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A review by mburnamfink
Fire on the Mountain: The True Story of the South Canyon Fire by John N. Maclean
4.0
Fire on the Mountain is a compelling, if some what confused book about the tragedy of the South Canyon Fire. In 1994, 14 firefighters, including 3 Smokejumpers, 9 Prineville Hot Shots, and 2 Helitacks, were killed when the wildfire they were fighting on Storm King Mountain blew up, and overcame a significant portion of the team.
The book is best when it focuses on the men and women who died, especially Don Mackey of the Missoula Smokejumpers. Wildland fire fighting is a tough life. It's a solid, if irregular source of hard cash for tough people from economically depressed western towns. Firefighting has decades of heroic associations, many of which are true. It's about people measuring themselves against immense natural forces, striving at the edge of skill and endurance to save lives. Yet there are immense contradictions in the work. Urban firefighters do save lives, but most calls are simple paramedic incidents. Actually storming into a burning building to pull someone out is rare. Wildfires, by their nature, take place far from human activity. The smart thing to do is to evacuate in a timely manner. Wildland firefighters act mostly to protect property, and the lives that they can save (or doom) are their own.
Yet as someone behind a keyboard, it takes a unique kind of person to jump out of an airplane or climb up a mountain and battle a fire that may be hundreds or thousands of acres with hand tools. The basic work is cutting line, clearing a perimeter of free fuel around the fire so it doesn't spread. The reason why people do it is the purpose, and the people they work besides. Maclean takes us deep into the insular culture of wildland firefighters, and stays as close as he can to the people killed, up to that moment when all knowledge fails. The writing is a moving tribute to the dead.
Yet, the main question of the book is "Why did these people die?". The crude answer is that someone fucked up, and as investigators we have to find out who and why. Starting from the end, the dead failed to flee the fire. While 14 firefighters died, over 30 survived. The people who lived were better positioned and faster to run. Two mistakes belonging to the dead is that they carried their tools far longer than is reasonable, and Mackey going back into the fire to check on the others. Yet, it is hard to fault the urge to support the people you are responsible for, and not abandon the implements of your job. To drop tools and run would be to surrender to panic, and for firefighters to abandon their professional identity.
At another level, the dead should not have been in the position they were in. This is where the narrative begins to falter. I understand that the western flank line, on which 12 of the 14 people died, was an unusual location for a fire line. The firefighters were cutting through dense oak scrub with limited visibility and lookouts were not set. A local weather forecast warned of sudden gusts starting at the exact time the fire blew up, a prediction made that morning which proved accurate within minutes, and which never reached anyone on the mountain. But they key points about the western flank line and the sequence of events desperately needs a good map, and the one at the front of the book lacks scale, time, and the progress of the fire. This is the authorial/editorial choice that knocks this book down from five stars for me.
And at an operational level, wildland firefighting is a lot sloppier than outsiders would expect. Generally, wildfire response faces a problem of scaling. The forces involved on a fire can go from a handful of people and a single helicopter in support to an army of thousands with corresponding air support. Deciding who is in charge and getting everybody up to speed on those changes through the daily and hourly evolution of a fire is a hard problem, and one which the supervisors on the South Canyon Fire absolutely dropped the ball on. While scaling multi-jurisdictional scratch units is always a present challenge, at South Canyon, the two HQs involved, the BLM Grand Junction District and the Western Slope Coordinating Center, cordially (and not so cordially) despised each other, and their decade long feud contributed to getting people killed. These sorts of bureaucratic conflicts can be tricky to write about, and I didn't get much about this one from the book, except that it existed.
And finally, since 1999 when this book has been written, there has been an opened debate about the strategic wisdom of immediate and heavy response to all fires, as has been done in the 20th century. The American West is a pyroscape, an ecology evolved to burn regularly. A century of fuel suppression has meant that what would have been a more-or-less harmless creeping ground fire now has enough fuel to explode up in a devastating firestorm. The canyons full of dry wood and leaves that the firefighters hacked through, and which ultimately killed them, were the consequence of a century of "victory" over fire.
At 25 years on, Fire on the Mountain has not aged into a true classic. It's of the 90s, without explaining the 90s to those who weren't there. The book is good, but the absence of a comprehensive map is inexplicable.
