Flagstaff Fires, Vol. 1.

My Uncle said it best, “You’ve had nothing but a fuckin’ wild ride since you rode into town. Tighten the cinch and hang on – winter will return!”

It got me to thinking. The picture to the left was taken on January 21, 2010. We were a full thirty-six hours into what would result in - two days later - the largest single snow event to hit the city of Flagstaff in 47 years. I recorded 52” of snow in my backyard on the morning of January 24, 2010. The official count was 53.8” of snow at the Flagstaff-Pulliam Airport, 1.47 miles south from my apartment. The front page of the AZ Daily Sun announced, “One for the record books,” and then, under it, “Still digging out.”


On Monday, June 21, 2010, the front page of AZ Daily Sun read, in one-inch black sans serif, “Up in smoke.”

Quite literally, I can’t remember the last time I turned on my windshield wipers. My best estimate is that it was between 45 and 55 days ago. It’s dry. Flagstaff also sits in a part of the biggest Ponderosa pine forest on the North American continent. Not to mention the Pinyon-Juniper stands in the mid-elevations. There is a significant amount of fuel sitting around on these hillsides.


The Eagle Rock fire started about 25 miles west of Flagstaff on June 16th. They are still tending to that fire but not in the manner it took them when it started, of course. It topped out at about 4,000 +/- acres on June 19th or so. However, it has been reported that the call regarding the fire, placed by a one Mr. Bob Rike, sat in the voicemail box of the Kaibab National Forest Service office until an employee checked it twelve hours later, when, indeed, the Forest Service opened for business the next morning. The fire had grown considerably by then, as you can imagine.


So that little snafu, naturally, caused some complications about the matter.

Unfortunately, the Hardy Fire flared up on June 19th, Saturday, at about 1:00 pm, a few miles south of the I-40 and Butler Avenue exit in Flagstaff because of a transient named Randall Wayne Nicholson from California. He decided to dump his charcoal out in the "grass" under the BBQ grill itself. He was charged with a class 2 misdemeanor and is held in custody until someone pays a $2,500 bond.



Anyway, that fire burned a comparatively small amount of ground, about 350 acres, but it just so happened to be on the edges - and had the wind to help it - of consuming two schools, two historical restaurants and a hotel, two gas stations, a power substation, five fairly affluent neighborhoods, a country club or two and two resort properties - Wyndham and Marriott - and, ultimately, the Nestle/Purina Mill. That would have been the absolute worst case scenario. But, when I took the picture at right, it seemed somewhat plausible.


The ground crew was on the scene first, but there was very little information coming to us at that point so I don’t have too many details as to where they started in on it. Within an hour or so, I reckon, two slurry bombers and two Sikorsky Skycrane helicopters arrived on the scene. It was fucking bad-ass, for lack of a more inventive term. Those pilots can fly, let me tell you. I had a bomber pass not 80 to 100 feet over the top of my Jeep whilst turning that beast at a 45 degree parabolic climb out of the thick smoke over I-40 and the adjacent neighborhood. I whooped loudly and pumped my fist and yelled, “Fuck yeah!”.....and then I nearly threw my iPhone out the window at 40 mph trying to get video of it. 

Alas, I managed this still as it circled away, only about ten seconds later. Still have the phone.

I watched pilots of gigantic Sikorsky S-64E helicopters put those machines at 30 to 40 degree nosedives in order to dip into local water holes in very urban areas, then hover, fill, and take off. Then fly into the teeth of a 5 or 6,000 foot column of smoke. Watching machines of that size in the air in an urban setting, wherein the biggest things you encounter on a daily basis might be a piece of heavy equipment or a really big semi. The train, certainly, is a massive thing. But these are all on the ground. We grow used to seeing machines of that size on the surface of the earth.

However, seeing a helicopter with a maximum takeoff weight of 42,000 pounds and cruise speed of 105 mph slice through the smoke a few hundred feet over your head just puts an eerie movie-script feeling to the whole ordeal. The choppers pop out of the smoke and cut the air over the apartment in half well into the wee hours of night, on a constant mission. An airborne attack, but of a benevolent nature.



They had that fire knocked back and the power shut off to the station and re-routed and the roads closed and the people out of their houses within four hours and I’ll tell you something else, to this day, with roughly 12,500 acres charred in the greater Flagstaff area and about 1,000 homes evacuated in the last five days, not one single injury has been reported nor one single structure damaged.


Now that is impressive.

So, as those 900 or so wildfire fighters took to the woods over the last 120 hours, they have done one hell of damn good job. 

Because I forgot to tell you that the Schultz Fire started on June 20, Sunday, Father’s Day at about 11:00 a.m. Here's a picture of its effects, roughly two hours after it was reported.The mountain behind which it is burning (lower left) is named Mt. Elden. It's about 10,000 feet tall. 


That's one hell of a plume of smoke.




It was set by an abandoned campfire along Schultz Pass Road, some 8,000 feet up in the highest, driest section of the Rocky Mountains. The winds were too much for the pilots to fly through; some fifty miles an hour at certain points.The bombers, I’ve been told by a co-worker, need to re-charge in Winslow. But, with eight of them and five attack helicopters, the cycle of water and slurry is nearly constant.

Again, very impressive.

Bombers emerge, a low drone at first, out of the densest of smoke at about six thousand feet above sea level, behind the steep angle of the mountain’s shoulder. From the south, one can see how they fly the entire line of the leading edge of the fire, drop, then fly behind Mt. Elden through the smoke and emerge over HWY 89, just north of Townsend-Wynona Road. It, too, is fucking bad-ass. It's like a three or four mile run right through a 10,000 acre wildfire at a hundred and some-odd miles per hour. All kinds of slurry bombers are used across the west, from DC-10's to WWII-era Navy bombers, known as the PB4Y, to small and agile aircraft like the AT-82 (And even some refurbished B-17's during the 1980's.) The picture above is a bomber pilot fighting a fire in California some years back. Check out this link to the Associated Aerial Firefighters website for some amazing pictures in their gallery.



In the end, the woods will benefit from the fires, I understand. What’s a goddamn shame is that these guys and gals have to put their lives in danger because of two idiots who didn’t know how to put out something as simple as a campfire.

Another disconcerting factor is a line in an article posted on the AZ Daily Sun website Sunday: “Coconino National Forest officials will meet Monday to consider imposing fire and use restrictions on the forest, but they have no plans at this time to shut it down.” It might be a good idea to shut down the woods just for a few days, boys, until you can get this under control. There are eight tankers and 5 helicopters working on it as we speak. 300 fighters. It’s still out of control, and zero percent contained. 

It's been a crazy few days. Evacuations and late-breaking news and inaccuracies and closures and a bit of the type of thought process that I like to call, "Holy shit! Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Fuck! What should I do first?!" Then you get your shit together - in that bright moment of realization which alcoholics refer to as a moment of clarity - and handle it. 


Indeed, I think I got about ten emails that started with "Holy (insert your favorite cuss word/phrase here for the best effect)!" after people saw the pictures. It was a lot like that down here, too. One old timer shuffled up to me at work - as we are all standing in the middle of the street with cameras and radios and half-written text messages and children and parents and stopped cars, doors flung open, our mouths agape - and said, "Jesus Christ! Is that all it ever does around here is burn?"

I closed my mouth and swallowed. "Sure seems like it," I said. 

But then again, I remember saying the same thing about the snow.


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