

Prescott (pronounced by locals to rhyme with “biscuit”) sits in the pine forests an hour and a half north of Phoenix, but after decades of rapid population growth, it’s no longer the strictly blue-collar town it was for much of the twentieth century. The town now has a small aerospace industry and three colleges within city limits. Hip new microbreweries and boutique coffee shops are pushing out some of the ubiquitous antiques stores, but Prescott’s defining characteristic remains its western pride. Kids here grow up dreaming of becoming bull riders and spend their summers working on cattle ranches that operate in the rangeland outside town. Many locals have roots that reach back to the city’s 1860s founding, when miners struck gold in the surrounding Bradshaw Mountains, and for a short period the town served as the territorial capital of Arizona. The Earp family and Doc Holliday stalked Prescott’s streets. It’s on Whiskey Row, a half-mile strip adjacent to the courthouse that once boasted forty bars, that the Old West feels most present.

That morning, as the hotshots headed out of town for their drill, the elm-shaded sidewalks of Whiskey Row were empty except for a few early-season tourists taking in displays of cowboy boots and faux-Indian headdresses. Flyers touting the 126th anniversary of the world’s oldest rodeo were plastered onto the windows of the hole-in-the-wall bars that are still packed into the strip, and the buggies’ diesel engines echoed against the brick facades.

Grant peered out of the buggy’s submarine windows as Granite Mountain’s caravan passed from Whiskey Row south into the wilder lands of the Prescott National Forest. Grant watched the housing styles change from historic Victorians to seventies-era ranch homes to double-wide trailers and finally to McMansions perched in the foothills. Just a few miles from downtown, the buildings vanished altogether. The roads, once paved and suburban, became dirt or gravel, and ponderosa pines filled the view. On the oldest trees, the bark was
blackened from past fires. The hotshots, drowsy and still unaccustomed to the day’s early hours, watched the pines flicker by. Most of the men, nervous about the coming test, mentally rehearsed the skills they’d learned over the previous weeks and focused on their assigned roles. In the stillness, Grant saw an opportunity to ease the tension.

“Hey, Chris!” he called to the cab from the dim light in the back. “What are we going to do today?”

“You gonna learn, boy!” Chris, the lead firefighter, yelled back to his squad from the buggy’s cab. He’d said the same thing before every workout since day one. At first, Chris’s yelling terrified the rookies; now the joke was theirs, too. Anytime Chris forgot to deliver his daily message, Grant reminded the lead firefighter.

From basic crew structure to the nation’s coordinated response to wildfires, nearly everything in wildland firefighting is organized hierarchically. There’s generally one person or organization in charge, with layers of command cascading down from the apex. It was no different on Granite Mountain.

After Marsh was injured, Steed claimed the crew’s top position. Tom Cooley, the temporary captain, was just beneath him. The rest of the hotshots were divided into two modules, called Alpha and Bravo. Each squad of either nine or ten hotshots was assigned a buggy and contained a mix of veterans and rookies. Command of the smaller units fell to their respective squad bosses: Clayton Whitted on Alpha and Bob Caldwell on Bravo. (Travis Carter, the third squad boss, ran both Alpha’s and Bravo’s chainsaw teams.) Below Clayton and Bob were two lead firefighters—Chris on Alpha, Travis on Bravo—who could step into the squad boss role; a pair of hotshots known as sawyers, who ran chainsaw; and another pair who removed the vegetation the sawyers cut: the swampers. Rounding out the squads were the ten or eleven firefighters whose job was to use hand tools to dig fire line. These firefighters are called the scrape. At any point, a hotshot might be instructed to run saw, dig line, or swamp, and one of the nine qualified veterans might serve as a lookout posted to warn the crew of any unexpected change in fire behavior, but otherwise the men defaulted to their assigned roles.

Among seasonal hotshots, the scrape is considered the bottom of the hierarchy. It’s where nearly all rookies start their fire careers. Over the course of the season, the scrape try to prove themselves capable of becoming swampers, while the swampers are trying to move up to the sawyer job, which is the most sought-after position among seasonals. Grant was in Alpha’s scrape, and since he was a rookie, the seat the veterans assigned to him was in the rear left, the bumpiest of the eight seats in the back.

He was the first out of Alpha’s buggy when the caravan stopped at a dirt parking lot walled in by 150-foot pines. The morning was still cool, with traces of night’s humidity still in the air. The hotshots, wearing yellow fire-resistant shirts, green pants, and black hard hats, gathered around Steed. He and Marsh, who had come to supervise the drill, wore the same uniform as the men, but their helmets were red.

Marsh stood quietly to the side and took notes on the drill while Steed spread out a map on the hood of his truck and pointed out the fake fire’s location. It sat in a saddle of the Bradshaws between the Senator Highway, a now-decrepit stagecoach road from the 1860s, and Highway 89, which runs south through the town of Yarnell and toward Phoenix. The flag fire, marked before the drill started with strips of plastic pink flagging, was a few acres and spreading quickly. Steed identified for the men their escape routes—clearly demarcated paths of retreat—and safety zones: areas cleared of flammable materials that are large enough for firefighters to weather an out-of-control blaze. Sometimes safety zones are clearings bulldozed into the “green,” the unburned vegetation beside a blaze. But more often, when a fire explodes, hotshots retreat into the cold ash left behind by the flames—the “good black.” With no chance of rekindling, it’s often the safest place to be during a rapidly intensifying fire. On the flag fire, Steed pointed inside the theoretical blaze’s perimeter. Granite Mountain’s safety zone was the good black.

