The South Canyon Fire was a 1994 wildfire that took the lives of 14 wildland firefighters on Storm King Mountain, near Glenwood Springs, Colorado on July 6th, 1994. It is often also referred to as the “Storm King” fire.
Links:
South Canyon Fire
John Maclean’s book Fire on the Mountain: The True Story of the South Canyon Fire.
Paying Tribute to Storm King 14 Firefighters
Arizona deaths come near Storm King anniversary
1994 Storm King Mountain fire: To die on Storm King Mountain
By The Oregonian
Editor’s note: This story first published on August 14, 1994
By JAMES LONG, ERIN HOOVER
The two smoke jumpers — rugged young risk-takers, both named Mike — stood on a finger ridge of Storm King Mountain, gazing at the flames leaping from a cliff below.
Mike Cooper pulled a camera out of his pack and squinted through it at the fire.
“You know what it’s gonna do?” he said.
Feliciano, the other Mike, stared at the spectacle. The blaze was still small, but it was growing — and not in a normal way. A strong wind had come up. Amazingly, the fire was backing into it.
“It’s gonna back down into this draw,” Cooper said, “and come up on this side at us. That’s what it’s gonna do.”
Feliciano thought a minute.
“Well, why don’t we get out of here then, you know?” he said.
Cooper casually snapped some pictures. It was July 6, 3:30 p.m. — minutes away from a catastrophic confluence of events and circumstances that roared upon Cooper and Feliciano and 46 other unsuspecting firefighters in America’s deadliest wildfire in decades.
Oregonians, in particular, know the outcome: 14 dead, including nine young men and women from a Prineville fire crew. The pain and shock still throb in communities across Oregon, and so does a haunting question. How could such a calamity happen to such highly trained people working for a Western institution — the U.S. Bureau of Land Management — deeply experienced in fighting fires?
Investigators push for the official answers, to be released in a federal report Aug. 22. But the truth already lies in the wind-blown ashes of Storm King Mountain — and in the revealed details of that deadly day.
An ill-timed pause for photos.
A lingering lunch break.
A chain saw idled by the loss of a 32-cent part.
A reconstruction of the race with fire reveals a pastiche of tragic coincidences. Comprehending it requires a return to the Colorado mountain and the night it caught fire.
– –
Saturday evening, July 2: Just west of the resort town of Glenwood Springs, not far from Aspen, Storm King Mountain rears up like a broad-shouldered, brick-hued rampart on the north side of Interstate 70 where the freeway follows the little Colorado River out of the Rockies. It’s not one of the state’s grander peaks, but it is tall — 8,793 feet — with steep slopes that can wear down even the hardiest of hikers.
Sometime that evening, as a thunderstorm rattled the Rockies, lightning struck Storm King Mountain and ignited a pine tree close to the top of a knoll at 6,800 feet. The small creeping fire seemed to do little harm. Fire officials, besieged with nearly 50 other fires in Colorado, let this one go.
– –
Sunday, July 3: Though the blaze remained small, Winslow Robertson, BLM assistant fire management officer, wanted to tackle it with special firefighters who rappel out of a helicopter. The aircraft he needed, however, had been hacked from his budget. The copters that did exist were assigned to other fires.
– –
Monday, July 4: Two days after it started, the fire remained near the bottom of the BLM’s priority list. Nevertheless, Robertson and his boss, Pete Blume, decided it was time to fight it. They put Butch Blanco, 50, a 20-year firefighting veteran from Glenwood Springs, in charge of the work that was to begin at dawn. The mission: Cut fire lines above and below the fire. A pretty routine operation. Or so it seemed.
– –
Tuesday morning, July 5: At daybreak, Blanco’s BLM crew churned up the sandy steepness of the canyon on the back side of the ridge, carrying up to 50 pounds of gear apiece. By that point, the fire had grown to 30 acres.
Brad Haugh, 32, wasn’t the only one who was tired. He and six other firefighters had been pulled off a fire on Copper Spur near Bond, Colo., on Monday and bused to Storm King.
