On the Burning Edge (18 page)

D
onut picked a new theme song for Alpha. Chris MacKenzie was back as Alpha’s lead firefighter, and Donut, once again in the back of the buggy, reclaimed his role as deejay. The tune was Rammstein’s “Du Hast,” a thrashing metal song that riffs on traditional German wedding vows and repeats “until death separates” ad nauseam. Nobody in the buggies, of course, knew what the foreign lyrics meant. What they liked was how the pulsing bass line psyched them up for the task at hand. Not long after noon, the hotshots arrived on scene. The wind blew the smoke north across Iron Springs Road, and the column was lying almost parallel to the ground. As they drove through the plume, the hotshots on the left side of the trucks could see a line of flames ten feet tall, maybe higher, churning through the brush and coming straight at the highway.

Donut turned around to the other hotshots in Alpha. “Get your fucking shit together,” he said. “This is what we signed up for.”

Steed rearranged Alpha and Bravo after Bunch’s and Renan’s departures, and Granite Mountain was a slightly different crew than they had been on Thompson Ridge. Marsh, who was getting his truck fixed and not with the hotshots when the Doce broke, was back in his
superintendent’s position on Granite Mountain. Steed stepped back to captain, and Tom Cooley returned to structural firefighting.

Clayton Whitted had moved Sean Misner, a twenty-six-year-old rookie from California with a new baby on the way, to Alpha to be Grant’s new “battle buddy.” Scott Norris and Joe Thurston shifted to Bravo to replace Bunch. John Percin, who had hurt his knee during the first week of the season, wasn’t currently in Alpha but was expected to be back soon. Since his injury, Percin had been a “chip bitch,” doing defensible-space work with the three other guys Marsh and Steed hired each year to keep the projects going while the crew was on the line. That morning, when Steed asked Percin how he was doing, Percin said, “Better, but I’m not a hundred percent yet.” After two weeks on Thompson Ridge, few of the guys felt 100 percent, and with Renan and Bunch gone, the crew was now shorthanded and needed Percin back as soon as possible.

The buggies took a left down a dirt road toward the fire’s starting point, where a spark from a bullet had ignited the chaparral beside a rock fence set up to keep ATVs out of the desert. The blaze burned so hot it looked as if the chaparral’s stems had been blackened and then shorn with a razor, but the flames were already long gone. There was no chance the crew could cut direct line around the fire: It had aligned with the wind, and with the gentle rise in the terrain, the fire’s head had already grown to a few hundred yards across. The firefighters would have to link together a series of roads to contain the Doce.

Granite Mountain backtracked on the dirt road, which was now stacked with arriving fire engines. Every available firefighter in the area had been pressed into duty. The plume was throwing embers across the road, and engine crews hurriedly hosed down the flames before the fire could get established on the wrong side of the impromptu containment line. Overhead, a single-engine air tanker strafed the unburned side of the road with retardant.

The roads between the flames and town were the firefighters’ last hope for keeping the Doce from knocking on the doorsteps of the town’s sixty thousand homes. If it crossed either road, flames would be running wild through ranchland with nothing between them and
Williamson—and, by extension, Prescott—but a few hundred heads of longhorn cattle and a five-mile strip of junipers and tangled brush that hadn’t burned since the last Doce, twenty-three years earlier. To widen the line, Steed quickly planned to burn out a patch of chaparral that grew in the corner where the dirt road intersected the paved Iron Springs Road. With the flames spreading so quickly, it was a risky assignment. Steed needed experienced hands to pull it off.

“Chris, Donut—I want you to get into the interior and dot-light every twenty-five feet,” Steed said. “This stuff is flashy. We just need to blacken the corner before the flames hit.”

Chris and Donut would enter the chaparral alone and, parallel to Iron Springs Road, spark a small fire every twenty-five feet. The rest of the hotshots would spread out along the road to watch for spots.

The two men grabbed the torches from Steed’s truck and waded into head-high thickets of brush. They could see the flames chugging toward the highway from the south. The boughs raked across their helmets, and they held their arms across their faces to block the whiplash of branches. Chris, the more experienced of the two, went deeper into the thickets than Donut. Forty feet off the highway, he came to a barbed-wire fence that ran parallel to the road. He pushed it down, stepped over it, and kept going, while Donut stopped at the fence, to stagger their burning positions.

