On the Burning Edge (24 page)

“I’ve got Donut and he’s leaving his lookout,” Frisby said. “The fire activity is picking up and we’re moving our rigs. Do you want us to move yours?”

“Affirm,” said Marsh. He watched as Frisby floored the ATV and they raced away ahead of the flames.

A
ll of Granite Mountain had heard the radio traffic about Donut getting blown off his lookout, and from the safety of the ridge they had seen the rescue. They could see Frisby and Donut in the Razor, a cone of dust billowing out behind as they outpaced the fire to the buggies. The wall of flames burning toward Yarnell now spread across the whole valley.

After receiving the weather update, Steed had pulled the hotshots off the direct piece of line they’d been cutting, and the men now sat close together on rock perches near the ridgetop. Ash drifted down on them. The mood was somber but not tense. Torched manzanita skeletons and the black and withered flesh of burned yuccas surrounded the hotshots for hundreds of yards in all directions. From where the men sat, the view was apocalyptic, but the black was cold and safe.

Corkscrews of dark smoke twisted off the leading edge of the fire and pulled into a column so thick it blotted out the sun. The smoke reached thirty thousand feet, as high as the cloud cover moving in from Prescott. Even the blue sky on the column’s edges looked smudged, but the men kept their eyes glued to the valley-wide flaming front. It had very nearly reached the knob where Donut sat just moments before.

The hotshots kept their packs on, as if they were just pausing for a few moments before standing to move again. The four sawyers sat close together with their swampers nearby.

Dustin DeFord clipped his gloves to a pink carabiner on his shoulder strap and folded his chaps up to let out a bit of body heat. Zup did the same. At that point, every hotshot from Percin to Steed understood there was no longer reason to cut line. As Willis had witnessed that morning, the flames barely slowed at the retardant line the DC-10 had dropped: $10,000 worth of slurry rendered useless in moments. Another weather change was the only thing that could stop the Yarnell Hill Fire.

Grant sat below the sawyers. He leaned against a rock, rested his hands on the Kevlar chaps covering his thighs, and watched the flames race toward Yarnell. In a nod to his steady improvement throughout the season, Steed and Clayton had promoted Grant to swamper—an honor for any rookie, and recognition that he’d proven himself one of the fittest men on the crew. But that afternoon, Grant looked resigned. Over the past few hours, he’d seen aircraft nearly collide and Donut narrowly avoid a burnover. Now he was going to watch Yarnell burn. The day had started slow, but the afternoon was punctuated by brief adrenaline-filled moments. The experience was both exhausting and exciting. Yarnell Hill was news in the making, and Granite Mountain had front-row seats to a catastrophe. Grant, like the rest of the hotshots, couldn’t look away from the fire.

Wade snapped a photo of Grant with his phone: the flames engulfing the valley on the left, Grant in the middle, and Yarnell on the right. Wade texted it to his mom, along with a note explaining that the town was soon to burn. The sawyer Andrew Ashcraft did the same, sending a photo to his mom and his wife.

Scott texted Heather. “Holy shit! This thing is running straight at Yarnell!” It was 3:52. Heather didn’t respond.

Marsh wasn’t with the
crew while the hotshots rested. As was his style, he was likely scouting the long ridgeline closer to the Helms’
place. The intensifying fire behavior might call for a change in tactics on Division Alpha, and Marsh always walked the ground he worked to familiarize himself with the terrain. As he hiked, he radioed Steed, who was resting on a flat rock with the hotshots. Bob, Turby, and Tony were sitting next to him.

“I was just saying—I was just saying I knew this was coming when I called you and asked what your comfort level was,” Marsh told Steed. “I could just feel it, you know.”

Marsh was stating the obvious—they’d received multiple weather updates forecasting the wind shift. That the fire would explode when the winds hit didn’t require great foresight. Whether it was that or something else, a few veterans seized on Marsh’s statement as an opportunity to poke fun at their boss.

“Yeah, well, we’ve been feeling it all day,” Turby said, spitting out a long strand of tobacco. Tony and Chris chuckled. So did Steed. Bob, who seemed to be consumed with thought or worry, leaned on his knee and looked out over the fire.

“I’m just saying, you know. Too bad,” Marsh continued.

