Fire!

A while ago, I talked about a book called Fire on the Mountain, which I read for my class on "The American West." It's a truly gripping story of the events of July 6, 1994, when 14 young wildland firefighters died on Storm King Mountain just west of Glenwood Springs, CO. After I read the book, I decided I had to walk the trail to the site where they died. Once I knew their story, not doing so would somehow feel disrespectful. My partner and I made plans for the trek in May, and when the weather foiled that, we scheduled a return trip this week.

So I climbed Storm King this morning. Now, I'm sitting in a coffee shop in Glenwood Springs resting my aching knees ... with my mind full of what I saw, what I know about Storm King from my reading, how it felt to be there where 14 people died late one July afternoon. It just rained here. I'm thinking, "If only that had happened on that day." So now, I've decided to finally blog about a topic that has consumed my consciousness for the past several weeks.

The topic is fire. Wildfire. Fire on Storm King Mountain in 1994. Fire in Colorado Springs last year and in Fourmile Canyon near Boulder two years ago. Fire in the wooded hills of Colorado's Black Forest a few weeks ago and in the piñon scrub of Yarnell, Arizona, right after that. Fire in the wild land–urban interface, or WUI (pronounced “woo-ee” in wildfire circles). Fire that risks and consumes lives in exchange for mountain views, open desert skies, solitude, a “return to nature.”

Fire—wild land fire—has been so on my mind  these past couple of weeks, as Black Forest and Yarnell burned and I anticipated my pilgrimage up Storm King. During that time, I've worked sporadically on a blog about this topic. I've hesitated to post it because it's so ... um ... difficult. From my perspective, it's full of deep sadness about the firefighters' deaths and vague outrage over how they died—protecting homes built in the WUI. From others' perspective, it may seem like a rant, might appear to disregard the complexity of the situation. So I postponed it, waiting to see how today's walk would speak to me. Now I have the answer: deep sadness and vague outrage.

I'm troubled about two things here: the tragedy of these people's deaths and our collective inability to think about what their deaths mean for how we live our lives. Before I talk about these issues, I need to have a full-disclosure moment: This issue has a very personal meaning for me, although I only recently made the connection. For most of my adult life, I lived in the WUI, in the mountains just west of Denver. I loved it without reservation. I loved awaking to the absence of city noise and the quiet presence of birdsong and wind in the aspen. I loved sitting on the deck and watching the sun set behind the familiar line of ponderosa pines. I loved watching the fireweed grow up in the meadow and the birds sitting on the deck railing. I loved walking out the back door to take the dogs for a walk every evening on public land. So I know well the draw of living on the edge of "civilization"—close enough to enjoy the resources of a city yet distant enough to enjoy the beauty and peace of the woods. I understand people's attachment to their spot in the WUI. This is personal for me, and my reaction to it is complex.

With that as background, here's how Storm King spoke to me today:

I started my walk early to beat the heat, and I immediately noticed the paradoxical beauty of morning in this place. Yesterday's rain drops on the leaves, beautiful red cliffs in the morning light, wildflowers along the trail—and even, as I reached the valley where the fire had raged, burned stumps as lovely as sculptures. 

I was also struck as I climbed by the odd reality that just below the hill where fire took 14 lives, the traffic on I-70 sped busily along, and rafters floated happily down the river. Of course, this is how the world is: beauty often keeps company with horror, and the everyday business of the world continues in the face of death. But the contrasts heightened for me the impact of this place and its story.

I was passed on the way up by a group of young men. The writing on their t-shirts identified them as Forest Service firefighters. I met another such group on my way down. I wondered whether this is a regular part of training for (at least local) potential wildland firefighters—a difficult hike to a place where the worst outcome possible in their profession happened. To learn about fire from this scene, to get clear about the dangers of this work, to pay respects to fallen comrades. The first group were at the observation point (which provides an overview of the fire scene and marks the end of the steep and rocky but "maintained" trail) as I approached. They seemed to be in deep thought—maybe even prayer—so I hung back for a while.

I stopped at the observation point to read the interpretive signs. Across the valley I could just make out the thin, horizontal line—now largely overgrown—that marked the fire line, the route of the futile attempt to outrun the fire. I continued along the (not maintained, extremely steep and rugged) trail leading to the sites where some firefighters escaped and others died. This part of the hike truly felt like a pilgrimage. I was climbing the very hill where the firefighters worked and died. The hillside is now overgrown with dense stands of oak, nearly impenetrable except for the narrow path created for access to the memorials. Occasional bare trees suggested the piñon forest that grew here before the fire. 

I climbed to the ridgetop where the attack on the fire originated, some distance from where the fire began farther along the ridge. On the other side of this crest is another drainage (shown in the picture on the left)—a division that became literally a matter of life and death. As I approached the ridgetop, I remembered sections of the book describing what happened here, and my heart slipped deeper into sorrow.

