Mike West began working with the Lassen Interagency Hotshot Crew in the summer of 2004, when he was twenty-one years old. On one of his early missions, the crew was dispatched to Arizona, where lightning had ignited fires in the mountain peaks of the Coronado National Forest. The crew members camped more than eighty-five hundred feet above sea level, amid ponderosa pines and Douglas firs, and joined other crews of hotshots—élite firefighters revered for their endurance and skill—in battling what became known as the Nuttall Fire. The Lassen crew’s job was containment. Along a ridge bordering the main fire, they started making what firefighters call a “handline,” removing trees, roots, and other fuels from a continuous strip of land. Beyond the handline, they ignited their own fires with drip torches, creating areas of blackened ground to starve the main fire. This process, known as backfiring, is one of the core strategies of wildfire suppression.
One morning, the crews hiked along a knifelike canyon ridge. They were heading into “the hole”—the area downhill from their escape route—to contain a small fire that had crossed the handline. The terrain was rocky and punishing; at many points, the slope dropped steeply away. While the hotshots worked, lookouts monitored the main fire, watching for shifts in the wind that might change its behavior or direction. Todd Wood, the assistant superintendent of the Flagstaff Hotshots, observed from a knob of rock facing across the canyon and down onto Nuttall Creek. Over the radio, the fire meteorologist reported a weather update. On a scale of one to six on the Haines Index—a measurement of both the changeability and the dryness of the air—they were heading into a Super Six.
At around 12:30 P.M., Wood turned to check on the handline, then swivelled back. Just seconds had passed, but now he saw a crown fire—a blaze igniting the forest canopy—on the opposite slope. Because hot air rises, fires usually move uphill faster than they do downhill. But Wood saw a fast-moving front of flames, about three hundred yards across, running down the hill toward the creek. Once it crossed, the fire would move uphill toward the hotshot crews. It was a “blowup”: a sudden increase in fire intensity, accompanied by violent convection. “Nobody saw it coming,” Wood later recalled.
West was sitting on the ground, eating his lunch.
“Hey, W.,” a friend said. “Look at that smoke column.”
West glanced up and saw a churning mass in the sky. Squad leaders ordered the firefighters to assemble their gear. To West, time seemed to stretch. “I was standing in line just thinking, Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go,” he said.
By the time the hotshots started to hike out of the hole, the fire was boiling up toward them from the canyon floor. They moved as fast as they could, crawling over boulders and pulling one another up rock faces. Chainsaws were passed back and forth as crew members grew tired of carrying them. West struggled to breathe. As people began to fall behind, his squad leader yelled, “Just go, just go. Pass ’em!”
The sound of a running crown fire is sometimes compared to the roar of a freight train or the thunder of heavy ocean surf. It reminded West of a waterfall, or an ongoing explosion. Between the crews and the fire lay a stretch of unburned fuels which wildland firefighters call “the green.” “The fear is that you have this active, loud, roaring fire, and you’re in the green, and you have nowhere to go, and it’s just, is this going to get me?” West said.
The crown fire raced uphill, torching the trees to their right. They watched as the flames reached the ridge in front of them, then flicked over the edge and stopped. It took the group of around forty hotshots half an hour to get out of the hole; at the top, West threw up. The firefighters rested around a small lake. They learned that two crews were still trapped below, and a pensive mood set in. West watched as Skycrane helicopters dropped water on the fire. Behind the choppers, the smoke had risen so high that it had combined with the atmosphere to become a pyrocumulus cloud—a dark column of ash, smoke, and water vapor twenty thousand feet tall. At the top of the formation, where the ambient air temperature dropped below freezing, the vapor froze to create a smooth white surface, like a meringue—a process called ice-capping. It was the first time West had seen it. Over their radios, the firefighters heard that eleven hotshots in the hole were deploying their fire shelters. The small tents, made of an aluminized cloth, were designed to protect occupants from temperatures as high as seventeen hundred degrees.
“This is really bad,” West said to his squad leader.
“Yep,” the man replied, tersely.
