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
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 Blanco on the ridgeline, who was hurriedly conducting the evacuation. “This was a much stronger warning than the previous one,” recalled Haugh. “I sent my swamper to the ridgetop with the saw and radioed that as soon as the lower Prineville contingent came into sight below me, I would bump up to the safe zone.”
Suddenly, fierce westerly winds drove the fire dangerously close—though still hidden behind the thick brush —to the unsuspecting fire fighters. “The crew was unaware of what was behind them,” said Haugh. “They were walking at a slow pace, tools still in hand and packs in place.” As Haugh watched them, a smoke jumper appeared at his side. “He said that his brother-in-law was down in the drainage, and he wanted to take his picture.”
That fellow was Kevin Erickson, and Don Mackey was his brother-in-law, now in serious trouble below. As Erickson aimed his camera, everything below him seemed to explode. “Through the viewfinder, I saw them beginning to run, with fire everywhere behind them,” Erickson said. “As I took the picture, Brad grabbed me and turned me around. I took one more look back and saw a wall of fire coming uphill.” Closing in on Haugh and Erickson were smoke jumper James Thrash and the twelve other fire fighters in a ragged line behind him. Though Blanco and others were now screaming, “Run! Run! Run!” on the radio, Thrash chose to stop and deploy the fire shelter he would die in. Eric Hipke ran around him and followed Haugh and Erickson up the hill. The three-hundred-foot-high flames chasing them sounded like a river thundering over a waterfall.
In his book
This process is usually a slow one, and fires that burn more than a few acres per hour are rare. The South Canyon fire, for example, only burned fifty acres in the first three days. So why did it suddenly rip through two thousand acres in a couple of hours? Why did one hillside explode in a chain reaction that was fast enough to catch birds in midair?
Fire typically spreads by slowly heating the fuel in front of it—first drying it, then igniting it. Usually, a walking pace will easily keep fire fighters ahead of this process. But sometimes a combination of wind, fuel, and terrain conspires to produce a blowup in which the fire explodes out of control. One explanation for why South Canyon blew up—and the one most popular in Glenwood Springs—was that it was just so damn steep and dry up there and the wind blew so hard that the mountain was swept with flame. That’s plausible; similar conditions in other fires have certainly produced extreme fire behavior. The other explanation turns on a rare phenomenon called super- heating.
Normally, radiant heat drives volatile gases—called turpines—out of the pinyon and juniper just minutes before they are consumed. But sometimes hot air rises up a steep slope from a blaze and drives turpines out of a whole hillside full of timber. The gases lie heavily along the contours of the slopes, and when the right combination of wind and flame reaches them, they explode. It’s like leaving your gas stove burners on for a few hours and then setting a match to your kitchen.
A mountainside on the verge of combustion is a subtle but not necessarily undetectable thing; there are stories of crews pulling out of a creepy-feeling canyon and then watching it blow up behind them. Turpines have an odor, and that’s possibly why some of the Prineville survivors said that something had “seemed wrong.” The westward-facing hillside had been drying all afternoon in the summer sun. Hot air was sucked up the drainage as if it were an open flue. The powerful winds that hit around 4:00 P.M. blew the fire up the drainage at the hottest time of day. And turpines, having baked for hours, could conceivably have lit the whole hillside practically at once.
When Storm King blew, Haugh had to run 150 feet straight up a fire line with poor footing. Despite rigorous conditioning—he is a runner and a bodybuilder—his heart rate shot through the roof and his adrenal glands dumped enough epinephrine into his system to kill a house cat. Behind him, sheets of flame were laid flat against the hillside by 50 mph winds. The inferno roared through inherently combustible vegetation that had been desiccated, first by drought, then by hot-air convection, finally by a small grass fire that flashed through a few days earlier. The moisture content of the fine dead fuels was later estimated to be as low as 2 or 3 percent—absolutely explosive. As Haugh ran, panicked shouts came over the tiny radio clipped to his vest for people to drop their equipment and flee. One brief thought flashed through his mind—“So this is what it’s like to run for your life”—and he didn’t think again until he’d reached the ridgetop.
Above him, the BLM and upper Prineville crews had abandoned hope of reaching H-1 and scrambled north toward H-2. When that route too was blocked, they turned and plunged over the ridge. Due south, one hundred feet below H-1, the eight smoke jumpers who had been ordered out by Don Mackey fifteen minutes earlier were crawling under their foil shelters to wait out the approaching fire storm. At Canyon Creek far below, a crew of fresh smoke jumpers who were preparing to hike in watched in horror as eight little silver squares appeared on the mountainside. Meanwhile, hidden from view by smoke, Mackey, the Prineville nine, and the three smoke jumpers were running a race only one of them, Hipke, would win.
In the end twelve of the dead were found along the lower fire line. Prineville hotshot Scott Blecha had also run past Thrash but lost his race a hundred feet from the ridgeline. The rest were in two main groups below a tree—
The Prineville nine’s dash for safety ended after three hundred feet. They were caught just three or four seconds before Haugh himself cleared the ridgetop, and he could hear their screams over his radio. Reconstructing the details of the victims’ agonized last seconds would occupy many hours of professional counseling for the survivors.