Besides Haugh, the climbers included Derek Brixey, 21, a college student whose job was tossing brush that Haugh cut; and Michelle Ryerson, the 28-year-old crew leader.
Haugh was lugging a chain saw that kept snagging the oak brush. Once on the ridge and midway into his first cut, a 32-cent ring-clip that held the chain broke. With only one chain saw left, the BLM crew couldn’t move as fast in building that first fire line from the knoll, which came to be called Helispot One, down the spine of the ridge to a supply base, called Helispot Two.
Those ring clips never break, Haugh would say later.
– –
Tuesday afternoon, July 5: The National Weather Service issued a red-flag wind warning for Wednesday. Forecasters said a cold front was arriving from the west, and they said it would mix with the hot air over the Rockies to form a strong and erratic wind — a firefighter’s worst enemy.
– –
5:30 p.m., Tuesday, July 5: The BLM crew was still digging when eight smoke jumpers from Missoula, Mont., parachuted onto the ridge. Led by 34-year-old Don Mackey, the smoke jumpers took over the line. Haugh and his weary companions plodded back down the mountain to the highway. They’d be back the next morning, but tonight they’d sleep like the dead.
– –
Late Tuesday night, July 5: Firefighting resources by now had been stretched far beyond capacity in the Rockies, and calls went out for help. Twenty Prineville Hot Shots — well-trained, well-conditioned firefighters, much like the smoke jumpers — boarded a chartered plane at Kingsley Field in Klamath Falls and headed for Colorado to join in the battle. Somewhere en route to Grand Junction, the plane bumped over the turbulence of a cold front that was headed in the same direction, bringing the fierce, unstable winds the forecasters had predicted.
The fire on the knoll, meanwhile, had worked its way down through some rocks and cliffs to smolder and flare near the highway — in a blind spot where fire-safety lookouts could not see it from surrounding ridges.
– –
Wednesday morning, July 6: Richard A. Good, a 46-year-old contract pilot from McCall, Idaho, banked an Aerospatiale helicopter around the knoll on Storm King Mountain for 10 or 15 minutes, giving the fire leaders a chance to see what they were up against.
It didn’t seem to be much.
Along for the ride were Blanco, the BLM fire manager; Mackey, the smoke jumper crew leader; and Richard Tyler, Good’s BLM helitack foreman from Grand Junction.
Blanco and Mackey scanned the landscape, marking things on their map, talking strategy.
Tyler, whose job was logistics, mostly listened.
One thing was obvious: The fire was a creeper. The few flames that were visible were tiny. Mostly, the men saw smoke.
By now, the fire had backed slowly down and around the knoll for four days, mostly on the southwest side, blackening fallen leaves and sticks, torching clumps of grass, under a wild canopy of Gambel’s oak.
These small, thick trees — often called “scrub oak” only 7 or 8 feet tall — grew so densely in many places that a person couldn’t walk through them sideways.
When green, Gambel’s oak is hard to burn. When dry, it is a highly flammable flash fuel.
Drought had already stressed the Gambel’s oak, which responds by coating its own leaves with waxy resin that is highly flammable.
Now, heat from the creeping ground fire had radiated up through the leaves, further sapping their moisture, leaving them ripe for the fire’s return.
Eighteen years before — near the time Blanco began fighting fires in Glenwood Springs — a late frost had killed the Gambel’s oak leaves, creating the same volatile conditions. The leaves fueled a fast-moving fire that killed three Arizona hot shots on Battlement Mesa, just 30 miles from Storm King Mountain.
The resulting investigation stressed the peril of the dry leaves. So did a training video still used at the Grand Junction BLM office.
Some of the out-of-state firefighters, however, were unfamiliar with Gambel’s oak and its lethal history.
– –
Later Wednesday morning, July 6: After the tour in Good’s helicopter, Blanco returned to the ridge to rejoin Ryerson, Haugh and the rest of his Glenwood crew. Eight smoke jumpers already were there, and another eight were about to parachute down. The 20 Oregon hot shots were arriving below the mountain to wait for Good’s helicopter.
