Granite Mountain Hotshots Disaster | One Foot in the Black | 5
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A note to our listeners, this episode contains explicit language. Please be advised. From Wondery, I'm Mike Corey, and this is Against the Odds. Over the last four episodes, we've told the story of the 19 Granite Mountain Hotshots who died on June 30th, 2013 in Arizona's Yarnell Hill Fire.

We may never know exactly why the Hotshot team went into the ravine where the fire overcame them, but it's something my guest, Kyle Dickman, has spent a lot of time thinking about.

Kyle is a writer and contributing editor for Outside Magazine. His experience working as a firefighter and a hotshot helped him write On the Burning Edge, A Fateful Fire, and The Men Who Fought It. Kyle Dickman, welcome to Against the Odds. Thanks for having me. In your previous life before becoming a journalist, you worked as a firefighter and as a hotshot. Can you tell us where you did this and mostly what was your job?

So I was a hotshot on a crew called the Tahoe Hotshots in Northern California. And I spent four years on an engine crew before going to the Hotshots.

My job was just like a grunt. If we caught a fire on an engine crew, I would roll a hose out and spray the fire with the hose. Or on the hot shot crew, it was to walk fast in the woods and then it was to swing a Pulaski and do it fast. What's a Pulaski? A Pulaski is like an axe. It's like the heart and soul of the U.S. Forest Service. And that's cutting through the roots and digging through the dirt and things like that is what it's used for.

Yeah, you use it for cutting through roots or trees or whatever that is in the path of the fire line that you're building. But like hot shot crews are, so you have sawyers, these are the guys with chainsaws, you have swampers, those guys move the things that the sawyers cut. And then you have the scrape and the scrape are guys that use Pulaski's and shovels. And I mean, it's a lot of digging. Yeah.

being a hotshot we've learned is quite dangerous work. And why of all the things on God's green earth to choose as a career, did you pick a hotshot? I mean, it's pretty fun for one thing, but my story with it was that in high school, my dad said, look, if you get a job fighting fire, I'll buy a car. So I said, okay, well, I'll get a job fighting fire. So I got a job. I was a freshman in college on an engine crew. And I got like a,

pretty run down Toyota Camry station wagon out of the deal. So that was sort of my entree into the field. And then once I was on the engine crew, you know, I was what, 19 years old. And it's just a, it's an awesome world, right? You hang out with a bunch of people your own age, they're all fired up to be out in the woods. Like it's exciting to get a fire call. You jump in the fire engine or you jump in your hot shot buggy and you race out and it smells like smoke. And

You have some sort of aggro music playing on the stereo. And it's pretty great, right? When you're 20 years old, it's hard to write a better script. Yeah. What kind of music was in the stereo? Depended on who was the DJ that day. But the guy that did it most on the Hot Shot Crew, his name was Nooter. His name was not actually Nooter, but we called him Nooter. And Nooter would always play like Damian Marley. So we listened to a lot of sort of like, I don't even know what you call it, like reggae hip hop.

Yeah, oh, I was thinking it was going to be ACDC or System of a Down. Yeah, tons of that too. Absolutely right. Rage Against the Machine was on there, but yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Guerrilla Radio. You were saying that your father encouraged you to become a hotshot, a firefighter. Why was that? I think just practically speaking because...

It's a good gig for a college kid, right? Like you work outside, you work hard. I think there's lots of good life lessons in that experience. Maybe he was thinking about that stuff. I mean, you earn a lot of money. So like if you're a 20 year old kid, you make enough money, or at least I would over the summer that I didn't have to work when I went to college.

Yeah. And there's definitely something to, you know, the Wolfpack getting together, music on the stereo, rushing to save the world or save a town or save someone, right? There's something deeply gratifying and honorable about that. Yeah. I mean, look, most fires that you fight are not those things, but

I think the reality is that mindset is so ingrained in our culture, right? Like firefighters are heroes. That's what they are. And so I think when you sign up for the crew, you're like baked into that. So I think when you get that call, even if you're racing out to a fire that happens to be 40 miles from the nearest town, you still feel like you're saving the world. Like, you know, some fires are just single tree lightning fires.

And so you go out and it's wet and it's raining. It's going to actually be raining and you can be fighting fires. But, you know, on those days when it's hot and it's dry and it's windy and it's been that way for a month and a half and the forest is like so dry that every step you take, the pine needles crack or, you know, like even bigger sticks are just cracking underfoot. You can feel it in the forest when it's ready to burn. After the break, we'll hear more from writer and former hotshot Kyle Dickman.