At the crest was the first of many monuments to the firefighters. This one, like the others, was surrounded by random items left behind by other visitors—coins, flowers, flags, water bottles, snuff cans, a garden elf. I moved on past the spot where many of the firefighters escaped over the ridge and dropped into the east drainage just before the flames overtook them. I recalled the stories of hair on fire, burned arms, shelters used as capes to protect from the licking flames, screams to "Run, run!"

Walking along the ridge, I came to "the tree"—a skeleton of a tree that served as a meeting point, marking the top of the fire line that the teams were carving through dense underbrush, oak, and piñon. The tree, like the memorial I passed earlier, was festooned with all manner of mementos—small items like before, plus shirts, caps, knapsacks, boots, jackets.

Near the tree, I found the start of the fire line, which dropped directly down the steep slope and into the oak. A burned stump here framed the firefighters' view of Canyon Creek Estates, the development that their work here was intended to protect. 

                                                           

Just a short distance down the fire line—maybe 20 yards below the ridge—I was startled to see the first memorial, a lone cross, decorated with an assortment of pilgrims' belongings. I knew the memorials would be here, but I hadn't quite imagined what it would be like to see them. This, I thought, is how close one firefighter got to safety before the flames got so close he deployed his shelter. And died, alone, facedown, head toward the ridge. 

After spending some time there, I moved on down the hill, now anticipating another memorial. After a few yards, I looked up to gauge what was ahead, and my heart stopped as I saw cross after cross after cross dotting the hill below me, all surrounded with mementos. I stood fixed to the spot, tears running down my cheeks. Slowly, I regained enough presence to ease my way down and visit them all. Other than the first memorial, all of them were in groups of two or three. People died with someone they knew nearby. They wouldn't have been able to talk over the roar of the fire. Lying in their shelters, they would have been alone, unable to touch one another. But nearby would have been another person who knew them, knew where they were and what was happening. Who could witness—as all those who have come since have tried to do—their sacrifice. I took pictures to record for myself the immensity of what I was seeing. I knew right away that I wouldn't post the pictures of individual memorials here, opting instead for the collective, spontaneously evolving ones shown above. To show the individual crosses would feel to me like I gathered them as souvenirs. But I wanted to take something of the place with me. I want to remember.

As I started back up the fire line, up the hill toward the ridge, I tried to imagine the terror that fueled those people's effort to "Run, run!" for their lives up this impossibly steep pitch, this God-forsaken hill. When I reached The Tree at the top, I understood totally the impulse to leave something. To say, "I was here. I came to pay my respects. I want a part of me to stay here as witness to what happened." The hike back to the trailhead was one long meditation on what I'd seen and what they must have experienced that day.

And now I'm back in Glenwood, comfortably ensconced in a coffee shop and settled into telling this story. Just as important as this one, though, is the broader topic I've been stewing about for weeks: wildfire and its disastrous human costs.

Several things contributed to this preoccupation. First, of course, was Fire on the Mountain. Then came a guest speaker in my class on "The American West." And then came Yarnell and its media aftermath. Together, these things provided a new (and totally unexpected, un-sought-after) frame for me to think about fire.

Late in the class, Dr. Limerick had a guest speaker, Mike Daluz, who used to work for the U.S. Forest Service, initially as a “hot shot” crewman and later as a fire ecologist. Daluz was also involved in the follow-up after the fire on Storm King Mountain. Having seen up close the personal costs of the task these young people had undertaken on behalf of other people’s property, he had some very strong views about the growing tendency to build in the WUI—and to do so expecting that, in the case of trouble, someone would come along to save the day. About people's apparent indifference to the fact that, in Patty Limericks words, they were betting young people’s lives against their enjoyment of living in the WUI. To illustrate his point, he showed overhead slides of homes that had been, in his words, “surgically implanted” in the midst of dense stands of trees. Looking at the pictures from the recent fire in the Black Forest, I could swear his pictures were taken there—before the fire. People know there’s a risk in building there, living there, he said. They agree to take that risk, insisting at meetings intended to teach fire mitigation that they are willing to take the risk in exchange for the beauty, the peace. But when fire comes, he said, they want something done, by someone else, and fast.

With these earlier experiences as background, the media coverage after Yarnell was almost mesmerizing for me. So much of it echoed what I’d learned from that class and from reading about Storm King. The New York Times ran several really excellent articles (I recommend them highly; read them here, here, and here). The first of these addressed very directly the question that should be on the mind of everyone who chooses to live in the WUI: “What did they die for?” The author, Timothy Egan, writes:

Once again, the question hangs over another of the oft-lovely places where fire is at the top of the predator chain: what did they die for? Young men trained to be the best of the best are not supposed to take their last breaths inside the oven of a foil shelter, facedown in hot ground, gasping through the roar of a blowup…

Every homeowner in the arid lands owes these fallen men an answer. More than ever, wild land firefighters die for people’s summer homes and year-round retreats. They die protecting property, kitchen views, dreams cast in stucco and timber.