Steed ignored Marsh’s train of thought, and a long moment later he replied with an update on the location of the fire.

“It’s almost made it to the single-track road that we walked in on,” he said, referring to the road Donut and Frisby had used to flee minutes earlier.

As Donut and Frisby
sped down the dusty track toward Granite Mountain’s buggies, Frisby radioed Trew, his captain, and told him that they needed another driver to move all the vehicles.
I’ll be there shortly to pick you up
, Frisby told Trew. The flat gray of overcast skies—an artificial sunset—supplanted the bright light of day as the smoke cloaked the sun. Flames would be at the buggies soon.

When they got to the trucks, Frisby told Donut to take off if it got too dangerous.

“But otherwise,” Frisby said, “wait here until I get the other drivers.”

He wanted to lead Donut out of the labyrinth of jeep trails that threaded through the valley. As Frisby sped off toward Blue Ridge, Donut, out of danger for the time being, threw his Pulaski and gear in the back of Marsh’s superintendent truck. He climbed into the cab, turned on the A/C, and switched the radio to Granite Mountain’s crew net.

On the radio, Donut could hear Marsh and Steed discussing whether the crew should stay in the black or come up with a plan to move. Marsh said he was scouting the escape route: the two-track that ran along the top of the ridge to Glen Ilah and the Helms’ place. Staying put in the black was obviously the safest option, but it also meant agreeing to be spectators to the macabre show unfolding beneath them. The alternative was for Granite Mountain to follow the ridge out to their escape route and to the safety zone at the Helms’ place.

It was an appealing option. The Helms’ place would put the hotshots in a better position from which to reengage the fire. With all its defensible space, the ranch was not under threat, and if they could wait out the firestorm there, the crew would be a short walk away from Glen Ilah, where they could help homeowners whose lives were soon to go up in flames. Moving Granite Mountain was also the type of tactical decision that might surprise and impress Abel and the incident commanders. Granite Mountain had been sidelined on the fire’s cold heel all day. But when the flames swept through Yarnell, Abel and Cordes would immediately need all the help they could find. For Granite Mountain to emerge unexpectedly into the action, just minutes after the fire had torn through Yarnell, would be a slick move—a coup that could win an ambitious division accolades with the incident management team or a recently absent superintendent the admiration of his unfamiliar crew.

But moving Granite Mountain to the Helms’ place came with substantial risks. It compromised many of the Ten and Eighteen that both Marsh and Steed had memorized:

Weather is getting hotter and drier.

Wind increases and/or changes direction.

Terrain and fuels make escape to safety zones difficult.

Unburned fuel between you and the fire.

The safety zone was more than a mile and a half away from the crew, and as soon as the hotshots left the safety of the black, a sea of dry chaparral would lie between the men and the fire.

Steed and Marsh considered the rules but found ways to justify ignoring the Ten and Eighteen. From the escape route along the ridge, the hotshots had an expansive view of the fire’s spread. If the fire got too close, they could always bail off the south, southwest, or west side of the Weavers into the thinner fuels in the desert below.

Ultimately, the choice was Marsh’s, and the orders Donut heard him deliver were clear:
Move the crew along the escape route
. If Steed or anybody else questioned his decision, they did so discreetly, because on the crew’s radio channel, nobody openly disagreed with Marsh.

From his lookout on
Highway 89, Cordes was scrambling to come up with a plan to keep the fire out of Yarnell. He radioed Frisby, who was still in the ATV, racing along the network of dirt roads to pick up his captain, Trew, near St. Joseph’s Shrine.

“Is it still an option to burn off that dozer line?” Cordes asked.

Frisby replied that it was not. The wind was too strong, and the flames too close to safely put firefighters before them. From his vantage, Marsh confirmed Frisby’s judgment.

“The fire has progressed nearly to the buggies,” Marsh said over the radio. Then he came back a moment later. “I want to pass on that we’re going to make our way to our escape route and to our pre-designated safety zone.”

When Cordes heard the transmission, he wasn’t certain where Granite Mountain was, where Marsh was in relation to the hotshots, or even what escape route he intended to take. But upon hearing the phrase “pre-designated safety zone,” Cordes immediately assumed that Granite Mountain was going to the Helms’ place—the safety
zone they’d discussed that morning. If Marsh felt they had the time to get there, Cordes saw no reason to doubt that their escape route was safe and justifiable.