EDIT: https://coloradofirecamp.com/south-canyon-fire/chronology.htm has a chronology with good maps and a clearer technical explanation.
The book is best when it focuses on the men and women who died, especially Don Mackey of the Missoula Smokejumpers. Wildland fire fighting is a tough life. It's a solid, if irregular source of hard cash for tough people from economically depressed western towns. Firefighting has decades of heroic associations, many of which are true. It's about people measuring themselves against immense natural forces, striving at the edge of skill and endurance to save lives. Yet there are immense contradictions in the work. Urban firefighters do save lives, but most calls are simple paramedic incidents. Actually storming into a burning building to pull someone out is rare. Wildfires, by their nature, take place far from human activity. The smart thing to do is to evacuate in a timely manner. Wildland firefighters act mostly to protect property, and the lives that they can save (or doom) are their own.
Yet as someone behind a keyboard, it takes a unique kind of person to jump out of an airplane or climb up a mountain and battle a fire that may be hundreds or thousands of acres with hand tools. The basic work is cutting line, clearing a perimeter of free fuel around the fire so it doesn't spread. The reason why people do it is the purpose, and the people they work besides. Maclean takes us deep into the insular culture of wildland firefighters, and stays as close as he can to the people killed, up to that moment when all knowledge fails. The writing is a moving tribute to the dead.
Yet, the main question of the book is "Why did these people die?". The crude answer is that someone fucked up, and as investigators we have to find out who and why. Starting from the end, the dead failed to flee the fire. While 14 firefighters died, over 30 survived. The people who lived were better positioned and faster to run. Two mistakes belonging to the dead is that they carried their tools far longer than is reasonable, and Mackey going back into the fire to check on the others. Yet, it is hard to fault the urge to support the people you are responsible for, and not abandon the implements of your job. To drop tools and run would be to surrender to panic, and for firefighters to abandon their professional identity.
At another level, the dead should not have been in the position they were in. This is where the narrative begins to falter. I understand that the western flank line, on which 12 of the 14 people died, was an unusual location for a fire line. The firefighters were cutting through dense oak scrub with limited visibility and lookouts were not set. A local weather forecast warned of sudden gusts starting at the exact time the fire blew up, a prediction made that morning which proved accurate within minutes, and which never reached anyone on the mountain. But they key points about the western flank line and the sequence of events desperately needs a good map, and the one at the front of the book lacks scale, time, and the progress of the fire. This is the authorial/editorial choice that knocks this book down from five stars for me.
And at an operational level, wildland firefighting is a lot sloppier than outsiders would expect. Generally, wildfire response faces a problem of scaling. The forces involved on a fire can go from a handful of people and a single helicopter in support to an army of thousands with corresponding air support. Deciding who is in charge and getting everybody up to speed on those changes through the daily and hourly evolution of a fire is a hard problem, and one which the supervisors on the South Canyon Fire absolutely dropped the ball on. While scaling multi-jurisdictional scratch units is always a present challenge, at South Canyon, the two HQs involved, the BLM Grand Junction District and the Western Slope Coordinating Center, cordially (and not so cordially) despised each other, and their decade long feud contributed to getting people killed. These sorts of bureaucratic conflicts can be tricky to write about, and I didn't get much about this one from the book, except that it existed.
And finally, since 1999 when this book has been written, there has been an opened debate about the strategic wisdom of immediate and heavy response to all fires, as has been done in the 20th century. The American West is a pyroscape, an ecology evolved to burn regularly. A century of fuel suppression has meant that what would have been a more-or-less harmless creeping ground fire now has enough fuel to explode up in a devastating firestorm. The canyons full of dry wood and leaves that the firefighters hacked through, and which ultimately killed them, were the consequence of a century of "victory" over fire.
At 25 years on, Fire on the Mountain has not aged into a true classic. It's of the 90s, without explaining the 90s to those who weren't there. The book is good, but the absence of a comprehensive map is inexplicable.
EDIT: https://coloradofirecamp.com/south-canyon-fire/chronology.htm has a chronology with good maps and a clearer technical explanation.