Mackey and Blanco decided the crews should widen the fire line on the ridge to 20 or 25 feet wide.
While the Glenwood crew rested briefly on the ridge, Blanco discussed escape zones and safe areas.
“It was a little more casual than usual, but it was done,” Ryerson recalled later.
Helispot One — the relatively bald top of the steep knoll above the freeway — would be their safe place to go. But it would mean a difficult run to get there.
For the people, including the Oregon hot shots, who were to build the downslope fire line, these safe areas were an even longer and more treacherous distance away.
And not everyone was told about them — or the wind and fuel conditions.
Blanco was responsible for informing people. Secondarily, the responsibility fell to crew leaders — Tom Shepard for the hot shots and Mackey for the smoke jumpers, Ryerson for the Glenwood Springs firefighters and Todd Abbott — who led a small band of firefighters from Canyon City. Ultimately, it falls to firefighters themselves to know where the safe zones are.
Derek Brixey had joined Brad Haugh to help the smoke jumpers dig the downslope line — the same one the nine hot shots wound up on. They headed straight into oak brush. Although the ground litter beneath it had burned, the leafy canopy had not.
“The escape route thing I was trying to figure out as we’re walking down the hill,” Brixey said later. “Looking around, we were constructing line in pretty much straight oak brush. It was just a bad deal. I was kind of wondering about that. It wasn’t anything that would make me ask anybody, but I did wonder.”
Hot shot boss Tom Shepard later said he and Blanco discussed the weather and safe zones “in a general sense.”
He said that the volatile state of the fuel “wasn’t brought up” and that he and his crew did not know about the red-flag wind warning.
“I did talk to Butch about some of that stuff,” he said. “The whole crew didn’t show up at the same time up there and there are some things that are always lost when you don’t have everybody together.”
But Shepard said that the conditions he observed when he got to the fire didn’t alarm him and that it is not uncommon that information is not relayed on a fire as thoroughly as it should be.
“It’s like that quite often, and it shouldn’t be,” Shepard said.
But he was adamant: “There were a whole series of events and circumstances,” he said. “A change in any one of those would have been a different outcome.”
Back in Grand Junction, Blanco’s higher-up, Winslow Robertson, said he was particularly concerned about the direction of the winds that day. They were expected to come from the southwest. Just the right direction to fan the flames on Storm King Mountain.
– –
Wednesday noon, July 6: The cold front that the hot shots had passed on their flight from Klamath Falls arrived in Colorado about noon.
“Well, here it is,” said a weather forecaster, sticking his head out the door of his office trailer in Grand Junction, 90 miles west of Storm King Mountain. “Right on time.”
– –
Early Wednesday afternoon, July 6: Soon after Derek Brixey and Brad Haugh headed down the fire line, a second crew of eight smoke jumpers, including Mike Cooper and Mike Feliciano, parachuted to the fire.
With them were Eric Hipke and Dale Longanecker from the North Cascades smoke jumper base at Winthrop, Wash., Billy Thomas and Tony Petrilli of Missoula, and Roger Roth and Jim Thrash of McCall.
They headed south on the ridge.
Two groups were already at work, up ahead: 11 of Blanco’s BLM firefighters and the earlier group of eight smoke jumpers who had parachuted in and camped near the fire the night before. They were widening the line on the ridgetop.
The Oregon hot shots began flying up by helicopter sometime around noon. They had to split into groups because Dick Good could fly them only five at a time.
Normally, the lineup is chosen by the firefighters’ weights to avoid overloading the helicopter.
But this time, the first 10 people who boarded the helicopter were simply hot shot boss Tom Shepard and the first nine names on the list.
The list was mostly alphabetical, and that would matter:
Kathi Beck of Eugene.
Tami Bickett of Powell Butte.
Scott Blecha of Clatskanie.
Levi Brinkley of Burns.
Doug Dunbar of Redmond.
Next was Hagen, Terri. Of Prineville.
Bonnie Holtby, Prineville also.
Rob Johnson of Redmond, and John Kelso of Prineville.
