Free Fire by Sebastian Junger

drops from choppers. If there were problems, crews could easily reach H-1 in five or ten minutes and crawl under their fire shelters—light foil sheets that resemble space blankets and deflect heat of up to six hundred degrees.
    â€œIt was just an ugly little creeper,” the BLM’s Brad Haugh said of the early stages of the fire. Every summer, fire fighters like Haugh put out thousands of blazes like this one all over Colorado; at this point there was no reason to think South Canyon would be any different.
    The second half of the Prineville crew dropped onto H-2 around 3:00 P.M . and began widening the primary fire line. Two hundred feet below, Haugh was clearing brush with his chain saw on a 33 percent slope. That meant the ground rose one foot for every yard climbed, roughly the steepness of a sand dune. The grade near the top was closer to 50 percent. He wore bulky Kevlar sawyer’s chaps and a rucksack loaded with two gallons of water weighing fifteen pounds, a folding knife, freeze-dried rations, and some toilet articles. He also carried a folding fire shelter and a Stihl 056 chain saw that weighed ten or twelve pounds. Even loaded down as he was, Haugh could probably have reached the ridgetop in less than one minute if he had pushed it, and H-1 in five or ten minutes. Wildfires rarely spread faster than one or two miles an hour, and the vast majority of fire fighters are never compelled to outrun them—much less fight to survive them. By conventional fire evaluation standards, Haugh was considered safe.
    About three-thirty Haugh took his second break of the day. It was so hot he had already consumed a gallon of the water he carried. The fire was burning slowly in the drainage floor, and the crews fighting it—nine from the Prineville unit and twelve smoke jumpers—were several hundred feet below him in thick Gambel oak, some of the most flammable wood in the West.
    Around 3:50 Haugh and his swamper—a sawyer’s helper who flings the cut brush off the fire line—were finishing their break when their crew boss announced they were pulling out. Winds were picking up from a cold front that had moved in a half hour earlier, and the fire was snapping to life. They were ordered to climb to the ridgetop and wait it out.
    It’s rare for an entire mountainside to ignite suddenly, but it’s not unheard of. If you stand near H-2 and look several miles to the west, you can see a mountain called Battlement Mesa. In 1976, three men died there in a wildfire later re-created in a training video called Situation # 8. Every crew member on Storm King would certainly have seen it. In Situation # 8, a crew is working upslope of a small fire in extremely dry conditions. Flames ignite Gambel oak and race up the hill, encouraged by winds. The steep terrain funnels the flames upward, and fire intensity careens off the chart, a classic blowup. Four men are overrun, three die. The survivor, who suffered horrible burns, says they were never alerted to the critical wind shift—an accusation the BLM denied at the time. “It’s a hell zone, really,” said one Forest Service expert on Colorado’s oak-and pinyon-covered hills. “It’s one dangerous son of a bitch.”
    At about 4:00 P.M . high winds hit the mountain and pushed a wall of flames north, up the west side of the drainage. Along the ridge, the BLM crew and the upper Prineville unit began moving to the safety of H-1. Below them, Don Mackey ordered his eight jumpers to retreat up to a burned-over area beneath H-1. He then started cross-slope to join three other smoke jumpers deployed with the Prineville nine. Apparently, no one had advised them that the situation was becoming desperate. In the few minutes it took Mackey to join the twelve fire fighters, the fire jumped east across the drainage. “I radioed that in,” said Haugh. “And then another order came to evacuate.” That order came from Butch