On the Burning Edge (8 page)

That afternoon, the men of Granite Mountain were still at their station in Prescott, but the season’s slow start was about to come to a harsh and rapid end. They’d be fighting fires nearly without pause for the rest of June.

“
W
here are you going this time?” Janae asked.

“New Mexico,” Bunch said. The crew was already on the road.

Janae wasn’t pleased. One week, two weeks, maybe even three, alone with the boys, plus the pregnancy—they needed the money, but she refused to feign enthusiasm about her husband’s departure. At least Bunch wasn’t going to a fire. Yet. For now, the SWCC had ordered Granite Mountain, along with a handful of other regional crews, to Albuquerque so there would be resources close should any of New Mexico’s quickly growing fires need additional firefighters.

Staging, as assignments like this were called, wasn’t an ideal job. It meant traveling to a distant station and sitting and waiting for a fire to start. There was no chainsaw work to pass the time, no freedom to drink beer after work, and no family nearby. In other words, staging was boring. Still, the hotshots didn’t mind. They were finally leaving Prescott. In the Alpha buggy, the hotshots bent over their phones and sent flurries of text messages to friends, girlfriends, wives, parents—
We’re going! First assignment! Drinks on me when we get back!

East of town, the Prescott Valley resembles Napa without the vineyards. Its rolling grasslands are studded with agave and oak trees
that are short, squat, and far older than they look. Scott, who sat in front of Grant, was pleased to finally be on the road, even if this wasn’t the best time for an assignment. His older sister, Joanne, was pregnant and due any day, and he’d just adopted a new puppy, Riggs. Then there was Heather. He thumbed out an anxious text.

“Well baby, we finally got the call. We’re heading to New Mexico right now. I’ll miss you so badly. I’ll call you tomorrow if you have time to talk later, we’ll be driving for a while. I love you so much, sexy baby.”

Heather Kennedy, a cop for the City of Prescott, was heading to a call on downtown’s Cortez Street when she got his text. Scott slid low in his seat and they talked for half an hour. In the background, Heather could hear the drone of the buggy’s heavy tires on pavement and the guys giggling at some probably lewd joke. She and Scott talked in the cooing tones of young love about things romantic and not: how maybe they should have waited to get Riggs until after the season ended; who was going to feed the dogs; how much they already missed each other.

Heather was Scott’s first long-term girlfriend. She was slight, with cropped blond hair and a no-nonsense manner that indicated a toughness her stature didn’t. They’d met a year and a half earlier on Match.com. She liked Scott’s profile picture. He’d shot it himself while sporting a two-week traveler’s beard in Thailand, Laos, or maybe it was Cambodia—somewhere tropical, on one of his many winter wanders. A monkey sat perched on his shoulder, and Scott wore a skeptical smile. He looked worldly.

Their first date was in a coffee shop, and Scott arrived late because one of Heather’s colleagues had pulled him over for speeding, a bad habit of his. When he walked in, Heather was waiting for him in a booth toward the back. She faced the door as she’d been trained, so as not to be vulnerable to whatever threat walked in, and she recognized Scott immediately from his picture. She waited to say hello. She wanted to watch how he moved. Scott took off his sunglasses and craned his long neck around the coffee shop. He was nice to look at:
a head taller than her, thick red hair swept to the left, the lithe build of an endurance athlete.

It was formal and first-date awkward, until Scott mentioned getting pulled over. He remembered the officer’s name, a sharp observation for somebody not in law enforcement, but she didn’t let on that she was a cop. Guys always acted weird—threatened, even—when they found out. Equally coy, Scott said nothing about being a hotshot. He didn’t want a “fire bunny,” one of those girls who date only firefighters. They clicked over a shared interest in firearms.

Scott noticed the way Heather sat favoring one hip.

“Are you packing?” Scott asked her. She was wearing a Glock 19 on her waist. He couldn’t believe it.

“No way!” he said, and lifted his shirt to reveal the same gun. At the time, he was working part-time at a gun shop and considered ownership of a wide range of guns a wise investment (a belief Heather and Scott’s mother never shared). The Glock 19 is a popular sidearm, and both knew that carrying the same gun wasn’t an exceptional coincidence, but they took it as a good sign.