Except for Bill Baker of Spokane, Kip Gray of Madras and Tony Johnson of Roseburg, the luckier hot shots — the ones who flew up last and built line on the ridgetop — were farther down the alphabet:
Brian Lee of Corvallis.
Louis Navarro of Prineville.
Tom Rambo of White City.
Alex Robertson of Salem.
Bryan Scholz of Bend.
Tom Shepard of Prineville.
Mike Simmons of Redmond.
Kim Valentine of Prineville.
For the Oregon group, the alphabet determined who would live and who would die.
– –
2:27 p.m., Wednesday, July 6: The cold front reached the town of Rifle as it approached Storm King Mountain. Maxine Myser, 67, who has been doing daily weather reports for the National Weather Service for 28 years, was tending gauges and instruments in her cozy home with its rail fence and vegetable garden.
When the strong wind hit, she could read the wind speed — more than 40 miles an hour — but couldn’t tell which way it was blowing. Eerily, the gusts seem to come from every direction.
– –
2:30 p.m., Wednesday, July 6: By midafternoon, all the crews were in place. Nine of the Prineville Hot Shots, the ones mostly from the first half of the alphabet, were working on the downslope fire line with the smoke jumpers and BLM firefighters Brad Haugh and Derek Brixey. The rest of the 48 people, including Shepard and Blanco, were on the ridge, widening that fire line.
Shepard and Blanco traversed the ridgeline, serving as fire lookouts while supervising their crews.
Smoke jumper boss Don Mackey walked along the steep fire line on the side of the ridge with a radio. He was keeping an eye on the gusty little fires that had been fretting and flaring all morning down near the interstate.
The fires were not yet of much concern. They were out of sight on the other side of the finger ridge sticking out from the knoll. Up on the main ridge where the other firefighters toiled, the wind was picking up. But it still whipped against their backs, upslope, west to east, suggesting that the unseen fires below would blow east, away from them, if they blew anywhere at all.
Meanwhile, near the top of the fire line, almost at the top of the ridge, a BLM saw team was working to make it wider. The smoke jumpers only had cleared debris from the ground and scratched down to soil to stop the creeping; now Haugh and Brixey were chain-sawing a 20-foot swath through the Gambel’s oak to get rid of the canopy.
Haugh pointed to a shady pinion tree about 100 yards down slope and told Brixey they’d stop for lunch when they got there.
Pinion pines and junipers stand up through the oak brush all over the mountain. But this one beckoned them with a spot of shade, the only shade they could see.
“I don’t even think they had time to do a Hail Mary if they were religious. I really don’t … Mother Nature just played a really cruel trick. It’s not supposed to happen like that.” — Brad Haugh, Glenwood Springs BLM firefighter
It was the tree. Their tree.
A group of Prineville Hot Shots had gone by them a little earlier. The top of the alphabet. Haugh and Brixey only nodded as they passed.
– –
Shortly after 3 p.m., Wednesday, July 6: Dick Good, who had to interrupt his shuttling of the Prineville crew to drop buckets of water on hot spots for Mackey, began to fly the remainder of the alphabet to the ridge. By tradition, Bryan Scholz, the foreman and second-in-command, went with the last load.
After arriving on top, this second group of hot shots didn’t go down the slope with the others. They were needed on the spine of the ridge to finish widening the fire line that the BLM crew was working on.
Tom Shepard, the hot shots’ No. 1 boss, was on the ridge to meet Scholz. They talked things over, and Scholz learned that the smoke jumpers down the slope were out of water. Scholz started down there, past the tree, carrying two five-gallon water cans.
The slope was steep and loose.
Scholz kept walking down the line until he ran into one of the jumpers who took the water cans and asked his help moving a burning log so it wouldn’t roll downhill.
Scholz gave him a hand, then headed back to the ridge.
Down below, with the mixed group of hot shots and smoke jumpers finishing lunch, was Eric Hipke, a lean, 6-foot-4, 32-year-old from Auburn, Wash. Hipke was glad to see Tami Bickett, the hot shot squad leader he’d met on a fire the previous year at Leavenworth.
