19: THE TRUE STORY OF THE YARNELL HILL FIRE
On the morning of June 30, all 20 members of Prescott, Arizona's Granite Mountain Hotshots headed into the mountains to protect the small town of Yarnell from an advancing blaze. Later that day, every man but one was dead.
The Yarnell Hill fire picks up steam. Photo: Matt Oss
Chris MacKenzie a year earlier. Photo: Jakob Schiller/Wired
The Granite Mountain Hotshots fighting the Whitewater-Baldy fire in New Mexico, May 31, 2012. Photo: Kari Greer
The wall of flames heading toward Yarnell. Photo: Conrad Jackson
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| The lone survivor: Brendan "Donut" McDonough. More photos from Yarnell. Photo: Dan Winters |
Through interviews with family, colleagues, and the lone survivor, a former hotshot pieces together their final hours—and the fatal choices that will haunt firefighting forever.
By: KYLE DICKMAN
Yarnell, Arizona, a former gold-mining town of 650 people, sits on a precipice at the western edge of the Colorado Plateau. Rising above it are the 6,000-foot peaks of the Weaver Mountains, and nearly 2,000 feet below are the flatlands and cactus of the Sonoran Desert. An hour and a half northwest of Phoenix and an hour south of Prescott, Yarnell is, according to the town’s slogan, “Where the desert breeze meets the mountain air.”
Weekend drivers coming into Yarnell from the south know they’ve hit town when they see the Ranch House Restaurant, a greasy spoon where the waitresses all look related and the clientele ride Harleys or horses. Across the street is Glen Ilah, a subdivision with a couple hundred homes owned mostly by retirees like Truman Farrell, a 73-year-old Air Force veteran who up until two years ago was the town’s volunteer fire chief.
On the night of June 28, Truman’s wife, Lois, was sitting on their back patio in her usual spot by the grape trellises and the koi pond. From there the couple have a sweeping view of the Weaver range to the north, and Lois was watching a dry thunderstorm hung up on the range’s crest. She saw lightning strike the ridgetop and, a short while later, wispy blue smoke drifting toward the clouds. When Lois pointed it out to Truman, he thought little of it.
Around 7:30 the following night, Robert Caldwell walked through the front door of his downtown home in Prescott. “Zion!” he said as he lifted his five-year-old stepson into his arms, kissed his wife, Claire, and flopped down in a chair at the kitchen table with a can of Coors. At 23, he was the youngest of three squad bosses, a senior position that put him in charge of nine men on the Granite Mountain Hotshots, a team of wildland firefighters based out of Prescott.
“Go get comfortable, would ya?” said Claire. “You smell like Robert.” By this she meant go clean up because you smell like you usually do: like smoke.
Robert didn’t want to get up. He’d barely been home since his last time off nearly two weeks ago, and sitting, even in his fire boots, ash-smudged work pants, and sweat--crusted Granite Mountain T-shirt, felt good. Family time was precious during the eight-month fire season, lasting from April through November. He and Claire had been married for a little less than a year, and it still felt like the honeymoon. She was the hippie chick eight years older with an easy laugh; he was the cowboy gentleman wise beyond his years. Robert had an IQ high enough for Mensa and a love of Hemingway. Hotshotting was his identity. He’d fought fire for five seasons, and after two of Granite Mountain’s squad bosses left in March, he was promoted. It was one of the six full-time positions on the crew.
Since April, he and his Granite Mountain colleagues had spent 26 shifts on fires. The week before, they got some local press for saving a few hundred high-dollar homes from the 6,700-acre Doce Fire, a national priority that burned the crew’s namesake, a 7,290-foot peak visible from nearly anywhere in Prescott. For the nation’s only municipally funded hotshot crew, saving homes was a big deal, and the town was calling them heroes. The praise made the crew uncomfortable, especially Robert, who felt that getting paid to camp and work fires in the most beautiful places in the West was closer to selfish than heroic. But it was nice to be acknowledged.
That night the family ate dinner together at the kitchen table. After putting Zion to bed, Robert drank a cup of coffee while Claire did the dishes, then he pulled her into the bedroom. Before nodding off, Robert removed his wedding ring. “It’s filthy,” he said, showing it to Claire, who lay in the crook of his arm. Ash covered the edges, and the silver was scuffed from the handle of his Rhino, the hoe-like tool he used to dig on fires. Claire took the band and rolled it between her fingers and thought, What if someday this is all I have left?