After several hours, the trapped firefighters emerged from the hole. No one had died, but one person was taken to the hospital. For West, the Nuttall Fire seemed like a close call—the kind of experience he hoped he’d never have again. He didn’t know that it was a harbinger of things to come.
West’s career as a hotshot coincided with a transformation in American wildland firefighting. In the years following the Nuttall Fire, wildfires increased in intensity and complexity. The new fires often seemed to resist control and could easily spread to a hundred thousand acres or more, costing millions of dollars to suppress. A group of scientists coined the term “megafire” to describe the phenomenon. Megafires now account for a growing proportion of the total area burned in America each year; climate scientists predict that the number of days conducive to such fires will increase by as much as fifty per cent by the middle of the century.
This past spring, I trained to become a wildland firefighter; in the summer, the Dixie Fire became the largest single fire in California’s history. While West was telling me about his ordeal in the Nuttall Fire, Dixie was threatening to force an evacuation of Susanville, West’s home town. I was embedded with a firefighting crew sixty-six miles south of Susanville. By digging handline and laying hose, we were trying to contain an edge of Dixie’s monstrous perimeter, which would soon grow to encompass nearly a million acres.
Today’s largest fires behave in surprising ways. In the late nineteen-nineties, a few scientists began inspecting satellite images of unusual clouds over Australia and elsewhere; the meteorologist Michael Fromm speculated that they could be connected to the convective force of giant wildfires below them. Eventually, the researchers confirmed that particularly powerful wildfires could cause not just pyrocumulus clouds but vast firestorms called pyrocumulonimbus columns. Created by the flames at ground level, the columns are tall enough to generate lightning, and their air currents are so strong that they can punch particles of smoke into the stratosphere, where commercial jets typically cruise. “There were some who literally laughed when we tried to tell them what we thought was going on,” Fromm told me. Skeptics believed that “if you saw aerosols in the stratosphere it had to be a volcano.”
Since then, pyrocumulonimbus columns, which fire scientists call pyroCbs, have been observed with increasing frequency. In 2003, wildfires in Canberra, Australia, created a pyroCb with enough energy to spawn the first documented fire tornado—a Category F2, with wind speeds of more than a hundred and thirteen miles per hour. In the twenty-tens, scientists identified pyroCbs in western Russia, Europe, Africa, and South America, and the formations have now been seen above the Arctic Circle. Two years ago, during Australia’s Black Summer wildfires, eighteen pyroCbs emerged in a single week, causing giant plumes of smoke to spread across the Southern Hemisphere; one such plume grew to be six hundred and twenty miles wide. “It shocked us all,” Fromm said.
When the towering formations tumble to earth, they release massive energy in the form of downdrafts. These high-speed winds are dangerous for firefighters; as Crystal Kolden, a professor of fire science at the University of California, Merced, told me, they “are very well known as extreme-fire-behavior generators.” Fed by gusts and fuels, megafires can swallow tens of thousands of acres in hours, overtaking firefighters with little warning. Their smoke shades large areas of the earth, unsettling the usual patterns of night and day and creating sudden wind shifts.
Wildland firefighting has always been risky, but the risks have grown along with the fires. Between 1910 and 1996, the National Wildfire Coordinating Group counted six hundred and ninety-nine on-duty deaths among wildland firefighters; according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, in the past thirty years, more than five hundred have died. Tom Lee, a Green Beret who deployed to Afghanistan nine times and worked as a wildland firefighter in 2018 and 2019, told me that fighting megafires was one of the most dangerous jobs he has ever done. “Fires are dynamic—they’re unpredictable,” he said. He likened the work to combat: “You can plan for every contingency, but there is always that unknown factor.”
