On the Burning Edge (32 page)

For Turin

F
irst and foremost, I owe a great debt of gratitude to the people who shared with me their own painful experiences and memories of the men they loved. I sincerely hope the book does justice to the stories passed on to me by the hotshots’ friends and family members who graciously gave me their time, the following in particular: David, Linda, and Claire Caldwell; Leah Fine; John, Jane, and Amanda Marsh; Wade Ward; Darrell Willis; Phillip Maldonado; Pat McCarty; Marty Cole; Brandon and Janae Bunch; Jeff Phelan; Todd Abel; Truman and Lois Ferrell; Steve Emery; Conrad Jackson; Karen and Jo Norris and Heather Kennedy; Kristi Whitted; Brendan McDonough; and Renan Packer. These people provided the book’s narrative—its heart.

I also wish to thank those who told me their stories of working with Granite Mountain in the 2013 fire season and helped me understand the larger world of wildland firefighting. An incomplete list: Jim Cook, Rick Cowell, Stan Stewart, Travis Dotson, Mark Linane, Greg Overacker, Beth Melville, Tirso Rojas, Jason Schroeder, Kristen Honig, Allen Farnsworth, Dan Bailey, Dave Provincio, Carrie Dennett, Park Williams, Chuck Maxwell, John Wachter, Fred Schoeffler, Josh Barnum, Todd Haines, Todd Lerke, Harry Croft, and James
Lewis. I owe a personal thanks to Jennifer Jones, the Forest Service’s public information officer, who was incredibly accommodating during both the book’s initial reporting and its fact checking. These people provided valuable information that conveyed the greater context in which the tragedy occurred.

Personally, I must also thank a long list of people who helped produce this book. For starters, thank you to my wife and best friend, Turin. Your endless patience and support made this possible. I thank my parents, Bonnie and Paul, who taught me to love books, and my older brother, Garrett, who has been the first editor of nearly every piece I’ve written since we were kids. Sam Moulton read the manuscript cover to cover multiple times, and his sharp edits and steady encouragement exponentially improved the book. Thank you to my friends Peter Vigneron and Frederick Reimers, who read countless early drafts. Dave Costello, Abe Streep, Sean Cooper, Jonah Ogles, and Grayson Schaffer all provided thoughtful input on various chapters. Jakob Schiller provided many of the images in the book and also helped me report the story by sharing with me many of the initial contacts he’d made while photographing the crew in 2012. Thank you. Chris Keyes edited the National Magazine Award–nominated feature that was the seed for this book; Lorenzo Burke published it in
Outside;
Alex Heard served as a general counsel throughout the entire process; Kevin Fedarko’s input from outline to final draft was invaluable; and my remarkable copy editor, Will Palmer, added more commas than any man should ever have to and did so while providing poignant and necessary feedback on the story’s bigger picture. Reid Singer fact-checked every page of the book—a monumental effort he carried out with poise. He contributed greatly to the book. And finally, thanks to my excellent agent, Jennifer Joel, and editor, Mark Tavani, who offered clear edits and shepherded me through every step of the long process.

T
he pages that follow document the main sources used in each chapter. I have not listed the source of every quotation, fact, or passage, but to ensure the reporting’s accuracy, the entire book was independently fact-checked. Descriptions of fire behavior and the sights and sounds of the blazes Granite Mountain fought in 2013 were informed by interviews, photos, and videos shot by firefighters on scene and by my own time on the fire line. Most information specific to the personality of Granite Mountain’s 2013 crew came from the three surviving members: Brendan “Donut” McDonough, Renan Packer, and Brandon Bunch. In total, I spent nearly a month reporting the book in Prescott. This time included countless cups of coffee at the Raven, a café where I met many sources, and multiple trips to the fire site at Yarnell. I also visited the Doce Fire site with McDonough and the Thompson Ridge Fire site with Todd Lerke.

