THE FIRE LINE

THE STORY OF
THE GRANITE
MOUNTAIN HOTSHOTS
AND ONE OF THE
DEADLIEST DAYS IN
AMERICAN
FIREFIGHTING

FERNANDA SANTOS

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age88 of the Yarnell Hill Fire Serious Accident Investigation Report, the official account of the deadliest wildfire in the United
States since 1933, offers a distanced, emotionless diagram of a fatal last stand
against flames and heat. Coffinlike shapes represent nineteen firefighters
killed in the Arizona wildfire on June30, 2013, all members of the Granite
Mountain Hotshots. Its an arresting chartloyalty, death, and immeasurable
grief, graphed in numbered geometric figures arranged in precise disarray:
FIRE
7

16
3

11

17
6

13

12

20
24 ft.

15
14

10
18

19
30 ft.

The chart depicts the firefighters bodies in the hollow where the wildfire
trapped thema steep mountain to their backs, a high wall of flames
ahead. A list of names below it keys to the individuals who lost their lives:
1. Eric Marsh; 2. Jesse Steed; 3. Clayton Whitted; 4. Robert Caldwell;
5. Travis Car ter; 6. Christopher MacKenzie; 7. Travis Turbyfill;
8. Andrew Ashcraft; 10. Joe Thurston; 11. Wade Parker;
12. Anthony Rose; 13. Garret Zuppiger; 14. Scott Norris;
15. Dustin DeFord; 16. William Warneke; 17. Kevin Woyjeck;
18. John Percin Jr.; 19. Grant McKee; 20. Sean Misner.

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Number 9, Brendan McDonough, is missing. Hed been

assigned lookout duty a half mile away.
On that hot and dry June day, the Granite Mountain Hotshots had risen with the sun, as usual. Theyd taken their assigned seats in the crews four personnel carriers and traveled
through forty-three winding miles, from their home base in
Prescott, Arizona, to a speck of town649 residents, barely 9
square miles called Yarnell, a hideaway for hippies, artists, retirees, and others looking to forget and be forgotten. The men
had parked near the end of a dirt road, on the edge of the wild,
and sized up a fire that was chewing at a ridge west of town.
Theyd trudged uphill in single file for what should have been a
usual days worksawing off brush, tossing it aside, and scraping the ground down to mineral soil, to starve the approaching
fire of the vegetation that would keep it burning. The task is
called cutting fire line, and its how wildfires are fought.
The sun pounded down upon the Hotshots. They marched
upslope, bowed under the weight of fifty pounds of gear, their
eyes on the rocky ground underfoot. Parched chaparral coated
the majestic Weaver Mountains, highlands that rise from the Sonoran Deserts leafy flatlands. It hadnt rained in Yarnell since
April. For the fourth consecutive day, temperatures had soared
above one hundred degrees and lingered there, disrupting the
usual easy summer in that cool mountainside retreat. In flameresistant pants and long-sleeved shirts that some had folded up,
others had closed by fastening a strap of Velcro around their
wrists, the men lumbered past massive granite boulders that
blasted waves of heat at them. In their gloved hands, they each
lugged one of the tools of their trade: picks, axes, shovels, Stihl
440 chain saws.
The fire hadnt looked like much to them when they had

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rolled into town that morninga swirl of saffron smoke against

a boundless blue sky. Sparked two days earlier by lightning,
the fire had crept north of its point of origin, a gnarled cluster
of chaparral plants catclaw acacia, scrub oak, and manzanita
near the tip of Yarnell Hill, seventy miles northwest of Phoenix.
The Hotshots took positions on the fires slowest-spreading
edge, its heel, an area close to its point of origin. Yarnell stood
to their right, ringed by thick, tall brush, land that hadnt burned
in forty-seven years. To their left lay a charred patch of about two
hundred acresan area firefighters call the black, because the
vegetation there had already burned. They marked it as a safe
retreat if the fire turned on them.
Their first task was to find a strategic starting point for the
fire line they aimed to build as a barrier to the flames spread,
and as an anchor to a hand-carved buffer zone clear of everything flammable. They settled on a gap on the fires southwest
corner, along the dense wall of a steep, rocky slope facing toward
the town of Congress, away from Yarnell. They swung their tools,
pounding, digging, slicing, and clearing the ground around the
fires southern perimetera line about a yard wide around a bent
elbowand onward along the fires eastern fringe, its right flank.
The task is a sort of savage science, strategic in its planning, primitive in its execution, punishing bodies and minds. Stooped, the
men attacked the hardened soil with furious precision, determined to take away the fuel that would other wise feed the fire
if it ran toward Yarnell.
Then, everything changed. As forecasters had twice warned,
a power ful thunderstorm blew in from the north. It crashed
head-to-head with the fire, which was rolling toward Yarnells
small neighbor Peeples Valley, a community of ranches and middling homes with about half of Yarnells population and twice