Around the time a first date is supposed to end, Scott asked Heather if she wanted to go for a hike. They went to a lake by a formation of oddly shaped rock chimneys near town. She blew her nose onto the ground without thinking, then blushed. He pretended not to notice, then taught her how to hike with the long strides of a hotshot, bent slightly forward with her weight over her feet. He admonished her for swinging her head too much.

They dated on and off for the rest of the winter, and when fire season came around that spring, he returned to hotshotting. Scott’s parents—a construction worker and an English teacher—had raised him to appreciate the outdoors. He hiked, rafted, snowboarded, and backpacked any time he had the chance. Working in the woods came naturally for Scott. For five fire seasons, he lived out of the back of his Toyota pickup while running chainsaw for the Payson Hotshots, up in the White Mountains to the east. He called hotshotting his dream job. The eight months of intense labor paid for his winter travels. He
loved the hard work, the adventure, the brotherhood. But the first year he dated Heather, his job put stress on their untested relationship.

They’d been close that winter, finding and creating time to shoot guns, hike, and cook together, but Heather began to feel that Scott was more a friend than anything else. Raised Christian, he’d been a bit of a prude, too. Their relationship lacked romance, and that felt even more pronounced when he was away for weeks on fire assignments. After a few other guys showed interest, she decided to end it with Scott. When he finally called her during a fire assignment, she told him it was over. He’d actually laughed. Not because he thought it was funny. There just wasn’t anything else to do. He was on an empty ridgeline, talking on a satellite phone, somewhere very far from Prescott.

They didn’t speak again until he moved back home that winter. Heather called Scott first. She missed her friend and invited him to go to a shooting range in the hills outside of town. He brought his Glock 19. A squirrel popped out of the rocks, and he fired off three rounds but missed. He handed her the gun and she killed it instantly at thirty yards. He skinned it to make a chili dinner. That night, Heather asked if he was seeing anybody.

“Want to make sure you’re not wasting your time, huh?” Scott said.

That February, he moved into her duplex apartment, on the corner of a busy street, with a yard big enough for her Belgian Malinois and a sign on the door with a picture of two German shepherds that said
DOGS WILL BITE
. Scott hung the squirrel’s hide in the garage, where it served as a prompt for a funny story.

Despite his allegiance to the Payson Hotshots, Scott applied to Granite Mountain over the winter of 2012 to stay closer to Heather. The job had the added benefit of moving him closer to his goal of becoming a structural firefighter. Scott filled out what he called “the most complicated and in-depth hotshot app I’ve ever seen” during a break from cleaning his M4 assault rifle at the kitchen table. He was one of Marsh’s top candidates.

Heading out for the first assignment of the season, Scott must
have remembered getting dumped the last time he’d called Heather from the fire line. He recalled a conversation they’d had just weeks before the crew was sent east for staging.

“If I get a call, I have to go,” Scott had told Heather before they adopted the puppy together. “Hotshotting is my job, babe. You know that.”

“I get it, Scott,” Heather had said. “I’m all in.”

Not long after leaving Prescott,
the buggies dropped down into the cottonwoods along the Verde River, a muddy stream that drains the twelve-thousand-foot San Francisco Peaks, to the northeast. They caravanned past Montezuma Castle, a forty-five-room dwelling the Sinagua people built into a sandstone cliff wall nine hundred years ago, and climbed into the junipers and piñons along an old backcountry highway that parallels the Mogollon Rim. On one side of the two-thousand-foot escarpment were the meadows and pine forest that cloak much of the Colorado Plateau; on the other, the Sonoran Desert. Near the cliff’s edge, the road turned to dirt and Steed’s truck skipped a bit transitioning from the blacktop to the gravel washboard. He didn’t slow, and a cone of dust billowed out behind.

Granite Mountain was no longer going to Albuquerque. Barely out of Prescott, the SWCC had reassigned the crew to initial-attack a new fire burning just north of the Mogollon Rim in Arizona’s Coconino National Forest, which sprawls over nearly two million acres of mountains, ponderosa-covered plateaus, and red-rock formations in the north-central part of the state. The new fire had started that afternoon during what law enforcement described as a spirit quest gone wrong: A camper had lit and lost control of a bonfire along a ridgeline overlooking a popular lake between Flagstaff and Phoenix. The escaped fire, called the Hart, was burning in a dangerous patch of dead trees, and fire managers in the Coconino National Forest wanted it out before it became a serious problem. Before nightfall, Scott and the rest of Granite Mountain would be cutting line.