PROLOGUE

Details about the Yarnell Hill Fire of June 30, 2013, came from interviews with Brendan “Donut” McDonough. The timeline of events was provided by the two official investigations into Yarnell Hill—the Arizona Department of Occupational Safety and Health and the Yarnell Hill Serious Accident
Investigation—as well as interviews and official transcripts of interviews with McDonough, Todd Abel, and Brian Frisby that were made public through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Weather updates came from both the investigations and subsequent conversations with fire weather meteorologist Chuck Maxwell at the Forest Service’s Southwest Coordination Center.

CHAPTER 1

Information about the first week of Granite Mountain’s season was provided by Bunch, Packer, and McDonough. Linda Caldwell, David Caldwell, and Leah Fine provided Grant McKee’s biographical information, and a number of trips to Granite Mountain’s station allowed me to collect details about the saw shop, the ready room, and the setting. Former hotshot superintendents Rick Cowell, Mark Linane, Jim Cook, and Stan Stewart provided general background information on the hotshots and wildland firefighters, and this was supplemented by material provided by Jennifer Jones, the public information officer for the Forest Service. The total size of America’s wildland firefighting force, a surprisingly tricky number to pin down, came from Dan Bailey at the International Association of Wildland Fire. The number fifty-six thousand accounts for city, state, and county wildland firefighters, but it’s considered a conservative estimate. When volunteers are added, the number of American wildland firefighters is thought to be as high as seventy-five thousand.

CHAPTER 2

Details about the hotshots’ training day were provided by Bunch, Packer, and McDonough. Prescott’s Wildland Division chief, Darrell Willis, who oversaw the drill, also provided information on the hotshots’ certification process. Information about Prescott’s history came from the book
Prescott Fire Department
(Arcadia Publishing), by Eric Conrad Jackson, as well as visits to the courthouse square, Whiskey Row, and Prescott’s Sharlot Hall Museum. Heather Kennedy and Karen Norris told me Scott Norris’s story. Michael Thoele’s book
Fire Line: The Summer Battles of the West
(Fulcrum), along with Jennifer Jones, Chuck Womack, and Kari Boyd-Peak, at the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC), provided background on how the response to wildfires is coordinated. Longtime hotshot Tirso Rojas augmented my own experience on the fire line with explanations of how sawyers and swampers work. Stephen Pyne’s extraordinary book
Fire: A Brief History
(University of Washington Press) proved an invaluable source for the history of wild flames in North America; Timothy Egan’s
The Big Burn
(Houghton Mifflin) was the
reference for Ed Pulaski’s backstory; and the Interagency Fire Shelter Task Group’s
Wildland Fire Shelter: History and Development of the New Generation Fire Shelter
was a touchstone for explanations about fire-shelter usage in the United States.

CHAPTER 3

Eric Marsh’s backstory came from interviews with his parents, John and Jane Marsh, and his wife, Amanda. His second wife, Kori Kirkpatrick, confirmed much of his early history in Prescott. Marty Cole, Phillip Maldonado, Wade Ward, and Pat McCarty—all former Crew 7 and Granite Mountain firefighters—provided background about Marsh’s mission to turn Granite Mountain into a hotshot crew, and Marsh’s personnel files were a source for performance evaluations throughout his tenure on Granite Mountain. Jim Cook contextualized hotshot culture; Packer and Bunch shared anecdotes from the night the hotshots slept out after their drill.

CHAPTER 4

My sources for the state of wildfires in the West came from NIFC’s daily situation report. Details about the prairie fire were supplied by multiple newspaper articles published in the Prescott
Daily Courier
. Bunch, McDonough, and Packer all shared with me their experiences on the fire. Weather information came from the NIFC-issued summary of the 2013 fire season and meteorologist Chuck Maxwell, who tracked the season’s development over many months. Packer provided his own story. Bunch, Heather Kennedy, Pat McCarty, and Wade Ward all corroborated Marsh’s interview practices.

CHAPTER 5

Details of Brandon and Janae Bunch’s home life came from the Bunches. Former hotshots Pat McCarty and Jeff Phelan provided biographical information on Garret Zuppiger, as did Zuppiger’s well-written and highly entertaining blog
I’d Rather Be Flying!
(
garretjoseph.wordpress.com
). Bunch, Packer, Phillip Maldonado, Heather Kennedy, McDonough, and Leah Fine all provided information contrasting the leadership styles of Marsh and Jesse Steed.

