On the Burning Edge (14 page)

If there was any doubt among Granite Mountain’s crew members about how their inexperienced superintendent would respond to pressure applied by incident commanders, Steed put them to rest on Thompson Ridge. He wasn’t willing to risk his men’s lives to chase a dangerous fire that in the current conditions they were unlikely to catch. Even at the behest of an insistent operations chief, Steed flat-out refused the assignment.

“But that’s what hotshots do!” the operations chief, a former hotshot himself, told Steed. He wanted Granite Mountain to chase the slop-over before it became a disaster for the town of Los Alamos.

Steed was firm. Granite Mountain wouldn’t go. Nor would the other hotshot crew working the night shift. It was too risky. But after declining the assignment, Steed offered a productive alternative: Granite Mountain would go after the slop-over as soon as the fire intensity died down. The operations chief consented and, after midnight,
the hotshots lined out behind Steed and he marched his men toward the flames.

Born and raised an hour
northeast of Prescott in the small town of Cottonwood, Steed lost his mom to a car accident when he was twelve. He joined the Marine Corps after high school and served as a gunner for four years. Though he never saw combat (he was out of the service before 9/11), his time in the Marines shaped his perspective on firefighting. “It’s the next best thing to the military,” Steed often said.

He started his fire career with the Forest Service’s Prescott Hotshots, a crew based across town from Granite Mountain, when he was twenty-five. Over the next eight seasons, he worked on Forest Service engines and a helicopter, where he generated a collection of superhuman stories firefighters would tell long after Steed left each crew.

He once propped up a falling tree by throwing his shoulder into the trunk, and in a blaze in Yosemite National Park, he rappelled from a helicopter to put out a number of purported spot fires that had been picked up by a thermal imaging sensor. The red dots—heat signatures on the computer screen—turned out to be black bears. When Steed touched down, he unclipped from the rope and chased the bears off with his chainsaw.

Over a dozen years of firefighting, Steed’s reviews were unwaveringly exemplary: “ensured safety and morale during a 32-hour shift,” “always weighs safety first,” “an excellent listener and very much a people person.” By the time he came to Granite Mountain in 2009, Steed had developed a reputation as a composed and intensely fit firefighter. He moved quickly through the hotshots’ ranks, and after just two years as a squad boss, Steed was Marsh’s first choice for captain when the position opened up. “The missing piece of the puzzle,” Marsh called Steed.

The prospect of permanently taking over as superintendent thrilled Steed. Already he called Granite Mountain “my crew” and was changing the crew’s culture through a leadership style that was starkly different from Marsh’s. If Marsh was the stern father figure,
Steed was the cool older brother. With a picture-perfect family—a pretty wife, Desiree, a four-year-old boy, Caden, and a three-year-old girl, Cambria—he had always been a natural role model for Granite Mountain’s more family- and community-oriented hotshots. But when he took over as superintendent, his charisma and physical prowess served to make him a role model for most of the men. Steed reinforced that status by often telling the hotshots he loved them. He also did away with some of the crew’s less popular protocols.

He relaxed the dress code, allowed the men to wear their beards thick, and introduced new traditions beyond just the intensity of the physical training. As punishment for a poorly mopped-up log or a fuel bottle accidentally left behind, he’d forced the whole crew to drop down in the ash and lead them through forty push-ups. But more often he rewarded them, allowing the hotshots to play Frisbee in the afternoons or springing on them impromptu team-building exercises like building a human pyramid. Every Saturday afternoon, during the hotshots’ work hours, Steed invited the men’s families to come to the station to barbecue. By May, the picnics were robust affairs. Wives, girlfriends, and parents all came. One Saturday, a troop of more than a dozen kids traipsed about the station.

Donut and a few of the other veteran hotshots sometimes equated Steed’s relaxed approach to leadership with a tolerance for laziness. Bunch didn’t, though. He thought Granite Mountain was in both the best shape and the highest spirits he’d ever seen.

The crew’s lightened personality did come with a hitch, though. Compared with previous Granite Mountain crews, 2013’s hotshots were untested. Before taking over as superintendent, Steed had been captain for only one fire season. On other hotshot crews, it can take a captain a decade to make the jump. Filling in for Steed as captain was Tom Cooley, who had worked on the line with fewer than half of the hotshots. Nobody questioned Cooley’s experience. During his fifteen fire seasons, he’d fought hundreds of blazes in many different command capacities, but now his full-time job was as a structural firefighter with the Prescott Fire Department.

