The entry-level qualifications are a few dozen hours of classroom instruction and a decent level of fitness, and the primary tools are chain saws and Pulaskis, a speciality tool combining an ax and an adze. Hotshots are invariably referred to as elite firefighters, which suggests years of training, high-end equipment, and a mastery of the mechanics of wildfires. “Call me if you need anything,” he says, “and I'll see you soon.” He radios Marsh, tells him the buggies are safe. Flames are whipping across the ridges, and fat embers fall through heavy smoke, slopping over the lines, setting spot fires. So Donut catches a ride from a guy from another hotshot crew, and they move them out of the way, closer to town. The Granite Mountain buggies the crew had driven from Prescott are parked a mile away on a dirt road called Sesame Street, and they're suddenly in the path of the shifting fire.
#HOT SHOTS FIREFIGHTERS HOW TO#
They know, by experience and habit, how to get to the safe zones. But hotshots rarely deploy their shelters.
Every hotshot carries a shelter, a big foil pouch lined with silica-thread cloth, and every hotshot identifies rock outcrops or clearings where he can crawl into it if, God forbid, he's trapped by advancing flames. As he walks, Donut searches for a new lookout position as well as patches of earth where he can deploy his fire shelter if everything goes to shit.
He hikes 120 yards downslope, toward a clearing around an abandoned road grader. It crosses the trigger point he's set for himself, the spot in the medium distance that tells him it's time to move. Already it's shifted, jabbing back toward him now instead of north, flames leaping in hiccup spurts. Donut finishes his check, looks at the fire, considers his crewmates on the faraway slope, looks back toward the fire. He gets word, too, that the National Weather Service is warning about approaching storm winds that will blow over the fire at forty miles an hour.ĭonut clicks his radio, says he copies on the weather. Just before four o'clock, he checks the weather, as he does every hour, recording the temperature and the wind and the humidity, all of which can change the way a fire behaves. On June 30, Donut is three months into his third fire season. If the wind shifts, if the flames break in another direction or run back to the south, Donut's responsible for providing the heads-up. By late morning every man working the hills around the little town of Yarnell, Arizona, could see thunderheads rising to the north, too. But the flames twitched and flared as the day got hotter and breezier, so he was dispatched to keep watch over the fire's flank. McDonough, whose name everyone on the crew clips to Donut, cut line in the morning. To do that safely, those crews, like McDonough's Granite Mountain hotshots, need to know where the fire is and where it might reasonably be expected to go, and that often requires posting a lookout somewhere with a better view. Roads and rivers can be useful, but most of the firebreak has to be created with brute force: by bulldozers in favorable terrain and by men with chain saws and hand tools everywhere else. A wildfire isn't extinguished so much as choked into submission by encircling it with a perimeter cleared of fuel. McDonough is the lookout, and it's his job to keep his eyes on both the fire and his crew. From a half mile away, Brendan McDonough has a clear view of the eastern flank, a bright slash of orange beneath a tumble of gray smoke, and he can see his crew high on the slope to the south, cutting a clean line through unburned juniper and scrub oaks on the last day of June. The fire crawls north along the ridge, as it has for almost two days, burning a long black scar through the chaparral.
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