The intensification of wildfires has been driven not just by the weather but by forestry practices. From the nineteen-thirties through the seventies, fire agencies enforced a “10 A.M. policy,” aiming to put out any new wildfire by midmorning the following day. Although the policy officially ended decades ago, its ethos remains pervasive. The U.S. Forest Service and the Department of the Interior employ some fifteen thousand wildland firefighters, who are directed to prioritize fire suppression; as a result, ninety-eight per cent of all wildfires in America are extinguished before they become large. But preventing fuels from burning today preserves them to burn tomorrow. As the stockpile grows, fires burn longer and with greater ferocity. In California alone, an estimated twenty million acres—an area the size of Maryland, Massachusetts, and New Jersey combined—would need to burn to eliminate the so-called fire deficit created by a century of suppression. Federal agencies acknowledge the problem, but bureaucratic risk aversion and budget constraints, among other things, have stalled the adoption of new approaches, leaving America both burning and fire-starved.
In 2017, Timothy Ingalsbee, the executive director of the organization Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology, published an article in the International Journal of Wildland Fire in which he argued that firefighters know that large fires will defy suppression until weather conditions change or fuels run out. Steve Pyne, a historian and a former wildland firefighter, asked me, “Why are firefighters there at all? That’s the fundamental question.” Putting out too many fires contributes to the creation of even bigger blazes: fire ecologists call this the “fire paradox.” Today’s wildland firefighters are trapped within it.
In Susanville, some high-school graduates took jobs at one of the town’s two prisons. Others went into firefighting. It was often seasonal work with federal land-management agencies, which could pay for skiing, surfing, or travel in the intervening months. One of West’s football coaches had fought fires in the nineteen-eighties to pay for college. He told West that, with overtime and hazard pay, the money could be good. West, thinking that he might someday become a teacher, applied to join a handcrew—a group focussed on sawing and digging handlines around fires—to make tuition money.
During his first season, West got a temporary assignment with a hotshot crew, which regularly deployed closer to fires. It was the hardest physical labor he’d ever done: sixteen-hour shifts spent hiking with forty-five-pound packs and digging with hand tools. West decided to become a hotshot. “I was definitely trying to chase an adventure,” he said. “The guys a few years older than me, they would describe these situations, they would show me pictures. They talked about how much fun it was.” He loved being part of a tribe of dirt-covered, shit-talking dragon slayers.
The year after the Nuttall Fire, West became a sawyer, operating a chainsaw in heavy timber, often on the hot edge of a fire—one of the most dangerous jobs on a hotshot crew. The friendships West formed with his sawyer partners were thrillingly close. He and a partner would spend hundreds of hours screaming over the saws, synchronizing their movements. “Sawyering took me to places in my mind that I’d never gone before,” West said. “It was almost like chasing a high.” He came back to the crew again and again.
In the off-season, West would go on unemployment, like many seasonal federal employees, or enroll in college courses. He often rented a house with other wildland firefighters, and they would snowboard and drink together. In the winter of 2009, West moved to a little mountain town in Northern California with his childhood friend Luke Sheehy, a smoke jumper, whose crew would launch an initial “attack” on a fire after arriving via parachute. Every day with Sheehy was an escapade. They woke before sunrise to jog through miles of snow and lift weights at the local high school’s gym; they played practical jokes on friends who crashed on their couch, and took road trips together. West, an amateur standup comedian, worked on his material. He started spending time with a teacher from Susanville, Cassie Dunn, who would eventually become his wife.
Wildland firefighters aren’t supposed to show emotion or weakness. “It’s really hard to fight fire if you are overwhelmed by a fear of fire,” Melissa Petersen, a former wildland firefighter who is now a licensed therapist, told me. But there were moments when West experienced intense nervousness. He had trouble falling asleep and would wake up exhausted. He never talked about the Nuttall Fire, but it haunted him—the speed with which it had moved, the sound of it surrounding him. When fire season returned, West’s anxieties grew acute; cutting line, he wondered if he would have to outrun a fire that day. He knew that, on the job, he could be hit by a falling tree or die in a vehicle or helicopter accident, but his greatest fear was burning to death. Before the start of each season, he would say a sort of prayer: “I accept that people are going to die this year on the fire line. I really, really hope it’s not me or anybody that I know.”