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the acreage. The collision was at once fearsome and spectacular. Winds gusted to forty, then fifty miles per hour, bending the
northbound flames eastward and shoving them southward at
aspeed of a mile in four minutes, a hundred yards in fifteen
secondsfaster than any gear-laden firefighter can sprint. Smoke
cleaved a horseshoe in the air, stamping the fires changing orientation in gunmetal gray against the darkened sky.
From her home in Yarnell, Adria Shayne gasped at the apocalyptic sight. She grabbed her pets and, stunned, drove away in
her battered pickup truck, leaving her house and every thing in
it heating up behind her. Propane tanks hissed and exploded as
she escaped. Glass windows shattered. Ammunition fired spontaneously. Flames rolled through the west side of town, then
barged inside a neighborhood at its southern tip, Glen Ilah, burning homes at random, skipping some, as if in a drunken game of
hopscotch. Pipes cracked and water gushed underfoot. Ash
shrouded the sun, turning the day dark.
From a knoll northeast of the rest of his crew, McDonough,
the assigned lookout, swung a pocket-size psychrometer, an
L-shaped instrument that measured temperature and humidity
on the fire line. Lookout is a physically easy task that requires
intimate knowledge of fire, weather, and their wicked tricks.
The easy part suited McDonough that day as it was his first back
at work after two days at home nursing a cold, and a night out
with friends.
Facing north, McDonough felt the wind that had caressed
his neck shift and slap his face. He saw the fire suddenly rolling
toward him, no longer away from him. Over the radio, he warned
the crews captain, Jesse Steed, that the flames had charged close
to the knoll. Steed agreed when McDonough said hed pull
back to safety: Ive got eyes on you and the fire, and its making a

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good push, Steed had said. McDonough had looked back over
his shoulder as he left and saw flames devouring the perch where
he had just stood.
The nineteen Granite Mountain Hotshots stayed in the
burning wilderness.

Eric Tarr, a police officerparamedic with the Arizona Department of Public Safety, was part of a three-men team assigned by the state to drop water on the fire from a collapsible
bucket suspended from the belly of their Bell 407 helicopter,
Ranger 58.
The Hotshots had vanished and it had fallen upon Tarr to
go looking.
The helicopter circled the smoldering Weaver Mountains.
Smoke nearly smothered its jet engine. Swirling winds kept
shoving its nose down. The fuel gauge dropped perilously toward
empty. With two minutes of flying time left, Tarr glimpsed a
fleeting apparition through an opening in the hazea cluster of
scorched fire shelters.
Fire shelters are portable cocoons, mandatory since 1977 for
those on the fire line, a last-resort protection against heat and
smoke. Theyre made of layered fiberglass cloth, silica, and aluminum foil and are stuffed inside a hard-plastic case strapped
at the base of each firefighters backpack. Firefighters grasp handles marked left hand and right hand and shake the shelters, which unfurl like rounded pup tents. They then step into
the shelters, drop to the ground, and roll on their bellies, wedging the shelters openings underneath. They keep their faces
turned to the ground, their legs spread, and their feet to the fire,
protecting their airways and torsos. Within, they slip their arms

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through straps on each side, lessening the chance of the shelters

blowing away. The shelters are not supposed to hug the bodies
inside like blankets, but to wrap them loosely, like sacks. Deployed, they look like giant silver bullets.
The shelters Tarr saw at the bottom of the canyon that day
looked like burned ash logs, tightly arranged on ground the Hotshots had half-cleared and brush theyd half-sawed.
The aircraft looped twice, counterclockwise, over them. Tarr
clung to the hope that someone might have survived, even though
none of the shelters had stirred during the helicopters transits.
The firefighters radios had gone silent since their superintendent,
Eric Marsh, had tautly announced, Our escape route has been
cut off. We are preparing a deployment site and we are burning
out around ourselves in the brush, and Ill give you a call when
we are under the shthe shelters.
The pilot, Clifford Bursting, circled the helicopter closer to
the ground, worried whether the carbon-composite rotor blades
would withstand the heat radiating from the land.
Tarr spotted an opening. Trees burned on one side. A picnic bench burned on the other. It would have to do.
Bursting lowered the helo farther. Tarr stepped out and inhaled. The roof of his mouth throbbed. Scorching air seared his
nostrils and then his windpipe. His throat burned. His eyes
stung. He grabbed his medical kit. It had a pulse oximeter, which
measured the level of oxygen in the blood, a stethoscope, and
some basic bandages, moist and sterile, for wrapping burned skin.
Tarr began a lonely hike uphill, toward the shelters.
The fire had scorched the dusty ground black and turned
the high deserts golden soil to charcoal. The sand crackled
under the soles of his insulated boots, as though he were treading on eggshells. Ahead, thick smoke caressed the granite

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boulders the fire had seared. To his left, flames still danced
against the pale-gray sky. Tarr saw planes above, but couldnt
hear them. The air didnt stir.
As usual on the job, he carried a pistol in his holster. His vest
held handcuffs and a canister of pepper spray. A rectangular case
latched to his backpack contained his own fire shelter, in case
the flames menaced him. He knew they could.
From upslope, past a ranch spared by the blaze, a muffled
voice pierced the desolate stillness, startling him.
Hey! Hey! Tarr bellowed. Can anybody hear me?
He picked up his pace. His heart pounded. He heard that
voice again.
Is anybody out there?
At the crest of the rise, he halted.
His search ended.
The Hotshots had collapsed in the jagged circle. Eleven of
them had their feet to the fire, as theyd practiced. Billy Warneke
lay between Marsh and Clayton Whitted, the crossbar of an
H linking lines of bodies one at right angles to his feet, the
other to his head, where the flames must have first touched
the men.
Tarr looked at his wristwatch, noting the timesix thirtyfive in the evening. He moved deliberately from east to west,
stopping at each shelter, tallying the magnitude of the disaster.
The bodies lay in a lonely hollow. Together, they represented
the greatest single loss of firefighters since the 9/11 attacks,
and the largest death toll of professional wildland firefighters in
more than a century.
We have nineteen fatalities, Tarr said, and heard that muffled voice again. This time he recognized it as his own, echoing
from a firefighters scorched radio.

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