To Be Young Once, And Brave

By Paul Gray

It probably began with a stroke of lightning on a juniper or spruce tree, or in the oak brush that dotted the parched sandstone slopes of Colorado's Storm King Mountain. For three days the fire behaved itself, apparently stalled on a mere 50 craggy acres near the resort town of Glenwood Springs (pop. 5,800), 60 miles west of Vail. Extinguishing it fast did not seem a high priority; 13 other fires were burning nearby, and more than 100,000 acres blazed elsewhere across the hot, dry U.S. West.

Eventually, last Wednesday, 52 members of fire-fighting units based in Colorado, Montana, Idaho and Oregon assembled in Glenwood Springs to put out the Storm King nuisance. They represented their risky profession's nomadic elite: smoke jumpers, who parachute out of airplanes onto wildfire sites; helitacks, who rappel from ropes and hop out of helicopters; and hotshots, the self-described "ground pounders," the infantry shock troops in the West's annual summer wars against unbridled conflagrations.

One of the units present was the 20-member Prineville, Oregon, Hotshots. That team included Scott Blecha, 27, a graduate of the Oregon Institute of Technology and a four-year veteran of the Marine Corps. who planned to quit fighting fires after this summer and seek a master's degree in engineering. Also on board was Bonnie Jean Holtby, 21, who had run track and played basketball in high school. And there was Levi J. Brinkley, 22, who phoned his mother back in Oregon to tell her that he and his Prineville colleagues had been to hell -- a fire in California -- and were now headed for heaven -- the Storm King site in Colorado.

So it may have seemed to every other crew member gathered in Glenwood Springs for what looked like a routine job. All they had to do was contain a modest-size fire, stopping its advance or nudging it in a safe direction. And they would do so at an altitude near 7,000 ft. on a 45 degrees slope, staring into the scorch of a natural inferno.

This would be a normal day's work for these fire fighters, and so it might have remained had not something terrible happened that Wednesday afternoon. Split into two crews, most Storm King fighters were apparently working below the fire's edge, trying to keep it from creeping down the 1,000 ft. to where it would menace the traffic on Interstate 70. Suddenly the wind wheeled around 180 degrees and began gusting at 47 m.p.h. The fresh infusion of oxygen into superheated air created a blowup, an unconfined explosion of unimaginable power. In a matter of moments, the fire above those on the slope had also become the fire below them.

Trapped between two walls of flame, the 52 fire fighters did what their training had taught them to do to get out alive. Some pulled out their survival shelters, thin metallic covers they could throw over themselves as they fell facedown to the ground. Some looked for bare, blackened ground the fire had already consumed and moved past, creating a safety zone by default. But there were few such areas, so many of the trapped fighters raced the fire up the mountain, hoping to get over and find shelter behind a ridge above them. It was an excruciating run, and not everyone made it to safety. When the fire, which had quickly swept from 50 acres to 2,000, subsided enough to let rescuers in, the bodies of four women and eight men were discovered, most of them just below the ridge. The bodies of two more men were found two days later. Among the 14 dead were Scott Blecha, Bonnie Jean Holtby, Levi J. Brinkley and six of their Prineville Hotshots colleagues.

In the immediate aftermath of this disaster, fire fighters paused to mourn their fallen comrades and to try to explain, to themselves and others, what it is about their work that proves so attractive and sometimes so fatal. On the playing field of the Glenwood Springs Middle School, fresh crews assembled the day after the blowup, waiting to relieve those who were still trying to extinguish the deadly Storm King fire. John Murray, boss of the Chief Mountain Hotshots, a Blackfoot Indian contingent out of Browning, Montana, mused, "The fire gets in your blood. You want to seek out danger and defeat it."

On the same field, awaiting the same duty, Charlie Martin, 42, leader of the Wolf Creek Hotshots from Glide, Oregon, said of his job, "I've been to places in Montana and Alaska that no one else has. That's the romantic, exciting side. But the other, real side is that it's hard and dirty work." Fred Burger, 34, one of Martin's warriors, agreed: "It's an adrenaline rush. But it's also falling down cliffs, dodging dead trees and rocks falling on you, breathing thick smoke, not knowing where you are."

Still another Wolf Creek Hotshot, Richard Tingle, 34, spoke of the release into selflessness that joining a fire-fighting team can bring: "You're not an individual here. If you work as one person, you'll never make it." And a few veterans casually mentioned the pay, which can reach $200 a day. Some fire fighters, so the stories they tell one another go, earn enough during the summer months to pay college tuition or living expenses for the rest of the year.

But money cannot explain the acts of heroism that occurred on Storm King Mountain. In Missoula, Montana, Quentin Rhoades, 28, holds his baby daughter Rachel and talks about his longtime friend and fellow smoke jumper Don Mackey, 34. They and nine other Missoula colleagues had moved from a fire in New Mexico up to the Storm King site, where they spent Tuesday night chain-sawing trees for a firebreak. When the winds blew up the next afternoon, Rhoades and some of his teammates were lost and "getting spooked." Then they ran into Mackey, their leader, who pointed them toward a safe area.

"He could have taken us there himself," Rhoades continues. But Mackey knew some of the Prineville Hotshots were still stranded and in danger. "I think he could have honorably come with us and called them on the radio and told them to get the hell out of there. But I guess he felt the only way he could get them out was to go down and personally demonstrate the sense of urgency. Sometimes a radio message can seem so remote and detached. I think that's why he went back." Don Mackey never returned from Storm King Mountain.

With reporting by Patrick Dawson/Missoula and Richard Woodbury/Glenwood Springs