Meanwhile, West had more close calls. A blowup took his crew by surprise while they were sleeping, and they narrowly escaped in their trucks. Twice, he was almost killed by a falling tree. He had near-accidents in vehicles and around helicopters, and worked on at least four fires that resulted in the deaths of other firefighters. He started seeing ice-capped pyroCbs on most of the large fires he fought. Leaving for work on any given day, West didn’t know if he’d come back that night or the next month. In 2010, he moved back to Susanville. Returning from weeks in the wilderness, he’d sometimes become disoriented, losing his way around the town where he’d lived most of his life. He suffered from depression.
In 2013, West dislocated his shoulder while clearing brush. A few days later, he received a phone call telling him that Sheehy had died after parachuting into Modoc National Forest to put out a lightning fire—a falling tree limb had killed him. West was devastated. “I just remember this scream coming from him,” Cassie said. “And he couldn’t talk, and I was just holding him.” Two weeks after Sheehy’s funeral, Arizona’s Yarnell Hill Fire, which created a pyroCb, killed nineteen Granite Mountain Hotshots. “I didn’t really process it or think about it until later,” West said. “I was still in such shock from Luke’s death.”
That winter was the first time that West registered the reality of climate change. Around Christmas, his crew drove in the dark to Big Sur, where they saw a fire crowning on a hill. Usually that time of year was rainy, making ignitions and conflagrations impossible. “Oh, my God—it’s supposed to be dumping rain,” West thought. “There’s not supposed to be fires here.” A couple of weeks later, he was deployed to a fire in Lassen National Forest. It grew to a couple of thousand acres in an area that normally would have been under several feet of snow but was instead bone-dry. West began to doubt his ability to predict fire behavior. Sometimes he grew angry, thinking about how someone could get hurt trying to extinguish a lightning fire in a fuel-laden forest that needed a good burn anyway. “I almost felt this weird lost cause,” he said. “Like the generations before us had screwed up, they were suppressing fires so hard.”
During the 2014 fire season, West worked several huge fires. His mental health deteriorated. Constantly scared, he wondered if he was “soft” or had an anxiety disorder. The thought of suicide became a comfort. (In 2015 and 2016, fifty-two wildland firefighters died by suicide in the U.S.—twenty-five more than were killed in the line of duty.) Cassie learned that some of the firefighter spouses she knew were coping with familial stress through antidepressants.
One day in 2017, West was at his office, in Greenville, California. On his computer, he cued up an episode of the podcast “Wildland Firefighter Lessons Learned,” in which a man named Thomas Taylor described his experience as a hotshot in the Nuttall Fire. It turned out that Taylor had been one of the eleven firefighters who had deployed their shelters in the hole. Three years earlier, Taylor had also been trapped, along with five others, during the Thirtymile Fire, in Washington State. Then, lying in his shelter, Taylor had heard praying, talking, and screaming next to him; four of the other firefighters at Thirtymile died in their shelters.
On the podcast, Taylor choked up as he talked about the Nuttall Fire. He recalled the three-hundred-foot wall of flame that had risen over him. His brain, he said, had started to “eat itself” with fear, and he had hyperventilated and felt shame at losing control of his emotions. For years afterward, he lived with debilitating anxiety. The attacks would come during sustained silences, which evoked the quiet in a shelter after the fire had passed.
Taylor discussed trauma and the brain, talk therapy and Xanax. His openness was unusual for a firefighter. West had avoided his own trauma for years, but listening to Taylor was like hearing himself. He locked the door to his office and wept.
By then, West had become a qualified crew boss, sometimes leading nineteen firefighters into the field during the fire season. He became overprotective, often grabbing a chainsaw or a drip torch from someone and doing risky work himself. “I couldn’t let anyone get hurt,” he said. “I saw what Luke’s parents were dealing with.” He had flashbacks and suspected that he had P.T.S.D. He began looking for a way out of wildland firefighting.