ACROSS TOWN, three other Granite Mountain hotshots—Christopher MacKenzie, Garret Zuppiger, and Brendan “Donut” McDonough—arrived at the Whiskey Row Pub, a dive in Prescott’s historic downtown. When the hotshots came to drink in groups, as they often did on rare days off, bartender Jeff Bunch gave them a discount. His son was a former crew member.
The trio sat by the pool tables in the back of the bar. Donut hadn’t seen Garret, a red-bearded 27-year-old, or Chris, his roommate and a nine-year veteran of firefighting, in a couple of days. Strange as it was, Donut (his nickname was easier to say than his last name) had missed his hotshot brothers. He’d come down with a cold on Thursday night and taken Friday and Saturday off.
“Donut, what the fuck are you wearing?” Garret asked. He had on a pink tank top: an easy target. The hazing went around the table, moving from Donut’s style to Chris’s poorly trained dog, Abbey, to Garret’s obsession with vinyl records, before the conversation eventually landed, as it always did, on the job.
“Any idea what the assignment is?” asked Donut. “All I heard was we got work.” He was feeling better and eager to get back on the fire line. Tomorrow was Sunday, an overtime day—nearly $20 an hour.
“More staging, I think,” said Chris. “We’ve been busting little lightning fires since you left.”
Seven small blazes had ignited in the mountains around Prescott during the thunderstorm the previous night. One of them, sparked by the lightning strike Lois and Truman had seen on Friday, had become a higher priority blaze after growing to 100 acres. It had been given a name: the Yarnell Hill Fire. About the time the hotshots were finishing their beers, the incident commander, the general on the fire, had set up headquarters at the volunteer fire station in Yarnell and was ordering additional resources as fast as he could: eight engines, structure-protection specialists, air tankers, and three hotshot crews. Granite Mountain was one of them.
ERIC MARSH WOKE UP around 5 A.M. on Sunday at the crew’s quarters, Station 7. The night before, the 43-year-old superintendent of Granite Mountain had eaten dinner with his wife, Amanda, at the Prescott Brewpub downtown. Afterward she drove home; he crashed at the station, a tin-sided building on a patch of blacktop six blocks from the restaurant. Sleeping there seemed easier than driving the 30 minutes to their horse ranch outside town, in nearby Chino Valley.
The crew called Eric “Papa,” and at home, with Amanda, he referred to the 19 young men as his kids. Until they got to know him, Eric intimidated most of the hotshots. He was quiet, wry, and guarded—in many ways, a typical superintendent. Amanda was his third wife, but he rarely discussed his personal life with the crew. He once drove his men 16 hours from Prescott to a fire in Idaho and didn’t say a word until they reached the flats of the Utah desert. “I’m getting a divorce,” he said, then remained silent until they reached the fire camp.
Eric grew up on a ten-acre farm in North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains and fell in love with hotshotting when he joined a Forest Service crew as a second-year student studying biology at Appalachian State. He graduated in 1992. Five years later, he moved to Arizona to keep fighting fires, developing a reputation as a canny and cautious firefighter. In 2003, the Prescott Fire Department hired him to help with their fuels crew.
In the years prior, the city, which is surrounded on three sides by the Prescott National Forest, was named by the Hunt Research Corporation, a California-based risk-assessment group, as one of the West’s ten most likely places to be hit by a wildfire. Out of that danger grew the department’s vision for a fuels crew, one that removed brush and timber growing at the edge of town to provide defensible space. Eric was good at it. He and the crew used chainsaws and chippers to clear flammable material from around hundreds of Prescott homes, setting the National Fire Protection Association’s Gold Standard for defensible space in 2012. But for the longtime hotshot it wasn’t enough. In the hierarchy of wildland firefighting, there are few things less glamorous than a job that demands the same backbreaking work of a fire fight but delivers none of the thrill. Turning the Granite Mountain fuels crew from a wide-eyed group of 20 men not even allowed to set foot on the fire line into certified hotshots was Eric’s singular focus. He accomplished it in five years, an evolution that takes most crews twice that, some even longer.