From his seat, Scott looked out over the Mogollon Rim, out past
the sandstone cliffs in the foreground, over the ponderosas and firs sweeping down through the rim’s apron, and onto the desert and a layer of dust clouding the horizon in the distant south.

He knew this country well. It was where he’d fallen for hotshotting. A few years earlier, on an assignment not far from where Granite Mountain’s buggies were bumping down the road, he’d shot a short video. In it, Scott’s wearing his hard hat and yellow Nomex shirt. He points the camera at himself and says, “Sitting here in the shade watching two of my favorite things develop.” He pivots the camera to flames in the foreground. “Fire.” Then pans to a series of dark-bottomed clouds. “And weather.”

T
he prospect of fighting fire on the Mogollon Rim raises the hackles of any hotshot who has been around long enough. The pines grow thick, the escarpment is predictably windy, the terrain falls precipitously, and—because these features also add to the cliff band’s astonishing beauty—thousands of vacation homes are scattered throughout the forest. But the Mogollon Rim’s notoriety stems almost entirely from one particular day when a blaze, the Dude Fire, became a meteorological anomaly. It still haunts the profession today.

June 26, 1990, broke every heat record in Phoenix history. It was 122 degrees. The airport canceled flights because planes had never been tested in such extreme conditions and the tires might melt—nobody knew. A regionwide heat wave had hit during a drought like none seen in the Southwest since the 1950s, and forecasters predicted June 26 would be the most volatile day of Arizona’s fire season. It exceeded expectations.

When plants burn, the water held in their tissues vaporizes, and meteorologists studying the blaze years later calculated that by around noon the Dude Fire had sent more than a million gallons of water skyward. Thirty thousand feet above the flames, the heat of the fire and moisture combined to form a supercharged thunderstorm that
perched directly over the blaze. A wildfire creating its own weather is a relatively common phenomenon, but what happened around 2
P.M
. on June 26, when the fire was more than a thousand acres and burning at its peak intensity, was exceedingly rare and dangerous: the thunderstorm and smoke column collapsed.

By noon on June 26, the Dude Fire had spread across three square miles of ponderosa forest, with one flank burning within a few hundred yards of the eighty homes in the Bonita Creek subdivision, forty miles north of Payson. As always, after personal safety, the firefighters’ first priority was protecting homes. The incident commander recognized the blaze as far too intense to attack head-on and instead opted to herd the fire, using five hotshot crews and two Type 2 Initial Attack crews to attempt to contain the blaze.

Seen from above, the lines used to steer the Dude Fire around the Bonita Creek subdivision formed an incomplete
H
. The road atop the Mogollon Rim contained the blaze’s left flank. Some two thousand feet below this line and running parallel to the rim, a firebreak the Civilian Conservation Corps had built in the 1930s, called the Control Road, contained the right flank. Walk Moore Canyon sat perpendicular to the two lines, between the houses and the flames, and connected the legs of the
H
.

Though Walk Moore Canyon was thick with ponderosa pines and cured logs, the incident commander planned to use the dry and rolling wash to push the fire around the subdivision. When the Dude approached the homes, firefighters would intentionally burn out the canyon, thereby blackening the fuel between the fire and the houses and forcing the flames into the unburned forest just beneath the rim. The key to the operation lay in an old jeep trail threading through the canyon.

The day before, a bulldozer had widened the trail into a fire line, and seven crews piled into the upper third of the mile-long wash. Around noon on the 26th, the hotshots closest to the top of Walk Moore started burning out while the other six crews widened the line and watched for spot fires. The operation didn’t start well. Embers from the burnout immediately rode plumes of smoke across the line
and ignited multiple spots just beneath houses in Bonita Creek. One spot took an entire hotshot crew to control.

They didn’t know it at the time, but far more dangerous than these spot fires was the effect of the hotshots’ burnout. It poured additional heat, moisture, and energy into the smoke column, which now billowed into the base of a fully developed thunderstorm. Firefighters coming to the Dude from six states could see the mushroom cloud, a pillar of gray boiling into the otherwise clear sky, from more than a hundred miles away. Inside Walk Moore Canyon, the day looked overcast.

“If it’s burning like this now, imagine what it’s going to be doing at one
P.M
.,” one hotshot told his superintendent. Upon entering the canyon, another simply quoted Tennyson’s poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade”: “Into the valley of Death / Rode the six hundred.”