Bre’ Orcasitas, a former hotshot and smoke jumper, told me that today she is seeing a “great exodus” among federal wildland firefighters. Some have publicly resigned, penning candid letters detailing their mental-health breakdowns and frustrations with the low pay and high risk. In the course of her career in fire, Orcasitas said, she had lost several colleagues to accidents, suicide, and cancer. (Wildland firefighters have been shown to have an increased risk of lung cancer, because of exposure to smoke.) She resigned from the Forest Service in 2016, after trying to advocate for trauma education and training among firefighters. “I was almost desperate for it to change,” she said of the profession. After she left, she spent a year developing a course for wildland firefighters that focussed on teaching them to recognize trauma in the wake of extreme events. She flew around the country delivering it to any wildland firefighting crew that would invite her.
Jeremy Bailey, another former hotshot, also left wildland firefighting in the hope of changing the profession. He began his firefighting career in 1995, and two years later joined the Santa Fe Interagency Hotshot Crew. He often worked in the Jemez Mountains, in New Mexico, igniting prescribed burns—fires set deliberately in order to reduce fuels, recycle nutrients, and improve the habitat for fire-dependent trees, such as ponderosa pine and aspen. “Almost immediately, I had this awareness of the need for fire,” Bailey told me. It’s an annual tradition for the chief of the Forest Service to send what’s known as a Moses Letter—a sort of wildland-firefighting State of the Union—to the supervisors of federal firefighting employees. To Bailey, the letters always seemed to say the same thing: Let my people go fight fires, because this year things are so bad that we need to suppress every one. “I clearly saw the writing on the wall,” he said. “We were going to continue down the path of the 10 A.M. policy.”
In 2008, Bailey went to work for the Nature Conservancy, a global environmental organization headquartered in Virginia. He is now the director of its prescribed-fire program, and an advocate for “good fire”—a term used by some activists to describe fires of low to moderate severity that result in ecological benefits, including reducing the fuels that create megafires. In previous centuries, Native Americans managed their forests by setting this type of fire. An estimated eighty per cent of North American vegetation is fire-dependent, and Bailey and others think that good fires are essential if prairies and forests are to become fire-resilient. Bailey argues for the establishment of a workforce dedicated not just to extinguishing fires in the summer but to setting them in the cooler months. “Imagine if for every firefighter poised and ready to extinguish any start, we also had a fire lighter,” he wrote, in an essay published in 2019.
In Ord, Nebraska, in partnership with an environmental nonprofit called Pheasants Forever, the Nature Conservancy conducts a two-week prescribed-fire training program. To attend, I had to qualify as an FFT2—one of the entry-level wildland fire technicians that make up the bulk of America’s fire-suppression workforce. I took about forty hours of online courses from my Brooklyn apartment, and then, in Prospect Park, completed the required Work Capacity Test, carrying a forty-five-pound pack for three miles in less than forty-five minutes. Later, I travelled to Ord—a rural town of two thousand residents, on the North Loup River and the edge of Nebraska’s rolling Sand Hills—where a crew made up of wildland firefighters, former hotshots, and land managers planned to ignite four thousand acres.
I lit my first fire on the slope of a bowl impressed into the prairie. A crew member handed me a red drip torch filled with diesel fuel and unleaded gasoline, and I poured a trickle of it onto the ground. I took out my lighter and lit the yellow grass. I tipped the torch into the flames, lighting its spout, then walked out onto the middle of the slope. The wind whipped my hair around my hard hat. I tipped the spout again, and fire streamed out. Walking with my fire behind me, I fell into a rhythm, each arc of flame feeding into another, creating fish scales all the way to the bottom of the bowl. Then I stood back and watched. Overhead, the sky was brilliant blue; where it met the earth, all was flame and smoke. Everything in view was moving. It dazzled me.
Sometimes the work felt like being on a road crew. We “blacklined” for hours on end, starting fires with our torches and controlling their spread with hand tools or water hoses. Our work left behind undulating, blackened squiggles, about thirty feet wide, which marked the perimeters of the areas we intended to ignite. The early spring weather was frigid. Often, I stood on a patch of smoldering prairie, letting the heat warm my leather boots. The smells of diesel fuel and burning bluestem grass combined into something like incense.