Cooley had come to the hotshots in April after learning of Marsh’s
shoulder injury. Without Marsh, or somebody with comparable experience, Granite Mountain lacked the minimum qualifications needed to retain their hotshot status. Cooley, whose ample wildland certifications were up to date, agreed to temporarily transfer to the hotshots to help fill the experience gap. He was the number two in command of a crew he’d hardly worked with at all.

And it wasn’t just Cooley and Steed in new positions on Granite Mountain. Three of the hotshots’ fire experience was limited to the Hart Fire and the uneventful prairie burn, and Bob Caldwell hadn’t yet spent a year as squad boss. Hotshot crews deal with a considerable amount of turnover every season, but rarely this much. How Steed and Granite Mountain would respond to its first truly dangerous assignment remained an open question.

Steed led the hotshots
at a hammering pace up the road Clayton and Farnsworth had driven a few hours earlier. The slop-over rapidly spread to nearly a hundred acres, but around midnight, the humidity approached 30 percent. The extra moisture in the air damped the fire’s spread to a crawl. If the crew cut line fast enough, Granite Mountain could catch the slop-over by daybreak. Thompson Ridge could still be contained.

At the top of the hike, Steed gave a quick briefing on escape routes and safety zones. It echoed the briefings he’d given all year: If the fire intensified, Steed said, step into the cold black—the already burned fuel just inside the fire’s spreading edge. But this time, Steed had something else to say, too.

Maybe his earlier refusal to immediately chase the slop-over made him want to show the operations chief that Granite Mountain had the guts and firepower to catch the spot before shift’s end. Or maybe he wanted to prove to himself, the hotshots, and all the crews on Thompson Ridge that Granite Mountain was as good under Steed as it was under Marsh. Whatever it was, Steed added onto his regular briefing a few words designed to pump up the crew. This was the first
time the crew had really had a chance to prove what they could do on the fire line. Steed wanted them to catch the slop-over
that night
.

Bunch and the sawyers ripped their chainsaws to life and started clearing a line right on the fire’s edge.

“Back-cutting! Down the hill!” Bunch hollered as the crew dived into the woods. An enormous dead pine groaned as it leaned over and popped when it separated from its stump. When it hit the ground, every hotshot within a few hundred yards could feel the tremendous thud through the soles of their boots. Granite Mountain was off and hustling to catch the slop-over.

The saws kept screaming and the swampers followed close behind, tossing still-burning logs back into the fire and pushing armfuls of cut green brush farther from the burning edge. Throughout the shift, Steed moved ahead of the crew, devised plans, then returned and worked right alongside his men.

As lead Pulaski,
Donut led the way for the ten other hotshots in the scrape. His first tool strokes were nearly on the gravel road where the slop-over had jumped the lines. Starting fire lines in areas of nonflammable materials—water, rocks, roads, the black—is known as anchoring or creating an anchor point. The tactic is used on all lines to ensure that the flames can’t flank or get behind the firefighters.

Within minutes, Donut moved into the pine needles and aspen leaves smoldering on the forest floor. The scrape’s line traced the slop-over’s creeping perimeter. Flames crawled up the sides of long-dead and still-standing trees—snags—and the woods flickered around them. Donut put the line so close to the flames that he could feel the heat on his face.

For hours, the scrape swung their tools. Every so often Donut broke his rhythm—
swing, step, swing, swing, step
—and turned around to watch the men’s headlamps bobbing behind him. At first, the rookies in the scrape cut line with the mad energy of inexperience, pouring into each tool stroke every calorie they had in their bodies. But after
a few hours had passed, Donut glanced back and saw that most of the headlamps were shining down at the men’s boots. Fatigue was setting in. It wasn’t a good sign. Daybreak was still hours away.

“Hey, Donut,” Woyjeck said. “Can I take a piss?”

Donut sighed. After Chris left, Donut filled in as lead firefighter, the second-in-command on Alpha. The position allowed him to sit in the front of the buggies—a nice perk. But it also required fielding Woyjeck’s many questions.