The Perryville inmate crew
was one of the seven crews tasked with the burning operation in Walk Moore Canyon. Five hotshot crews worked above them, and one, the Navajo Scouts, below. Shortly after 2
P.M
., the Perryville inmates huddled tightly around a ten-gallon water can just delivered via ATV. They’d been building fire line nonstop since 1
A.M
., and most hadn’t had a drink in hours.

Unlike hotshot crews, Perryville used a rotating cast of superintendents, and on June 26, Dave LaTour, a professional firefighter from Tucson with a Tom Selleck mustache, commanded the crew. Beneath LaTour were seventeen inmates and two guards—Sandra Bachman and Larry Terra—who also acted as squad bosses.

In most cases, inmate crews aren’t used for frontline assignments, but when the Dude broke, the incident commander made an exception and requested Perryville by name. He’d recently worked with the inmates on a fire outside Prescott and considered the crew capable and hardworking.

Many firefighters hold inmate crews in similar regard. After serving their sentences, it’s not uncommon for former inmate firefighters to get jobs on wildland crews. Southern California first used prisoners
on the line in 1949, and other states quickly adopted the program. Inmates proved an effective and inexpensive source of labor. In 1990, Perryville prison paid firefighters forty to fifty cents an hour to do largely the same job as hotshots. Working on the crew was more about pride than payment, and the prisoners competed fiercely for positions on Perryville.

“You were somethin’ special. You know what I mean?” said Perryville firefighter Steven Pender. “It was like,
that’s
the fire crew. You gotta be elite to get on that.”

Predictably, Perryville’s crew members were a varied lot. Among them were Curtis Springfield, an artist in for assaulting his girlfriend; Geoff Hatch, convicted of burglary and theft; and James Ellis, serving a twenty-year sentence for manslaughter. Each was immensely proud to be on the crew. To train for the season, the inmates would gather under the prison yard’s razor wire and floodlights and spend hours doing push-ups and wind sprints. Recently, they’d been plotting a course to earn Perryville hotshot status, but their dream would never be realized.

Moments before the column collapsed, a frightening calm settled over Walk Moore. Perryville corrections officer Sandra Bachman was near the water jugs when she felt a light rain. The Dude was her first fire. She held her palms out and looked up into the ashy spritzes. Raindrop-size craters appeared in the dust around her. “I hope we get more of this,” she said to an inmate.

The other crews in the canyon noticed similarly odd things. One superintendent said, “The fire line and the world became deathly quiet.” Another watched tendrils of smoke that had been bending uphill with the daily winds suddenly stand straight up. The change in conditions made them uneasy, and all five hotshot superintendents pulled their crews back into a bulldozed safety zone—an area cleared of flammable materials. Only the Navajo Scouts and Perryville remained in the canyon.

A helicopter pilot, Dean Battersby, felt the column collapse first. Battersby was delivering brown-bag lunches to the crews working
along the top of the Mogollon Rim. The blades of his JetRanger
thwapped
beside the column, and inside the smoke, he could see burning bark and branches thousands of feet above the fire and floating upward in the rising heat. The distinction between the smoke and the clean air was crisp, like the seam that forms at the confluence of a milky glacial stream and a clear river.

The Dude Fire’s column had reached thirty-five thousand feet into the stratosphere, only half the height of the tallest smoke columns ever measured, but significant nonetheless. At that elevation, the temperature approached minus sixty degrees Fahrenheit, and the moisture in the smoke froze into a halo-shaped ice cap that sat atop the enormous pyrocumulonimbus cloud as if it wore a yarmulke. Just below the ice cap, the water molecules released from the fire condensed into droplets. The thunderstorm had reached maturity. It started to rain.

Around the same time, the ice cap became too heavy for the cloud’s structure to support it, and from the top down, the thunderstorm collapsed into itself. Somewhere in the center of the cloud’s massive cauliflower blooms, the smoke rushing skyward met the rain and cold air sinking off the ice cap, and for a few minutes the wind at ground level stopped as the fronts battled. Then the cold air and precipitation overwhelmed the heat of the column and the energy from both was refocused down toward the crews fighting the fire below.

Battersby noticed the collapsing column first, at 8,000 feet. His helicopter jolted to a stop. The pilot let out a grunt as he was suddenly lifted off his seat. The hands of the altimeter pinwheeled—7,500, 7,000, 6,500 feet—and in his rearview mirror Battersby saw the lunches, carried in a sling load that usually trailed a hundred feet behind the chopper, suddenly float directly beneath the JetRanger. He was plummeting in a descending column of air.