Once the blacklining was done, we could burn hundreds of acres a day without fear of our fires escaping. Sometimes I dragged a torch while driving an A.T.V. with one hand, moving in tandem with three or four other igniters spread across the prairie. Other times I worked alone, running up hillsides or down into drainages, bringing fire with me. One day, I stood on the rim of a basin full of billowing smoke. Flames lapped at my feet. I aimed a shiny silver pistol over the edge; I pulled the trigger and felt the recoil snap through my hands. As the crack of the shot echoed, an incendiary projectile trailed sparks through the air. It landed somewhere in the void below me, igniting a new fire.
Zeke Lunder, the planning-section chief at the Nebraska burn, was another wildland firefighter who had grappled with P.T.S.D. For two decades, Lunder had created wildfire cartography tools, designed for drawing up topographical maps during suppression operations. Then, in 2015, California’s Valley Fire engulfed seventy-six thousand acres and killed four people; Lunder worked to exhaustion for weeks, once on a shift that lasted thirty hours. “When the fires are that big, they don’t fit on standard maps,” Lunder said. A few years later, California’s Camp Fire burned more than a hundred and fifty thousand acres and killed more than eighty people. The fire reached Lunder’s area, bringing with it mass trauma. A carpenter friend who’d helped rebuild his community following a wildfire in 2008 died by suicide after watching it burn again; Lunder himself experienced depression. “This town that I knew pretty well was just gone,” he said. “It was like Dresden or Nagasaki. Just chimneys and rubble and people looking for bodies.” Lunder is now a good-fire activist, and a member of the prescribed-burn association in Butte County, California.
To a large extent, good fire is an Indigenous movement. Leaders speak of their right, as stewards of the land, to practice “cultural burning.” “Fire is life for us. Fire is family,” Elizabeth Azzuz, a Yurok tribal member and the secretary of the Cultural Fire Management Council, said. “It’s a tool that we use to be able to restore our environment, our ecosystem, and maintain the strength and health of our people.”
The term “good fire” can seem counterintuitive in the age of the megafire. But in Nebraska I came to see what the rhetoric was hoping to accomplish. Watching my fellow crew members transform the prairie into waves of combustion as far as the eye could see, I felt deep satisfaction. When the flames died, they left behind rich, ashen ground—earth that we ourselves had painted black. On my last day in Ord, I drove on a winding road alongside thousands of acres of black hills illuminated by the rising sun. A full moon hung over the charred landscape. To me, it looked right.
In 2018, West left the fire line. He became a dispatcher at the Susanville Interagency Fire Center, mobilizing firefighters and resources to respond to wildfires. He worked long hours, and the stress of the job was enormous; he also had two young children at home. “I felt very out of place in the real world, like I couldn’t have a real identity outside of fire even if I wanted to,” he told me. West sought counselling through the Forest Service, but the therapist he saw had no experience diagnosing P.T.S.D. Cassie, feeling desperate, found a therapist who specialized in treating first responders. The therapist encouraged him to consider a new career. “I couldn’t really heal if I stayed in fire,” he told me.
In August, 2020, West finished an eighteen-hour shift at his job, then sent a seven-page letter of resignation to the Forest Service. He shared the letter with family members and colleagues, who posted it online. “In my career, I was almost burned over four times,” he wrote. Still, “nothing has been more a threat to my life than the symptoms of PTSD.” West focussed his criticism on the lack of mental-health education and resources for wildland firefighters. “Even though I have PTSD I don’t think I’m dangerous or crazy,” he wrote. “I think wildland firefighting is dangerous and crazy and PTSD is a normal reaction from the human brain.” When he quit, after seventeen years with the Forest Service, his base pay was $22.80 an hour. A month later, he started work as a middle-school social-studies and English teacher. But school was cancelled during the first week, when the Sheep Fire threatened Susanville. This year, it was postponed again, because of the Dixie Fire. There was a time when West believed that his home, within the city limits, was safe from wildfire. Now the fire had come to him. “It’s almost like the front is here,” he told me. “It’s where I live.”