You can’t blame people for living amid the chaparral and piñon pine in the sweep of Arizona where the land rises up from the ceaseless heat of the valley to the cooler air of the plateau…. Nor can you blame people in Colorado for living with the sweet fragrance of a forest at 9,000 feet. 

The homeowners know that living in fire country is different from living in the heart of a city. They know the elements—timber, grass, brush, wind, heat, lightning—and the difficult terrain mean that shiny fire trucks cannot arrive at their smoking doorstep on a minute’s notice. They’ve made a pact with combustible nature, a gamble.

And yet, once a galloping afternoon wind transforms a smolder into a sprint of flames, these homeowners expect the best of the best to be on the scene…. In a panic, homeowners rage and scream: do something! 

Folks know the risk, and they say that they’re willing to take that risk, the possibility of losing everything, in exchange for living in their chosen idyllic place. Yet, when the risk becomes reality, when the danger actually arrives, they want to hand the risk off to someone else. Perhaps they assume that wild land firefighting is like city firefighting—the people in charge have the personnel and the equipment to handle it. Injuries are rare, deaths rarer still. But that is simply not the case with wild land fires. In remote fires, wild land firefighters have to carry all their gear, all their food, all their water with them as they hike to these places. And no matter how well trained they are, their only means of escape if the fire gets out of hand is to "Run, run!" Unfortunately, that moment doesn’t announce itself. The moment when the fire overcame those young men in Arizona earlier this month or the men and women in Colorado nearly 20 years ago—those moments came on suddenly and without enough warning for escape. The sudden waves of flames that overtook the firefighters in Arizona earlier this month and at Storm King in 1994 were both estimated to be moving at 24 miles per hour. No safety plan can protect you from flames moving that fast.

For me, this already personal issue became more personal today as I walked Storm King. I recall all those years living in the mountains when I didn’t even think about this issue. I was never confronted with the immediate possibility of wild land fire near my home. We prepared for the eventuality—cutting down some trees because of beetles and others specifically to reduce the threat of fire. We cleared brush near the house and stacked the firewood away from the house. We even planned what to do in case a fire came close enough that we would have to evacuate—how to get the pets out to safety, how to get various vehicles to a safe place, what to take along. But we never had to worry, because no fire ever got that close, whether we would lose all of the possessions we had left behind.

But more to the point here, I never even considered the possibility that young people might be called upon to defend the little corner of paradise where I had put down roots. It’s not that I dismissed it as unimportant—it simply never crossed my mind. And it never crossed my mind that, even if that happened, anyone would be put at risk. I hadn't thought about it much since, except to empathize with people who lost their homes to fire.

How would I have felt, I ask myself now, if I had lived in Canyon Creek Estates, the enclave at the base of Storm King that 14 young women and men died trying to protect? If I had been watching from Yarnell, Arizona, as the flames were kept at bay, my home protected at the expense of 19 more young lives. How did those people feel? My partner and I found one answer to this question when we drove to and through Canyon Creek Estates. The neighborhood association has built a memorial park, with 14 plaques carrying the firefighters' names mounted on large stones. At the entrance is a dedication plaque. The small print along the top reads, "This special area is dedicated in memory of the firefighters who gave their lives while protecting our homes."

"Their lives" ... "our homes." It was chilling. As my partner pointed out, the equation just doesn't work. Honoring them as heroes does not free us from our responsibility to see the grotesque inequity of this trade-off. Heroes they may well be, but they were also martyrs. And to what cause?

Still, I know it's more complex. Any of these people would likely have insisted, before and after the fact, that no structure is worth a life. Yet, the potential for that very trade-off is exactly what we sign up for when we live in the WUI. I can't condemn these people because I honestly don't know how I would have responded in a similar situation. Would I have said, "Do something! Fast!" had that moment actually arrived?

When I lived in the mountains, I expect I would have done just that—because I simply hadn't thought about it deeply enough. And how would I have felt back then, I now ask myself, if I had learned that someone died trying to protect my home in the woods? Could I ever be simply, deeply grateful to them, honor them as “heroes,” install a monument and move on? Or would I forever feel a sense of pained, futile responsibility for their deaths?

I’m not saying that everyone who lives in the WUI should abandon their dream homes. But I am saying that we need to think about this differently, think about it deeply. We need to take responsibility for the gambles we’re taking, the bargains we’re making. In the immediate future, that means much more careful planning for new construction, much more careful fire mitigation for existing buildings (even though it’s not a sure fix, it might help). 

Then we need to talk about how we can change our policies and our practices so that others’ lives aren’t lost protecting our dreams. And we’d better hurry, because the problem is only getting worse, what with climate change, the reduction in money for fire mitigation and firefighting, and the growing number of homes being built in the WUI.

Today, I stood in tears before the memorials for 14 people who died saving "our homes." Although they didn't die saving my property, they might have. And given what I know today, I’m certain that if I were faced with this situation, I would struggle mightily with the possibility that I could be betting my property against someone else's life.

I wonder if it would be a good idea to require a hike to Storm King as a prerequisite for living in the WUI.