“You ready?” Chris yelled to Donut.

“Affirm!”

They lit their torches in brush so thick it blocked their view of the road. Pretty quickly, Donut recognized the impossibility of the task. As he plowed through the brush, the burning end of his torch kept accidentally touching the chaparral. He was igniting the brush not every twenty-five feet, but with every other step. The tiny fires climbed down the branches, spreading from limb to limb until, within a matter of moments, the entire oak shrub was engulfed in flames and spreading in the adjacent brush.

“This is nuts!” Donut yelled. “These spots are right on my ass!”

“We gotta get the fuck out of here!” Chris yelled back.

They used their gloved hands to snuff out their torches and, just
minutes after wading into the brush field, started back out toward the highway. But in the short time Chris and Donut had been burning, the Doce had accelerated, and the wall of flames now pushed even harder toward the road. Smoke was steaming through the chaparral. As Donut crashed through the brush, he could hear the popping of sparks, the roar of fast-approaching flames, and the superheated water in the plants whistling like a teakettle as it vented from the shrubs’ woody stems.

Chris caught up to Donut and slammed into his back, and they both tumbled to the ground. On their hands and knees, they scurried over shotgun shells and empty Coors bottles and through the openings near the foot of the brush. Still, they weren’t closing the distance to the highway fast enough. Here in the dense brush, their shelters would do nothing. If the fire caught them, they’d be severely burned or, more likely, worse.

“Throw the torches!” Chris yelled, hoping to lighten their loads. They heaved the gas-filled canisters up and over the brush and kept going.

By now they were nearing the highway, and the hotshots spread out along the road watching for spots turned to see Chris and Donut stumble from the brush and onto the safety of the blacktop. Behind them, the fire overtook the drip torches and the canisters exploded. The main blaze, meanwhile, was bucking into Iron Springs. The flames curled over the road, and the fire kept marching directly at town.

By evening, smoke filled
the Prescott suburb of Williamson. Flames threatened more than two hundred homes on the outskirts of town. A Type 1 incident management team was brought in immediately, and within just a few hours of its start, the Doce became the highest-priority fire in the country. Tony Sciacca, a former hotshot superintendent who lived in Prescott, was the incident commander. By 5
P.M.
, Sciacca had assumed control of the Doce and was scouting the fire from the passenger seat of a small helicopter. He could scarcely believe what he saw.

The Doce now spread across more than five thousand acres, an area that, for reference, took the Thompson Ridge Fire four days to burn. Spot fires, thrown more than a half-mile ahead of the main blaze, had spread flames nearly three miles beyond the ignition point. Fire ran all the way over the top of 7,600-foot Granite Mountain and was pushing into the subdivision of Sundown Acres. Families, convinced their houses were going to burn, started stashing valuables in boxes and loading them into cars, while air tankers dropped thousands of gallons of red slurry on their backyards and local engines raced into the threatened subdivision against the flow of fleeing evacuees. Protecting Sundown Acres was triage.

An Incident Command Post was set up at Prescott High School, and the SWCC in Albuquerque ordered personnel and resources from all around the country, including the Forest Service’s only two DC-10 supertankers—converted commercial aircraft capable of dropping an eleven-thousand-gallon payload that covers a three-hundred-foot-wide, quarter-mile-long strip. In one shift on the Doce, specially trained firefighters working out of the Phoenix-Mesa Gateway airport reloaded the DC-10s with retardant, and the planes dropped a million dollars’ worth of slurry on the fire—so much that the red lines were visible from space with the naked eye.

This was exactly the kind of “adjustment in normal tactics and strategies” that Chuck Maxwell had said would be needed to contain fires in such fierce drought conditions. So far, it seemed to be working. By morning, just a few fingers of black reached between the houses in Sundown Acres; no homes had burned.