In August, 2021, a year after West’s resignation, I embedded as a firefighter-journalist with a Type 2 Initial Attack handcrew—a unit of twenty wildland firefighters qualified to be first responders to wildfire ignitions. We were assigned to the Dixie Fire. At that time, the fire had spread across half a million acres and was just thirty-one per cent contained. More than sixty-five hundred people had been tasked with fighting it. Two weeks before, in the Forest Service’s annual Moses Letter, Randy Moore, the agency’s chief, had described America’s wildfires as a “national crisis”; he’d also called for a policy of full suppression and for the scaling back of prescribed burning.
We drove to our fire camp, in Quincy, California, in a caravan of Ford Super Duty trucks. I rode with five firefighters who ranged in age from twenty-six to fifty-one; a few had started firefighting while in California’s prisons, where prisoners are regularly recruited to fight fires for pay. This was the crew’s third assignment, or “roll,” on the Dixie Fire. Everyone was dressed in green fire-retardant pants made of a material called Nomex, leather boots, and shirts featuring the logo of the private firefighting contractor that employed them. Most people slept, heads resting on windows or seat backs, waking only to buy breakfast, cigarettes, and sunglasses at a gas station. “Just a bunch of fire pirates out here,” the youngest firefighter joked.
Our route took us through the scar of the 2018 Camp Fire. One of the men in the truck lived in Paradise, California; the fire had destroyed his home, along with the homes of thirty colleagues. “That was the craziest thing I’ve ever been in,” he told me later, on the fire line. He’d driven his mother, wife, and kids four and a half hours to safety, and had seen the road explode into flames created solely by the heat in the air; two days later, he was back cutting handline on the fire with his crew, and searching for human remains in the wreckage of his town.
We spent our first day in Plumas National Forest, in Indian Valley, prepping homes for the coming fire by digging perimeters of bare dirt. The area sat under a smoke inversion, in which a cap of warm air trapped cooler air and smoke low to the ground; the mountains around us were invisible in the pall. The temperature was a hundred degrees, and the Air Quality Index was 368—a “hazardous” rating. An opened but undrunk can of Budweiser sat on the patio of an abandoned house, and the milkweed on the side of the road was drenched in psychedelic-pink fire retardant. We took our breaks sitting inside idling trucks, where we could breathe conditioned air instead of toxic smoke.
We slept that night in fire camp, then woke early the next morning to hike through miles of forest in the dark, up and down steep drainages and along fresh bulldozer wounds. In places the fire had already burned, we scooped up “moon dust”—white ashes—with our tools and gently brushed them with the backs of our hands, checking for heat to make sure that the fire was really gone. It had been days since the flames passed through, but my fingers grew calloused from digging embers out of the earth. Nature’s comforts were unsettling: a gust of wind cooled the sweat on my face, but I worried that it might awaken embers; a beam of sunlight pierced the smoke, but I wondered if it might portend a lifting of the inversion—a change in the stability of the atmosphere that could bring unpredictable fire behavior. We drove back and forth through the town of Greenville, where West had sat in his office back in 2017, listening to the podcast with Taylor. The week before, the town had been obliterated by fire—it was now a melted husk. My crew had been there, outracing a crown fire that had run downhill out of the forest. They’d retreated to Greenville’s high school and prepared to fight from there; when a local gas station caught fire, they were ordered out. “We call it a standalone,” the crew boss, Gene Lopez, said of the town that day. “If it survives, it will only be by an act of God, because there’s nobody there.”
For a few days, our group supported the operations of several hotshot crews. Choking on smoke, we dug line as helicopters dumped hundreds of gallons of water just yards away. One afternoon, I watched a hotshot superintendent lean against the hood of his truck, scrutinizing an iPad; the screen showed a topo map representing some of the wildest terrain in California. His yellow Nomex shirt was grimy and ripped across the back of his shoulders, as if he’d been mauled by a tiger. The sun was a small fuchsia dot behind the gray smoke pouring from the forest. It was nearly 2 P.M.—the witching hour, when the sun is hottest, humidity is low, and winds are strong. He zoomed the map in and out, then moved it left and right. He was trying to find a safe route for his crew to hike up the ridge and cut a line to slow the fire’s approach.