Station 7, where the crew moved in 2011, was a point of pride for Eric. He and the wildland division of the fire department had spent the previous six years trying to convince the city council that it would be safer for Prescott to host hotshots rather than just a fuels crew. The station was proof of the department’s victory. Its new headquarters had a workshop, a gym, and a stocked gear cache with a sign on the wall that reads TOTAL COST FOR A WELL-EQUIPPED HOTSHOT: $4000. Granite Mountain’s two $150,000 buggies, burly 12-person crew hauls kitted out with cubbies for medical equipment and tools, were parked in the garage. Eric’s superintendent truck, a Ford F-550 he’d customized with a welded-steel rack and brake lights in the shape of Granite Mountain’s logo, was in front.
After rolling out of his sleeping bag that Sunday morning, Eric headed to the parking lot, crossing the black tiles he’d helped install in the white floor to spell out “GMIHC—Granite Mountain Interagency Hotshot Crew.” When rookies stepped on the black tiles, they owed the veterans 100 push-ups. He pulled out his JetBoil stove and a Nalgene full of Bisbee’s specialty coffee grounds—both of which he always carried in his fire-line gear—and brewed up a pot of coffee. Eric had been sober for 13 years. Coffee was his only drug, and he took it black. There was no milk or sugar on the fire line, so why get used to it any other way?
With his mug full, Eric went to the ready room, where the crew met every morning. On one wall hung a poster common in wildland fire stations. It shows pictures of wildland-fire fatalities, including the two biggest: Montana’s 1949 Mann Gulch Fire (13 deaths) and Colorado’s 1994 South Canyon Fire (14 deaths). In both, elite firefighters had been killed battling small blazes that grew with terrifying and unexpected speed. In both incidents, the crews burned to death after being caught off guard with no time to escape. HOW IS YOUR SITUATIONAL AWARENESS TODAY? the poster asks.
“It’s the brush that scares me most,” he used to tell his dad. “Fires just move faster in it.”
The Yarnell Hill fire picks up steam. Photo: Matt OssTHE GRANITE MOUNTAIN CREW started arriving at Station 7 at 5:15 A.M. As they awaited the briefing, they sat in the ready room and talked about family and fires. Nearly half of them had children. On the wall were two whiteboards, one covered with a handful of random facts re-upped most mornings by a third-year sawyer named Andrew Ashcraft. That morning’s trivia: “A gorilla’s scientific name is Gorilla, Gorilla, Gorilla” and “Milk cows that listen to music produce more milk.” Robert Caldwell, who usually would have laughed while fact-checking the tidbits on his iPhone, ignored them. He’d been looking forward to days off and had a hard time leaving the house that morning.
On the other whiteboard was the Granite Mountain Hotshots Daily Physical Percentages, a half-joking, half-serious chart the crew used to take stock of each other’s energy levels, a matter of safety on the line. Eric had written “68%.” Donut put, “Hell ya.” Robert, or Bob as he was known only on the crew, put “Moderate Duty.”
By 5:40, they were all tipping back in their chairs. “We’ve got an assignment to Yarnell,” Eric said to the men. “It’s 300 acres and burning on a ridgetop in thick chaparral. It’s going to be hot—real hot—and that’s all I know.” It was exactly the sort of short, pointed briefing the crew had come to expect from their boss. “Load up.”
THE SUN HAD RISEN by the time the caravan crested the Bradshaw Mountains outside Prescott and descended into Skull Valley, north of Yarnell. Eric drove up front while the buggies followed close behind, with most of the hotshots sleeping inside. Robert Caldwell rode shotgun in one, trying to ignore the music—Rammstein’s “Du Hast”—blasting from the back of the truck. He texted Claire: “So much for days off. Heading to a 500-acre fire in Yarnell. Love you.”
His first sighting of the Yarnell Hill Fire would have come after rounding a bend just south of Rancho El Oso Road, eight miles from the blaze and on the outskirts of the horse ranches in Peeples Valley, a dispersed community of 428 people five miles north of Yarnell. For the team’s four rookies, like Robert’s cousin Grant McKee, whom Robert had talked into joining the crew that winter, the fire would have seemed entirely unimpressive: a few strands of white smoke drifting near the top of the ridge. Desert fires are deceptive, though, and Robert knew it. He’d worked blazes in the redwoods of California, the spruce stands of Minnesota, and the lodgepole thickets of Montana, but chaparral, where the Yarnell Hill Fire was burning, is a mix of scrub oak and brush that grows so dense it’s a struggle to walk through. When it’s dry, it’s a tinderbox. “It’s the brush that scares me most,” he used to tell his dad. “Fires just move faster in it.”