“We aren’t out of the woods yet,” Sciacca warned during a press conference. He knew that, at best, the slurry would check the Doce’s spread, but if the winds returned, the retardant wouldn’t hold back the blaze. Sciacca didn’t feel that his management team would have a solid handle on the Doce until hotshot crews and bulldozers lined the entire fire perimeter. Accomplishing that task required building fifteen miles of line; Sciacca expected it to take seven to ten days.

Fourteen hotshot crews were ordered to build the line. With the possible exception of the Forest Service’s Prescott Hotshots, none
knew the area better than Granite Mountain. It was for this reason that the men were given a special assignment on the fire’s far western edge. Out there, in the bottom of a dry and still-unburned canyon, there stood a two-thousand-year-old alligator juniper—among the world’s oldest and largest specimens.

“That’s the kind of loss you can’t quantify,” a Forest Service biologist had argued to Sciacca’s management team. Granite Mountain drew the assignment of protecting the tree.

The tree was less than twenty miles as the crow flies from their station, but for more than an hour the buggies bounced down dirt roads that passed beneath Santa Fe Railroad trestles built in the 1880s, herds of longhorn cattle grazing among cholla and teddy bear cactus, and the massive white skeletons of drought-killed cottonwoods. Officially, this was called Division B.

Back in high school, the hotshots who grew up in Prescott had come out here to party. Since then, Donut had visited the spot periodically to shoot guns in the pullouts and makeshift ranges that spring up beside road signs, but he’d never seen the juniper.

The buggies followed a series of increasingly smaller dirt roads until the drivers parked where the terrain was too hummocky for any vehicle but a dirt bike. For thirty minutes, the hotshots hiked down a gently sloping arroyo. The forest air felt so dry, it seemed to crackle as if clicking with countless cicadas. Near the intersection of the wash and a rolling canyon, the hotshots saw the giant’s canopy rising a few dozen feet above the other trees in the forest. But what set the tree apart more than its height was its sweeping, anvil-shaped top. Its trunk was fourteen feet in diameter. Donut thought it looked like something out of
The Lion King
.

An alligator juniper’s thick and scaled bark looks like the skin of the reptile it’s named after. Over time, the giant tree had become frayed from weathering, and great strips of dried bark hung from the branches. Many of its enormous limbs were long dead, a defensive mechanism that allowed the tree to save water by allocating it only to the most productive branches. Now the system that had kept the tree
alive for millennia threatened to kill it. The old juniper was a great woodpile, its green canopy stacked atop dead branches that were effectively cured lumber.

Granite Mountain didn’t have much time to save the tree. Behind it, a wall of knee-high flames was backing down the canyon’s gentle flanks. One squad carved a circle out of the brush surrounding the ancient juniper while the other put in a quick piece of line just wide enough to burn off.

Steed put Bob in charge of burning out the brush around the tree and assigned two hotshots to help him, then led the rest of the men back to the buggies at a fast clip. Bob gave Steed and the others a few minutes to get out ahead, and in those few moments, Bob and the others climbed into the tree’s limbs and snapped photos to document what they knew could be the last time anybody saw the ancient juniper standing. Then they set fire to the slopes and hiked out the arroyo as if racing a lit fuse.

A few days after their hurried burnout, Steed and the crew anxiously hiked back into the canyon to check on the tree. The slopes behind the juniper burned hot. When the brush, now gnarled and black, went up in flames, it had almost certainly sent a flurry of embers drifting upward. How the wind happened to be swirling in the canyon when Bob lit the backfire had determined whether the embers bent back into the juniper or, as the hotshots hoped, were swept northward in the general direction of the prevailing wind and the main fire. As it happened, the winds probably did both.

“Got a duffer up here!” Steed said, referring to a barely smoldering ember that sat in the teacup-size hole it had burned into the wood. Steed was straddling a branch eight feet up in the tree, and he extinguished the last remaining hot spot on the juniper. The tree still stood, but the heat had shriveled and curled back nearly a third of the green branches nearest the burnout.

Nobody could know whether the ancient juniper had the strength to recover from the stress of the wildfire. Some, like Donut, thought it would surely die. How any being, especially one so old, could survive
such a severe burn was beyond him. Other hotshots weren’t so convinced, but collectively, their mood was ebullient. If nothing else, they’d given the juniper a fighting chance.