CHAPTER 6

Jennifer Jones explained the fundamental operations of NIFC. This reporting was supplemented by Brian Mockenhaupt’s wonderfully clear
Atlantic
story about the Yarnell Hill Fire, “Fire on the Mountain.” Region 3’s public
information officer, Mary Zabrinski, provided basic information on the state of wildland fires in the Southwest in early May 2013, but the primary source for this chapter was meteorologist Chuck Maxwell, whom I visited at his office in Albuquerque. His early-season forecasts mapped out the movement of the fire season. Bioclimatologist Park Williams, of the Tree Ring Lab at Columbia University, provided scientific context for the warming and drying of the Southwest. Todd Lerke told me his own story of the initial attack on Thompson Ridge, and former hotshot superintendent and longtime fire researcher Fred Schoeffler gave me the growth rate of the Las Conchas Fire.

CHAPTER 7

Heather Kennedy told me about Scott Norris and their relationship, as well as the details about the fire-and-weather video. This reporting was supplemented by conversations with Scott’s mother, Karen, and his sister, Jo.

CHAPTER 8

Mike Johns, a U.S. assistant district attorney, offered invaluable context through both personal interviews and his meticulously cultivated report on the incident, “The Dude Fire.” Supplemental reporting came from Jaime Joyce, in her shocking story “Burn,” published by the nonfiction site the Big Roundtable on June 23, 2013. National Park Service–contracted helicopter pilot Chris Templeton gave sensory details about flying a JetRanger beside a collapsing column, and the video “Dude Fire Staff Ride” (
youtube.com/watch?v=EaV5WKgKVH0
), which highlighted the interaction between a number of surviving sources, provided quotes from a number of hotshot superintendents on scene on June 26, 1990. Ultimately, though, the primary source for this reporting was the official investigation into the Dude Fire fatalities and the many pages of handwritten interview transcripts associated with the deaths, which are available at the Wildland Fire Staff Ride Library (
www.fireleadership.gov
).

CHAPTER 9

Payson Hotshots superintendent Mike Schinstock explained his crew’s educational walk-throughs of the Dude Fire site. Heather Kennedy gave background on Scott’s fascination with prior burnovers and his relationship with Kevin Woyjeck. Context about how the Forest Service and other wildland fire agencies respond to tragedy fires came from Jim Cook, Rick Cowell, and sources who wished not to be named but who are employed by large, nationally funded educational institutes that study wildland fire. Norman
Maclean’s brilliant book
Young Men and Fire
(University of Chicago Press) provided context for this chapter and many others in the book, as did his son John Maclean’s exceptional investigation of the tragic South Canyon Fire,
Fire on the Mountain
(Simon & Schuster). Bunch, Packer, and McDonough provided details about the Hart Fire, and Don Muise of the Coconino National Forest gave the ranger district’s reaction to the fire.

CHAPTER 10

In addition to trips inside Alpha’s and Bravo’s buggies, Bunch, the sawyer on Bravo, and McDonough, lead Pulaski on Alpha, gave me the details on the buggies’ interiors. Bunch told me the story of the chips, which was confirmed by Packer and Leah Fine. FOIA requests for Incident Action Plans (IAPs) and ICS 209s—forms that document the incident commander’s response to a fire—detailed Bea Day and her management team’s response to the Thompson Ridge Fire. These documents also specified personnel assignments and division objectives on the fire. Bunch, McDonough, and Packer all related to me their experiences on Thompson Ridge, as did the Division Zulu, Allen Farnsworth, and the photographer Kristen Honig. Videos and photos that Honig shot provided additional scenes of Granite Mountain’s experience on Thompson Ridge. Details on relative danger rates of professions came from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Between 2000 and 2013, an average of forty-six mail carriers were killed at work per year, compared with thirty-three wildland firefighters.