As the ground rushed up at him, Battersby raised the helicopter’s nose while simultaneously redlining the power. He instinctively banked the JetRanger into a U-turn—the direction he’d come from provided the fastest escape from the downdraft. As the helicopter
came around, Battersby scanned the forest below for a soft spot to crash:
Trees, always look for trees
. Open ground and water have no give, but branches break.

The JetRanger jumped and shuddered as Battersby flew into the safety of the calm air just beyond the downdraft. He dried his palms, climbed up to the top of the Mogollon Rim, and delivered the brown bag lunches. By the time he finished, forty-mile-per-hour winds were stoking the Dude Fire.

Just a few miles away
and not far from the lunch spot, LaTour was scouting for spot fires when the smoke surged into the canyon. The descending column hit the Dude Fire uphill of LaTour. The winds fanned every flank and tossed embers in all directions, but in Walk Moore the walls channeled and accelerated the gusts from forty to sixty miles per hour. The gray overcast light suddenly turned an eerie and muted orange as embers the size of pinecones rained down upon LaTour and kindled in the pine needles with a sizzling hiss. He raced back to find Bachman, Springfield, Ellis, and the rest of the crew.

They were still at the water cans when the fire exploded. It was as if a heavy stone had been dropped into an already overflowing pot. The fire rolled over the top of the forest and jumped the two-foot flames that had been backing down the canyon—the hotshots’ burnout. In an instant, entire stands of trees combusted, and embers were thrown far down the canyon.

“Get the fuck out!” somebody on Perryville yelled.

The crew were fleeing in a tight group before LaTour reached them. As he passed the forty-pound water cans, LaTour grabbed one—why, he’ll never know. He put himself last in a long line of forty Perryville crewmen and Navajo Scouts now hurrying downhill toward the vehicles parked on the Control Road. Many ran. LaTour chose not to. He didn’t want to incite panic. He felt it, though. From behind him, he could hear the roar of flames—half again as tall as the pines—and the trees, cooked from the inside, exploding like artillery fire.

Meanwhile, a squad boss and an inmate who had gone downcanyon to fetch water were still picking their way back toward the crew when they heard a wind they described as sounding like a locomotive. Three Perryville crew members sprinted past them. The inmates said nothing when they passed—nor did the next three. The squad boss asked one fleeing firefighter, “Are you the last person?”

The inmate didn’t answer. Instead, he started yanking at his fire shelter while running. In his fluster, he stubbed his toe on a rock and flew headfirst into the creek bed, bruising his ribs. Five Perryville crew members hustled past him as the flames and the panic closed in. The squad boss ran. Bachman fell down. James Denney, an inmate in for burglary, picked her up. An elk with fire just feet from its rear hooves hammered past them down the canyon. One crew member didn’t put down his Pulaski. Another ran with a chainsaw. Burning debris landed under one man’s shirt, and without time to pull out the embers, his chest burned as he sprinted beneath a ceiling of flame.

Greg Hoke ran in the middle of the pack—tenth in the line of twenty Perryville firefighters. Just as those ahead of him rounded a bend, a tongue of fire swept across the dozer line. Hoke, aghast, stumbled to a stop feet away from the flames blocking his escape. He turned around, ready to run uphill, and watched in horror as a second finger of flame crossed the canyon between him and LaTour, Bachman, and the eight other members of Perryville attempting to escape. Hoke presumed they were dead. He stood alone in the middle of a dry creek bed with flames curling around him. Out of time and options, he threw his pack aside and deployed his fire shelter.

Almost a mile downcanyon,
an engine crew was eating lunch where the Control Road crossed Walk Moore. To support the burnout operation, they’d spent the morning running a hose-lay up the canyon and along the fire line, but after finishing, the crew took it easy and watched the burnout. The captain described it as looking nice—controlled, slow, exactly the way the incident commander intended it to be.

Things started unraveling when the same eerie hush the hotshot
superintendents had felt settled over the Control Road. Moments later, a fifty-mile-per-hour blast of wind slammed into the enginemen, and two-hundred-foot flames appeared on the western edge of Walk Moore.
Get in the trucks!
the captain yelled. The fire would be upon them in minutes.