Arizona, like much of the Southwest, was in a severe drought. The monsoon, a low-pressure mass of moist air that pushes up from the Gulf of California and brings afternoon rains to the region every July, was moving into Arizona, but so far the influx of moisture had done little to cool the 100-plus-degree temperatures. The monsoon cycle had yet to bring any rain either, though its arrival pretty well guaranteed lightning.
The crew reached the incident commander’s makeshift base at Yarnell’s volunteer fire station by 8 A.M. The volunteers’ red trucks were in the engine bay, and a handful of 4x4 pickups from nearby state forests and local fire districts were backed into parking spaces. It was still quiet. Eric went inside for a 20-minute briefing from the fire’s operations supervisor Todd Abel, a Prescott-area firefighter with 18 years of experience. The blaze had been divided into eastern and western divisions, and Eric was placed in charge of the west, where Granite Mountain was assigned to work. With Eric overseeing the division, which would require him to move freely around his section of the fire, command of the hotshots fell to 36-year-old captain Jesse Steed.
“Men, gaggle up!” Eric called when he returned. “It’s a long hike in, so bring plenty of water.” Then, as he always did before leading the crew into a remote fire, he told his men to call their families.
HOTSHOTS HIKE in single-file lines. Steed was up front. Behind him were the four two-man saw teams and squad boss Travis Carter, followed by Donut and the six other men carrying Pulaskis and hand tools, and finally squad bosses Robert Caldwell and Clayton Whitted, who were responsible for making sure the slowest hotshots didn’t drop off the back of the line. Robert watched the boot heels of the rookie in front of him. The dust the crew kicked up stuck to the sweat on his face.
A little more than a mile in, the thin road veered left and climbed 850 feet to the crest of the Weaver Mountains, where the fire was burning. It was now nearly 10 A.M. Temperatures were in the hundreds, and the last spots of shade had disappeared. Three times they stopped for water. Some hotshots, like Donut, carried 13 quarts that day—26 pounds of water that doubled the weight of their packs.
The fire, still around 300 acres, wasn’t doing much when they got there. It sat atop the ridge, which ran in a crescent shape toward Peeples Valley to the north. On the west flank, to their left, the blaze was held tight against the rim rock on the range’s crest. On the east flank, to their right, a few fingers of fire had burned down draws that drained toward the valley they’d hiked up.
The crew started building line, removing all the flammable fuel along the fire’s eastern flank. The sawyers went first, using their chainsaws to cut brush, while the swampers, the men responsible for clearing anything that has been cut, hauled it off the line and threw it down the mountain. Donut, Robert, and the rest of the hotshots followed behind, using Pulaskis, Rhinos, and rakes to clear away leaves and needles. Steed kept one ear to the radio while helping throw brush or cut line whenever he could.
Eric, who had gone ahead to scout, stood on the peak of the ridgeline above the crew, watching the fire burn north toward Peeples Valley. It was starting to build up steam. Like all seasoned firefighters, Eric was an amateur meteorologist, and he would have noticed the few small cumulus clouds, puffy seeds of thunderstorms, building to the north of the fire. Like giant vacuums, these clouds create wind, drawing in hot air and moisture rising from the desert floor as they grow. Eric knew that the bigger those clouds got, the stronger the vacuum and the faster the flames would be pulled toward the houses in Peeples Valley. It’s why the incident commander kept calling more hotshot crews, aircraft, and engines to the scene.
“Now they tell me, ‘You’re slower than shit and look like a Neanderthal, but we know you won’t quit,’ ” Donut says. “They’re more my brothers than my actual brother.”
Chris MacKenzie a year earlier. Photo: Jakob Schiller/Wired
ABOUT THE TIME Eric was scouting the fire, Marty Cole was “fiddle farting” in his garage in Chino Valley, a small ranching town just north of Prescott. He got the call to head to Yarnell to act as a safety officer, one of a few lead personnel converging on the fire.