“Dude, I don’t care if you piss, drink water, or sit and eat a snack,” Donut said. “Just do your fuckin’ job and don’t go tits-up on me.”

If Marsh were here
, Donut thought,
he’d be bawling at the rookies to pick up the pace
. They already looked spent. The rumor among the hotshots was that Marsh was taking over the crew again as soon as they returned from Thompson Ridge. His shoulder had healed. Donut considered it good news. He felt that Steed’s mellower style of leadership came at the cost of the perfection that Marsh demanded of Granite Mountain. Maybe when Marsh returned, the new guys, as Chris MacKenzie would often say, would learn.

Brendan “Donut” McDonough had
learned four years earlier. His first hard firefight came just a few weeks into his rookie season. A helicopter had dropped Granite Mountain on an Arizona ridgetop within sight of Mexico. One California hotshot crew had been camped alone in the meadow for ten days. They’d eaten nothing but MREs, and there was nothing to do but work from dawn until well past dusk. The camp was like a scene from
Lord of the Flies
: Tents cluttered the meadow, empty boxes of MREs were stuffed with trash, and the other hotshots were filthy, exhausted, and fast growing irritated with one another. With no resupply, the men were forced to ration their tobacco. Before Granite Mountain flew in, a few of the veterans had the good sense to stash extra logs of chewing tobacco in the sling loads—gifts for the other crew. But not even tobacco could alleviate the suffering.

Temperatures topped a hundred degrees every day. The fire had
ripped through brush that was twice the men’s height but not thick enough to provide any meaningful shade. For ten days, Granite Mountain worked sixteen-hour shifts in this sweltering tunnel, clearing a ridgeline of fuel in preparation for a burnout that they ultimately lost. This job was as hard as hotshotting got, and harder still for Donut.

Donut had moved to Prescott from San Diego, California, when he was thirteen. His new school was dominated by cowboy kids dreaming of one day riding in Prescott’s Frontier Days, the world’s oldest rodeo. Donut stood out. He was a lanky blond skateboarder with a fondness for brightly colored tank tops and an inability to ignore insults. Donut and Bob Caldwell, who grew up in Prescott, had nearly fought twice in school; once after one of them supposedly threw a rock at the other’s truck, and again when Bob accused Donut of cheating in a cooking class.

To hear him tell it, Donut faced the same exclusion when he started on Granite Mountain. He was a punching bag. Marsh hired him less because he was a stellar applicant and more because he needed to fill a position quickly after another guy had quit. Unaware that Marsh was even looking to hire, Donut had gone to the station in search of work. Marsh interviewed him on the spot, asking him his typical suite of questions. Donut earned his job because of his response to this one: “Why do you want this job?”

He was studying to be an EMT at the time, but sleeping off hangovers during most of the classes. He had been on probation for theft, had a history of smoking weed and drinking, and, most important, had a baby daughter. Donut told all of this to Marsh.

“She’s why I came here,” Donut told Marsh. Being a dad made him want to straighten up. “If you hire me, I’m not going to quit.”

Marsh believed in giving people second chances. He hired Donut on the spot.

For most of Donut’s first fire season, Bob, along with most of the other hotshots, ignored him, but when somebody did say something to Donut, it was usually scathing. Donut earned his nickname because nobody bothered to address him as Brendan or McDonough. He was McDonald’s, McDoNothing, McDipshit. “Donut” stuck. Though the
other hotshots seemed intent on making Donut feel unwanted and unliked, he refused to quit.

The fire on the Mexican border proved to the rest of the crew that he deserved to be a hotshot. From steep hikes and long days of swinging Pulaski, Donut bled where his pack straps cut into his shoulder and his hands, even through the gloves, bubbled with blisters. Then he caught the flu. At night, he’d lie on his mat shaking with fever and exhaustion, coughing until he vomited. Finally Marsh, who’d already had two guys flown off the line because of the bug, told Donut it was time to go to the doctor.

“I’m not leaving, Eric,” Donut said. He needed the money for his daughter.

“If you’re going to be a dipshit about this, you’re sleeping in the corner of the meadow,” Marsh said. “Because your coughing is keeping everybody else up.”