After lunch, Hipke and two other jumpers went with the hot shots to improve the fire line. They were working back the way they came, with Hipke digging cup-trenches for burning logs to keep them from rolling downhill. Mackey sent smoke jumpers Kevin Erickson and Sarah Doehring to walk still farther up the line, toward the ridge, to make sure the fire wasn’t trying to cross.
Erickson and Doehring hadn’t been gone long when somebody said, “Look at that,” and pointed to a fast-rising column of smoke rising from behind the finger ridge toward the interstate.
It didn’t scare them, exactly, but the group decided to move out.
The three smoke jumpers walked in front — Thrash, Roth, Hipke, in that order. Behind Hipke was a woman, a member of the Prineville crew he didn’t know. Then came the rest of the hot shots. Then Mackey, the fourth smoke jumper, eventually would bring up the rear.
First, Mackey had to go back down the trail looking for people to tell them to clear out. Those he rounded up included Cooper and Feliciano — the two Mikes — who had headed in the opposite direction of the hot shots after lunch to see what the smoke was about on the other side of the finger ridge.
It was after Cooper took his pictures and Feliciano agreed they ought to get out of there that Mackey came along and told them to scram. They didn’t follow the trail the others were on but angled off uphill through the brush in the general direction of the knoll.
Back on the trail where the Hipke group was marching, it was a quarter-mile to the ridgetop. Hipke looked back; the smoke column had gotten bigger.
– –
3:15 p.m., Wednesday, July 6: Up above, Brad Haugh and Derek Brixey were still widening the part of the line where it rose to the ridge. A message came over the radio:
“It’s getting hot down there. Let’s start moving up.” Either Mackey’s or Blanco’s voice.
There was no sense of crisis. Haugh and Brixey bumped up to “the tree.” It was a steep 50 yards short of the ridgetop. Haugh figured it was a good spot to wait for the hot shots to come up the trail.
The next time Hipke looked back the fire had gone all the way across the valley behind them and people said, “Gee, look at that.”
The hikers did not speed up; they were already moving fast. No sense, yet, that they were in a race for their lives. Hipke thought about getting his video camera out but decided not to.
The air was still clear, Hipke noticed, because the fire was running so fast that it was keeping up with its own smoke.
Up ahead on the trail, Erickson and Doehring reached the tree where Haugh and Brixey waited. They had heard the warnings, and Brixey and Doehring left almost at once. Haugh and Erickson waited for the others still downhill.
Things began to happen.
Looking west at the next hillside, Haugh and Erickson saw a fire shooting up a ravine, moving roughly parallel to their own ridge. The fire was moving fast. The marchers, still invisible in the oak brush, were only now were approaching the dogleg turn where they’d turn their back on the fire and clamber uphill toward the tree.
Haugh radioed Blanco and reported the running blaze.
“Get the hell out of there and don’t tie up the radio,” Blanco said.
“No problem,” Haugh replied. “As soon as I have the crew in sight, I’ll leave.”
Erickson saw the bright helmets of the marchers coming into view.
“That’s my brother-in-law down there,” Erickson said, pointing to Mackey, who was bringing up the rear. “I’ve got to get a picture of this.”
The fire in the background provided drama, and Erickson, at this point, was still thinking that the picture would make a dandy souvenir.
Neither man was aware, yet, that the continued existence of everyone on the slope was already in doubt.
Erickson began snapping pictures.
Up above the ridge, helicopter pilot Good was trying to sort out conflicting requests for bucket drops. Ryerson wanted a bucket for a in oak brush on top of the ridge. Then Mackey asked for a bucket down the hill.
“Can you wait five minutes?” Good radioed Mackey.
“Yeah, that’d be fine,” Mackey agreed.
When Good tried to hit Ryerson’s ridgetop fire, the wind blew the water sideways.
This marked the beginning of a second emergency on the mountain that would distract from the killer fire that was headed uphill.
They were all in trouble.
Near the spot where Good tried to drop water, Ryerson and Christiansen watched the flames go scampering across their fire line and into piles of sawn oak brush. Flames leaped into the canopies of standing Gambel’s oak, and the fire raced along the ridge toward the knoll.