CHAPTER 11

Fire researcher Jim Cook’s paper “Trends in Wildland Entrapment Fatalities…Revisited” was instrumental in reporting about history’s largest fire fatalities. So were Tim Egan’s
The Big Burn
, Stephen Pyne’s
America’s Fires: A Historical Context for Policy and Practice
(Forest History Society), and conversations with James Lewis, at the Forest History Society. Bioclimatologist Park Williams provided context on the impact that fire suppression and climate change are having on western forests. Harry Croft gave background on the evolution of fire management policy, Alexander Evans contextualized the role of prescribed fire in the West, and Jerry Williams’s writing underscored the onset of the era of mega-fires in his 2011 paper “Mega-Fires and the Urgency to Re-Evaluate Wildfire Protection Strategies through a Land Management Prism.” Details about the Peshtigo Fire came from Lee Sandlin’s book
Storm Kings
(Pantheon) and Peter M. Leschak’s book
Ghosts of the Fireground
(HarperCollins). Steed’s backstory came from a combination of
reports by Josh Eells at
Men’s Journal
, Brian Mockenhaupt at
The Atlantic
, Steed’s personnel files, and stories told to me by hotshots he’d worked with throughout his career. McDonough told me his own story.

CHAPTER 12

Details about Marsh’s first years as a hotshot superintendent were told to me by his wife, Amanda, and his parents, John and Jane. Former hotshot superintendents Jim Cook, Stan Stewart, and Mark Linane contextualized what new superintendents are often exposed to during their first few years on the job. Marty Cole, Crew 7’s superintendent before Marsh, added details about Marsh’s and Granite Mountain’s particular experience. Marsh’s personnel files were the primary source for details about the tension between Marsh and Aaron Lawson, the crew’s captain before Steed, but Maldonado, Willis, and Bunch corroborated and expanded upon the tensions.

CHAPTER 13

Incident Action Plans and ICS 209 forms were the sources regarding the fire’s expansion; so too was information provided by Darrell Willis, who was on the scene. Heather Kennedy showed me a video of the skit mimicking the After Action Review; Janae and Brandon Bunch told me about Brandon’s last few days on Thompson Ridge; Leah Fine explained Woyjeck’s relationship with Grant McKee; and McDonough told me about his trip to Las Vegas and his decision to come to God. Maldonado, who was McDonough’s squad boss at the time, confirmed the story about McDonough and the crew’s experience in Las Vegas.

CHAPTER 14

Details about the crew’s off-days came from McDonough, Bunch, Packer, Leah Fine, Jo Norris, and Heather Kennedy. Chuck Maxwell’s forecasts provided information on the weather conditions in early June. Prescott’s fire history was sourced from Eric Conrad Jackson’s
Prescott Fire Department
and a number of local museums in the area. Details about the Indian Fire, which nearly destroyed Prescott the year that Crew 7 was created, came from the Prescott
Daily Courier
. Willis told me some of the history of the Prescott Area Wildland Urban Interface Commission, but the organization’s story was documented most thoroughly by Everett Warnock, in the paper “A History of the Prescott Area Wildland/Urban Interface Commission.” Interviews with firefighters and dispatchers at NIFC, Dan Bailey at the International Association of Wildland Fire, and Harry Croft placed Prescott’s challenges within the greater context of wildfires in the West. Budget numbers past and
present were sourced from James Lewis at the Forest History Society and Jennifer Jones at NIFC.

CHAPTER 15

During a visit to the Doce Fire site with McDonough in November 2013, Donut told me the story about his close call and took me to the juniper, where he explained how the crew had saved the tree. Heather Kennedy, who heard of the incident from Scott Norris, confirmed the severity of McDonough’s close call. The number of houses the Doce threatened, the fire size, and growth rates all came from ICS 209s and IAPs. Conversations with Incident Commander Tony Sciacca and articles from
The Daily Courier
and
Wildfire Today
supplemented this reporting. An online archive of Chris MacKenzie’s photos helped fill out the moments that took place at the alligator juniper. Stories of the hotshots sleeping at the station came from Leah Fine, Kristi Whitted, Claire Caldwell, and McDonough. Packer told me about returning to the station. Chuck Maxwell and archival weather information were the sources for fire severity in the last weeks of June.