Marty had worked for Prescott area fire departments for more than 30 years and is what’s known in the business as an old salt—an arbiter of firefighting culture and tradition. He started his fire career in 1980, well before the city launched its wildland-firefighting division. Back then, firefighter culture was so tribal that city, county, and federal departments refused to leave their jurisdictions. If a fire was burning inside city limits—wildland or otherwise—it was the city’s problem and nobody else’s. Marty remembers one of the first burned bodies he ever saw. “A young kid burned to death in a car fire,” he says. “Two blocks away, firefighters from the neighboring department sat inside their station and watched the smoke column rise.”
Many of those walls have since been torn down. But the tribalism still exists, and it’s strongest within the insular world of hotshots. Marty was the superintendent of Granite Mountain from 2004 to 2005, when Eric first joined and they were trying to become a hotshot crew.
It was a humbling process. At the time, every one of the roughly 100 hotshot crews in the nation was funded by states or the feds—the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the Bureau of Indian Affairs—and many of them had decades of tradition. Granite Mountain, a startup outfit hosted by a small town in Arizona that most other hotshots had never heard of, wasn’t exactly well received. The crew once showed up at a fire in Oregon in white ten-passenger vans. Real crews use buggies. When Granite Mountain went out to start work, a firefighter from another crew drew a line in the middle of the road with spray paint and wrote Don’t cross it.
“When I left, Eric had something to prove,” says Marty. “He was going to make that crew better than any other out there.”
FROM HIS SCOUTING position, Eric could see one of two specially outfitted DC-10s—or VLATs, very large air tankers—fly 200 feet off the ground and drop 20,000 gallons of fire retardant between the flames and Peeples Valley.
He was concerned that the blaze could pivot and start burning down the valley toward Yarnell. If that happened, the flames would be below the crew, creating the same life-threatening situation that killed 13 men in the Mann Gulch Fire and helped spawn the ten standard firefighting orders, among them: know what your fire is doing at all times, and base all actions on current and expected fire behavior. Eric wanted to be certain that if this event unfolded, he had a dedicated lookout to warn him about it.
“Let’s send Donut down to be a lookout,” he told Steed. Eric picked Donut because he’d been sick—a slow day could help. “We’ll send him down with Blue Ridge’s supe.”
The Blue Ridge Hotshots, a crew out of the Coconino National Forest, had arrived on the scene that morning, and Granite Mountain could see the crew’s superintendent, Brian Frisby, on an off-road utility vehicle (UTV) motoring up the two-track in the valley to meet with Eric and coordinate their efforts.
The plan they agreed on was simple. Granite Mountain would keep building line on the fire’s eastern edge while Blue Ridge used their chainsaws to widen an old road that stood between the fire and Yarnell. If the winds shifted and the blaze ran toward town, Blue Ridge could set fire to the brush between the road and the wildfire, robbing it of the fuel it needed to survive. Given the fire’s steady chug to the north, it was a contingency plan.
Donut threw his gear in the back of the UTV and got a ride to a bluff in the valley that gave him a view of the fire. “Call me on tac”—a line-of-sight radio frequency—“if you need anything,” the Blue Ridge supe told Donut when he dropped him off. “We’ve got our eyes on you.”
Donut told Eric the whole story—the jail time, the drugs, his dream of becoming a firefighter, his new baby. He was hired on the spot.
The Granite Mountain Hotshots fighting the Whitewater-Baldy fire in New Mexico, May 31, 2012. Photo: Kari Greer
DONUT PICKED a good spot. The knoll he was perched on offered a clear view of the fire and an easy escape route. Just a few hundred yards behind him there was a safety zone, a patch of bare dirt a little larger than a tennis court that a bulldozer had cleared earlier that morning just in case things went haywire. He chose a trigger point, a small drainage a quarter of a mile away. If the fire crossed it, he’d retreat.