“Run to the helispot!” Ryerson heard Blanco’s voice on the radio.
“You mean Helispot One or Helispot Two?” Ryerson asked.
“Helispot One” — the knoll-top — Blanco replied.
Ryerson gave the order to the crew, assuming that Blanco was telling them how to evade the fire roaring up the ridge alongside their 20-foot fire line. A strong wind pushed the fire ahead of them, and finally through a solid stand of oak brush near the top of the knoll where they hadn’t yet widened the line.
People up ahead were yelling “go back, go back,” and everyone started running back. BLM crews and the ridgetop hot shots alike. Ryerson’s legs were wobbling, and so were a lot of people’s. The BLM firefighters not only had been toiling all day but also had hiked up there twice in less than 24 hours.
Nobody realized yet that the fire they were racing on top of the ridge was the least of their problems.
Down by the tree, Erickson and Haugh were scarcely aware of the pandemonium above them. Erickson turned around and let Haugh stow the camera back in his pack.
The hot shots were turning uphill, through the dogleg. Out to the west, behind the marchers, the fire that had been running up the ravine a half-mile to the west suddenly spotted over to the near side and began roaring uphill. The flank of the ravine fire became the head of a roaring monster.
Erickson’s heart thumped. He radioed quickly, telling the marchers to hurry.
For some reason, the marchers still seemed to be moving at a measured pace, five feet apart, tools carried on the downhill side, just as the book said to do it.
Haugh yelled down, too: “Come on, kids!”
Both men heard a vast roar tearing at the air, blotting out all other sounds and leaving no doubt that something big and lethal was charging at them.
They were trying to scream, telling those downhill to drop their tools and run.
Haugh began running himself. He thought Erickson was asking something like, “Should we deploy our shelters,” but Haugh said, “No, we’ve got to run for the top.”
The two men raced, Haugh in front, Erickson right behind him.
A wall of fire swept toward them with amazing speed, closing on the marchers below who were making a last, wild effort to reach the top.
Hipke ran the fastest. He went past Thrash and Roth. He tried to get his fire shelter out, but it fell from his hands. “And at that point I just kinda, I was just, the fire was really getting loud and it’s starting to — the sun was getting blocked out and stuff like that. And I knew, there was just no way.”
– –
Haugh reached the ridgetop in about 10 seconds. His world was turning eerie red. He never looked back. “Too much Sunday school,” he said later. “You know what happened to Lot’s wife.”
He dove over the ridge and bounded down in giant leaps maybe 100 feet before a tree stopped him.
Erickson tumbled down next, his shirt scorched.
Hipke crested the ridge with his hands over his ears, hoping they wouldn’t burn off.
As he ran, a blast of hot air traveling ahead of the fire wave caught him, knocked him down and blew him out of his pack and helmet. He, too, bailed over the side of the ridge, hurtling down and joining Haugh and Erickson.
His ears were still there, but the flesh on his hands hung in shreds.
Haugh was standing by the tree, stunned.
Erickson spoke, “Which way do we get out of here?”
– –
Fire was spotting all around them, hurled from above.
Haugh pointed to a small canyon farther downhill, the same one the BLM had hiked up twice.
All three hurried down to the canyon, although they knew the fire might already be below them and would race up the canyon like a chimney.
– –
Behind them, others weren’t so lucky. Nine upper-alphabet hot shots didn’t make it. Neither did smoke jumpers Jim Thrash, Roger Roth and Don Mackey, who had gone back down the line to help and ended up losing his life.
Cooper’s group of smoke jumpers, who had struck off through the brush, survived. They found a relatively clear, burned-over spot not far below the knoll and shook out their fire shelters.
It wasn’t a sure thing, but it was all they had.
“I would say we probably ran uphill maybe 15, maybe 20 minutes. Climbed maybe 300-400 feet in elevation . . . There was one, two, eight of us. I can’t remember every jumper’s name. A lot of ’em I don’t even know their names.”