“It’s a shit show,” he said. “They want someone to get hurt.” Ten years ago, he went on, crews could perform direct attacks—working close to the fire itself—because there was some moisture in the ground. “Now there’s no rain. It’s so dry,” he said. “We can’t go direct anymore, because it’s going to stand up and chase you out.”
Sometimes Dixie seemed to take a breath, returning stronger after the lull. Nearly two thousand miles of dozer line hadn’t prevented it from marching toward gigafire status—it grew by a hundred thousand acres in one twenty-four-hour period, and sometimes sent up multiple pyroCbs in a day. I slept amid hundreds of tents for firefighters, and walked past trailers for showers, laundry, food, and meetings held by incident commanders—a pop-up, military-style disaster-response city. In one morning briefing, a frustrated hotshot standing on a makeshift stage described how he’d ordered millions of dollars of fire retardant dropped, only to see it burned over by the next day. (Ultimately, containing Dixie cost more than six hundred million dollars.) Winds were so strong and fuels so dry that the backfires intended to box in the main fire escaped control, increasing Dixie’s size by tens of thousands of acres. People were asking, “How big would this fire be if we hadn’t tried to fight it?” Later, I checked Zeke Lunder’s blog, where he was tracking the Dixie Fire, which threatened his childhood home. “Why do we keep trying to pull off these big firing operations under terrible conditions?” he wrote. “Why are we still focused on containment, when it’s clear that parts of this fire are beyond our control?”
While on the Dixie Fire, I’d hoped that our crew might camp in Susanville, so that I could meet up with West. When that didn’t happen, I tried to get there on my own. The journey proved impossible: between us were evacuated towns and miles of roads barricaded by National Guard tanks. “I hope the crew gets a good assignment and you learn a lot,” West texted. “Stay safe out there.” Of the fire, he wrote, “It’s all over the map. It’s like five giant fires.” He and his family were packing in case of evacuation, under a neon-orange sky.
One afternoon, my crew began a mop-up patrol in a place called Lights Creek. It was clear that raging fire had run through it. The trees were still standing, but many were charcoalized. The black stumps of willow bushes jutted out of the barren ground. In my right hand, I held a “rhino”—a tool with a shovel blade at a right angle, for cutting and scraping.
As I walked toward the creek, my front leg sank to the knee in soft brown silt. Recalling stories of hidden ash pits and third-degree burns, I quickly pulled it out and stepped backward. With my rhino, I scooped out some dirt. It looked cold—but when I brushed my hand against it I felt warmth.
“Hold for heat!” I yelled.
Another crew member joined me, and we began to excavate. We dug through the powdery soil and sent up brown clouds of dust. The deeper we went, the hotter the ground became. The heat permeated the soles of our boots—eventually, we were dancing to relieve the discomfort. I stepped away from the pit and took in the situation. We were standing on an oven. Yards away from us, other crew members were also digging. Together, we were uncovering a single network of still smoldering roots.
“We need water,” the guy next to me said.
Someone radioed for an engine to bring hoses. A few people retreated to the rocky creek bank to wait, and I joined them. I leaned against my tool’s wooden handle and drank through the tube of a HydraPak. I tried not to dwell on the bleakness of the scene—the stumps and leafless trees and cooked earth.
“Oh, shit,” someone said.
I turned and saw a massive fire cloud rising over the mountain to the east. The smoke and vapor boiled and expanded. It was a pyrocumulus—the first I’d seen. I took a picture with my phone, then sat and stared. Over the next hour, I watched its white, cauliflower-like head rise to twenty-five thousand feet. It looked like a mushroom cloud. I tried to imagine the combustion taking place below it—the heat and speed of a fire that could send so much smoke and ash into the sky. What powerful, nefarious force was creating this beast? It was us. ♦