Frisby, though, didn’t follow Marsh’s intentions. He attempted to clarify.

“Are you in good black?” Frisby asked.

“Picking our way through the black to the road in the bottom, then out towards the ranch,” Marsh said. He was breathing hard. Marsh was referencing the two-track that led from the fire’s cold heel and back along the top of the long ridgeline to the Helms’ place. It was the most direct route back to Granite Mountain’s pre-designated safety zone, and the one he’d discussed with the hikers when he had first arrived at the fire’s edge that morning. But there were no clues in Marsh’s transmission to suggest that this was his intended escape route.

“To confirm, you’re talking about the road you saw me on with the Razor this morning?” Frisby asked, confused.

“Yes, the road I saw you on,” Marsh said.

This further confused Frisby. It was as if Marsh was being intentionally cryptic. The route he was describing sounded like the road that Frisby had only moments before used to rescue Donut from his lookout. Hiking the crew out that road made no sense whatsoever. The route was, in fact, lethal. It ran straight through the unburned chaparral, and if the brush wasn’t already burning, it would be soon.

Regardless, Frisby now had troubles of his own to worry about. Every moment that passed, the fire moved closer to Donut and Granite Mountain’s rigs, and he and Trew needed to get them out before the Yarnell Hill Fire claimed its first casualties. Frisby broke off contact with Marsh, trusting the longtime superintendent’s judgment. But where Granite Mountain was and where they were heading remained unclear to most firefighters on scene.

Shortly after 4:00, Cordes
was still parked on Highway 89 and acting as a lookout for the firefighters in town. The fire had burned northeast
to the doorsteps of Peeples Valley before it essentially made a U-turn, and it was now steaming southwest toward Yarnell. Cordes’s contingency plan to burn off the dozer line had already failed, and the winds from the outflow boundary were still minutes away from bringing their full force to bear on the fire’s northern edge. Once again, a Southwest blaze was defying the expectations of the firefighters on scene. But Yarnell Hill’s explosion was well beyond anything Cordes had anticipated.

“Time to get Yarnell on evacuation notice,” he called to Abel. “It’s at my first trigger point.”

Earlier in the day, they’d agreed on four trigger points for the town, each a geographic feature separated by roughly a quarter-mile. The fire had reached the first, a granite knob a mile north of town that meant Yarnell had one hour to evacuate. Already, a reverse 911 phone call had gone out to the homeowners, warning them to get out of town. The next trigger point, a ridge, meant the immediate evacuation of any civilians still left in their homes. The third, another knob, prompted the disengagement of firefighters. And the fourth, a rocky ridge above St. Joseph’s Shrine in Harper Canyon, was what Cordes called the “aw shit” point. If flames reached that ridge, every firefighting resource in Yarnell needed to be in or immediately heading toward the Ranch House Restaurant, the predetermined safety zone for the firefighters in Yarnell.

Paul Musser, the second operations chief, was with Cordes on the highway. Musser had already requested that any additional engines in Peeples Valley divert to Yarnell. Though he’d ordered dozens more resources from the SWCC—engines, hotshot crews, water tenders—most were still hours out. Cordes didn’t have hours. He needed firefighters immediately. Musser called Division Alpha. He wanted hotshot crews. Granite Mountain and Blue Ridge were the only two on scene.

“Are Granite Mountain and Blue Ridge still committed to the ridge?” Musser asked.

Marsh told him Granite Mountain could not get down to help but that Blue Ridge might be available. At that time, Donut, Frisby, and Trew were parking Granite Mountain’s vehicles at St. Joseph’s Shrine
in Harper Canyon. The gray overcast light now looked like inky dusk, but with a shade of orange. The leaves of the oak trees shading the canyon twitched and rustled. When some of the more veteran hotshots on Blue Ridge exited the buggies, they commented that they could feel the column sucking air upward. A few wondered if they were about to witness another Dude Fire. They were standing in the bottom of what would become another inescapable canyon if the column collapsed.

“Buggies are parked,” Donut radioed to Steed. “I’m with Blue Ridge. If you guys need anything, let me know,” he said.

“Copy. I’ll see you soon,” Steed said.