They lay down, covered with the crinkly aluminum blankets, and waited — everybody spitting and hacking — as a river of smoke and embers blew over them.
At the last moment, the fire hit the base of the little shelf they were lying on and broke around it, parting like the Red Sea.
– –
Up on the ridge, the horror wasn’t over.
Tyler and Browning, the helitack crewmen, decided to run farther uphill from Helispot Two. They got a quarter of a mile before the fire caught them.
Meanwhile, Ryerson and the rest of her BLM crew and the lower-alphabet hot shots were arriving at the helispot where Tyler and Browning had started out.
Ryerson turned and saw the uphill fire lapping over the top of the ridge behind her. She had seconds to decide what to do.
An orange wall of fire bore down on her. Some people started to pull out their fire shelters.
Ryerson almost did the same but decided to keep running. She saw Bryan Scholz, the hot shot foreman, running toward the top of the canyon that Haugh and the others had headed down. She followed — a decision that saved her life.
– –
Different participants in the Storm King Mountain fire would react different ways, some with silence, some by talking about it, some by expressing anger, grief.
Louis Navarro, one of the Prineville Hot Shots who survived, tore into the fire planning. He said that the crews hadn’t been told to expect high winds and that the supposed escape routes were unworkable.
“A three-quarters-of-a-mile sprint up a steep hill is no escape route, Navarro said. “An escape route is something a fat lady could roll to.”
Cooper said, “There was no safety zone. This terrain didn’t really allow for any safety zones. I’ve heard people say you could’ve made one in this scrub oak. Yeah, with four bulldozers and 12 hours you could’ve made, you know, a four-mile-wide safety zone that would have worked in this situation. With hand tools and chain saws, there’s no feasible way to make a safety zone in this scrub oak.”
Good, the helicopter pilot, ferried search crews to the top to look for survivors. There weren’t any, except for those mentioned. At first, nobody could find his friends, Tyler and Browning.
That evening, Good took his helicopter back to Grand Junction and told what he knew to investigators.
“It was a pretty rough night for me. I drove myself in a car from Grand Junction to Denver, and I shed quite a few tears off and on on the way back across, just thinking about what had happened. Nothing in Vietnam hurt the way this did. Nothing. It seemed so . . . hopeless — not hopeless so much as helpless to do anything. Just a terrible feeling.”
– –
Sunday, July 17: Brad Haugh, the BLM firefighter, rides his motorcycle over from Grand Junction and climbs the ridge once more, looking for his own answers.
He keeps wondering about the purpose of his survival.
Up on top, a hike of more than an hour, few mementos are left. A metal buckle. A burned food can. A piece of melted glass.
Haugh bends and examines what’s left of a gas can he’d almost picked up as he fled for his life.
“We had top-notch people die,” he says. “People that trained together, eat together, sleep together, jump together, everything together as a group — we had them die.”
He finds the place on the ridge where he bailed over. It’s so steep that a good jump would take you 50 feet down before you’d touch anything. Haugh picks out the tree that stopped him.
He says “an angel airlift” must have got him safely down the slope. “I can’t believe I ran down that.”
Down the opposite side of the ridge is the line where searchers found the remains of the hot shots.
Haugh descends to the tree where they’d passed by him that day.
Scattered just below are small baskets of dried desert flowers, marking the places. Haugh goes down and retrieves a basket that has blown away. He puts it back where he thinks it should be, weighting it with rocks and gathering up the spilled lupine and fixing the ribbon.
Up on the windy knoll, a new flag flutters on a tall metal pole that someone has firmly anchored with guy wires. The pole is evidently meant to stay the winter.
Haugh kneels and uses a small rock to scratch the date of the fire on a larger rock near the pole. For a while, he stays there with his thoughts.
The wind is blowing the ash around.
A hummingbird darts into view. The wings are startlingly loud as the bird darts and hovers among the charcoal branches of the oak brush. The hummingbird undoubtedly is looking for its flowers, but there aren’t any here anymore, except those left for the dead.
— James Long and Erin Hoover, The Oregonian
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