Wildland firefighters bring blazes
under control by building boxes of nonflammable things around them. In one combination or another,
that means surrounding the flames with water, roads, rock, bare dirt, and already burned fuel. To do this, firefighters have a relatively short list of tools at their disposal. Engines, air tankers, and helicopters use water and retardant to either knock down the fire’s spreading head or soak the vegetation ahead of the flames to slow its growth. Hotshot crews, though, use chainsaws and hand tools to remove the vegetation and create a continuous line of bare dirt or rocks around a fire.

The guiding principle of fire agencies is that the cheapest and most effective way to fight fires is to catch them when they’re small. They’re kept small by attacking them early. In a typical blaze, one of the country’s 826 operating fire lookouts—or, these days, someone with keen eyes and a cell phone—calls in a smoke report, and the closest available resources mount the initial response. The first wave of firefighters sent to a new blaze during peak fire season is usually designed to be overkill. On a hot and breezy June day, that first order might include three fire engines, a twenty-person handcrew, a helicopter, and an Air Attack plane that does what ground resources cannot by tracking the fire’s overall progression from above.

Engines, limited by road access and the amount of water they can carry, can hose down the flames faster than hotshot crews can build line. As such, in hopes of slowing the fire’s spread, engines tend to lead the initial attack while the hotshot and handcrews follow behind. If the flame lengths are small, crews build lines directly on the fire’s edge. This is called “going direct,” and if crews succeed in lassoing the blaze, the tactic stops the fire where it lies. When a fire’s burning more intensely, hotshots step back anywhere from a few hundred yards to five miles and build “indirect line” by constructing firebreaks on ridges ahead of the combustion. Once the box (which is rarely actually square) is complete, hotshots burn out or back-fire, intentionally igniting the vegetation between the line and the wild flames, thereby robbing the blaze of the fuel it needs to survive.

During the drill in the pine forest outside Prescott, the men of Granite Mountain needed to prove that they were capable of using all the skills needed to control fires of varying sizes. With Steed’s orders in hand, they broke into action.

Heavy aluminum cabinets creaked open. On one side of the buggy men found their Pulaskis—ax-adze combinations that are the signature tool of wildland firefighters—and rhinos, a burlier version of a hoe. On the opposite side, the sawyers unloaded their chainsaws while the swampers passed out red liter bottles of extra gas and oil to each crewman. On a busy day, a sawyer can go through more than twenty liters of fuel, and all the hotshots shared the burden of the extra weight. Within minutes, Granite Mountain was ready to go. With food, a jacket, files for sharpening tools, parachute cord for tying up whatever needs to be tied up in the woods, flares for lighting backfires, a lighter, a file, spare chains or chainsaw air filters, eight quarts of water, and half a dozen other random items, each man’s pack weighed forty-five pounds or more. Then there were the things they carried in their hands.

As the hotshots scurried around the buggy, one of the senior firefighters plunked down a five-gallon plastic-lined cardboard box of water at Grant’s feet. The cubie, as it was called, weighed another forty-five pounds. Steed and the squad bosses knew the hotshots wouldn’t need the additional water that day. Grant was given the cubie to prove that he could handle the extra weight.

Grant threaded his tool through the cubie’s plastic handle, hauled the box to his shoulder like a bindle, and took his place in the single-file line that had formed behind Steed. The sawyers hiked closest to Steed, with the swampers following behind and the scrape toward the back. A squad boss took up the rear and scolded any hotshot who slowed down, to keep the long line of men from pulling apart and squeezing back together.

Steed hiked faster than most people jog. His strides were long and steady, his weight slightly forward and centered over his knees. For twenty minutes, the crew hammered uphill along a two-track dirt road. Soon, sweat soaked through the men’s yellow shirts and the hotshots heard nothing more than the sound of their own breathing.

Not long into the hike, Steed’s oppressively fast pace broke the rookie John Percin, Jr. He’d wrenched his knee during training and pulled up lame during the hike. One of the squad bosses bawled at him
to catch up to the others, but Percin balked. The hike proved too painful. He dropped out, and a lead firefighter led him back down the hill to the trucks. Percin’s knee would take more than a month to heal, and he wouldn’t work with the hotshots again until the last week of June.

The rest of the crew didn’t pause. They kept racing to their objective: the series of pink plastic strips of flagging tied to tree branches to mark the fire’s perimeter. Grant, with the extra weight of the cubie, was struggling to keep up, and finally he, too, peeled off from the single-file line and dropped to his knee, gasping for air. With his face inches above the sun-baked pine needles, their sweet vanilla smell drowned out by the sheer volume of air sucking into his nostrils, Grant returned to the question he’d been asking himself for weeks now:
What was I thinking volunteering to chase a fitness-obsessed ex-Marine up the side of a mountain?

Grant’s goal was to help people as a medic—not save forests that he wasn’t particularly fond of anyway. He’d camped only three times, ever, and found the experience to be little more than an exercise in discomfort.

Grant grew up a latchkey kid in Orange County, California. His home life was rocky and he started taking pills in high school. Unhappy with his life’s direction, he moved to Prescott as a sophomore in high school to live with his aunt and uncle, Linda and David Caldwell, and his older cousins, Bob and Taylor. Still, even in a more stable home, it took Grant a couple of years to straighten out. He had to repeat his junior year of high school. Eventually, he stopped abusing pills and even went on to use his own experience to teach Drug Abuse Resistance Education. After graduating, he started taking EMT classes at Prescott’s Yavapai College and fell in love with Leah Fine, a pretty blonde he’d met through a friend and who had a shared interest in running.