Not that the third-year veteran felt he was in any danger. The southern edge of the fire was nearly half a mile away, moving 50 feet an hour toward him, maybe less. He ate his MRE lunch—beef stew—and at the top of every hour “slung weather,” using the red book-size kit every lookout carries to record hourly changes in conditions. He took out a thermometer on a chain, dipped the cloth-covered end into his water bottle, and swung it at arm’s length for a minute to measure the humidity and temperature. At 2 P.M. he scratched into the kit’s notebook: “104 degrees, 10 percent humidity, five to ten-mile an hour winds with gusts of 15 out of the S” and a note referencing the clouds: “Build up to the SW.” Then he went back to fighting off boredom.
Donut can trace his interest in firefighting to a fire-science class he took as a 14-year-old kid. He came to Granite Mountain during hard times. In December 2010, he’d spent a couple of nights in jail for possession of a stolen GPS. Then, in March 2011, his girlfriend at the time gave birth to his little girl. He was working construction and taking an EMT class at the local community college at night, but on the occasions that he actually showed up for class, he mostly slept off hangovers or was still coming down from something else. “You name it, I tried it,” he says.
In mid-April, he awoke from a binge feeling the full weight of fatherhood. I need to stop this now, he thought. He asked the Prescott Fire Department if they had any openings and was directed to Eric Marsh, who was looking for five replacements. Donut told Eric the whole story—the jail time, the drugs, his dream of becoming a firefighter, his new baby. He was hired on the spot. Donut thinks he got the job because Eric “saw some of himself in me.”
By that time, Granite Mountain had been a full-fledged hotshot crew for three years. Eric had pulled off the feat by attracting experienced wildland firefighters, like Steed, with the one thing the Prescott Fire Department could offer that no other hotshot crew could: access to jobs on the city’s red trucks. Nearly a dozen Granite Mountain alumni now worked for the department as paramedics or structural firefighters—full-time, family-friendly positions that kept them closer to home. Eric, a certified instructor in both city and wildland firefighting, facilitated that transition by offering training courses throughout the year. That was especially important this season, during something of a rebuilding year, when there were nine crew members with less than two years of experience and a pair of green squad bosses in Robert Caldwell and Travis Carter. Eric’s classes got new crew members up to date on the certification Granite Mountain needed to retain its hotshot status, and the classes gave career-focused firefighters like Donut a way to become skilled hotshots and to grow out of it.
On Donut’s first full fire assignment, in 2011, Granite Mountain was flown by helicopter into Arizona’s Chiricahua Mountains, a range notorious among wildland firefighters for its steep and rugged terrain. He swung his Pulaski for two weeks, often working 16-hour days. The physical abuse nearly broke him, and most of the crew figured he’d wash.
After his first season, he’d proven himself to the rest of the men. Last year he got a tattoo on his calf of a frosted doughnut combined with Granite Mountain’s logo. “Now they tell me, ‘You’re slower than shit and look like a Neanderthal, but we know you won’t quit,’ ” Donut says. “They’re more my brothers than my actual brother.”
It’s a familiar story in hotshotting: the discipline and rigor of crew life puts wayward young men on track. But Granite Mountain had a more nurturing atmosphere than most crews. Clayton Whitted, a squad boss like Robert, was a former youth pastor at the Heights Church in Prescott. During some shifts on the fire line, the crew would openly discuss Jesus or ask Clayton to tell stories from the Bible. It was through him that Donut accepted Jesus as his savior, on a fire in New Mexico two weeks before Yarnell Hill. “Clayton, Steed, Eric—those guys had it figured out. They made people better,” Donut says. “I wanted a piece of that.”
AT 3:30, Claire Caldwell, Robert’s wife, was at home in downtown Prescott, watering the pumpkins and sunflowers in her well-kept front yard. It was her last chore of the day, and she was rushing through it. She’d already dropped Zion off with his dad, where he’d stay the next couple of days, and planned to spend the evening relaxing on the couch with a bottle of wine and a movie.
The sky was nearly purple. Claire had just finished hosing down the garden when the wind hit. It was so strong that the sunflower blooms lay down across the raised beds. Moments later, the dry creek behind the Caldwells’ house filled with water for the first time that year. She texted Robert: “Hope this rain helps you guys out! You coming home tonight? Love you.”
It irritated her that he didn’t respond.
And finally, when the fire was racing straight at Donut, Scott texted a final photo of flames filling the valley below them: “Holy shit! This thing is running at Yarnell!”
The wall of flames heading toward Yarnell. Photo: Conrad Jackson