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Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. Okay, so become a hotshot. What exactly is the path like? Can you run us through how someone would become a firefighter and then how a firefighter could become a hotshot? So...

It's not that hard of a thing to do, is the honest to God truth. Either one of those fields. So when you show up, you have to take a number of relatively basic fire classes about things like fire behavior, how fires burn, how to read a map. Some hotshot crews will hire firefighters just like me straight out of college or if they need hands. But most of the time you get on a hotshot crew after having put in a few years of

on another crew that would be a little lower on the hierarchy of wireline firefighting, which would be like an engine crew. And with these people, let's say you were a firefighter first, would you be a certain firefighter that did forest fires or maybe your local firefighter in a town and then want to head out and become a hotshot? Two different worlds entirely. So-

Yeah, and typically the hot track crews and forest firefighters, wildland firefighters require less training than structural firefighters. Structural firefighters are often guided

guys that have to be EMTs or paramedics to get jobs. It's a more competitive job, really. And I think the need is so great in wildland firefighting that if you're an able-bodied person who is willing to suffer, they would love to have you. And if you're a hotshot, do you just work locally or is it a whole separate thing? What makes Hotshot special, I guess, is that it's a national resource. So most fire crews are based

locally, but a hotshot cruise jurisdiction is actually the entire country and in some cases the entire world. So whatever the highest priority fire is, if the incident commander on that fire says, look, we need more hands, they will pick up the phone and call the first four or five hotshot crews that are available. And those guys can get picked up from California or Arizona, Nevada, Alaska, and get sent to wherever the most pressing fire is. What's your mental state like during fire season? Is it

Is it dialed in? Is there any room for worry or...

hesitation or you're with the guys and you know you have a mission and you just take care of the job. It is all of the above, right? At some points you're exhausted. At some points you're thrilled. At some points like all you want to do is go home and take a hot shower and sleep in past 530. But other days like if one of your assignments is you get helicoptered into a ridgeline deep in the wilderness where the views are incredible and the fire behavior is good and you're with a bunch of good friends, like

There are times that that's the best place in the world to be. A crew of 20 people, all of which are living life. Everybody has good days and has bad days. There's stuff that's happening at home. Somebody's kid's sick.

somebody's grandfather dies. It's like the reason they talk about it as being brothers is because you're in such close proximity that like those people are family. Have you ever heard about the idea that fear and excitement are basically the same thing physiologically? Like the hormones are very similar and therefore you can trick your brain kind of back and forth from fear and excitement.

I feel like with firefighting and fire season, it's probably pretty similar where there's a bit of a seed of dread, but also quite a bit of excitement. Where is it fear? Is it excitement? There's just so much going on. I would love if you could speak a bit to that. I just want people to understand that if people were scared, they wouldn't do it. There is that element of excitement, but like...

For example, I was covering this story and I went out and I embedded with a hot shot crew who was working on this fire that was absolutely ripping through sequoias, the biggest trees on earth, period, ripping through them. And we hiked down this path, this line that they had cut, and we're standing on this line and they're doing a backburn, which means that they're intentionally lighting fire. So that fire will take the fuel that the wildfire needs to burn before the wildfire gets there and it'll all sit down, calm down, and they can control it.

And they're laying these strips of fire under giant sequoia trees in the middle of the night. And there are trees that are 200 feet tall that are just going up like Roman candles, torching. And the embers are flying overhead, right? And the hot shot that I'm hanging out with just looks up and he cranes his neck and he watches these embers go up. And he says...

Yeah, I think I'll go to J tree and go climbing this winter with my good friends. Not a care in the world. That's it, right? Like they do this every day. It's not uncommon for a hotshot to be on a fire 120 days in a fire season. So, you know, with that kind of exposure, I think that you get a little numb to the risks.

Earlier, you were saying that the job is a lot of digging and shoveling. So let's say it's fire season. You're a hotshot. You and you have your crew of guys. You're out there. There's a fire, let's say medium size. You wake up in the morning. What time do you get there? What happens? Is there a plan made before you get there? When you do get there, generally, what happens?

what is the job? Okay. So there's two ways that this happens. One way is called an initial attack fire, which means if a fire starts, what you're going to hear is like, we used to hear this like beep, beep, beep would come over the radio. And it was the best sound that you could hear on a shift. Cause I mean, it meant that, you know, you were going to work.

And so if you heard that, you would drop whatever it was that you were doing. Everybody would rush to the truck. If it was hot, dry, and windy, you'd go code three. So you would flip the sirens on and then you would get on scene and you'd look at it and you'd make an assessment of what you expected the fire to do based on the weather, the terrain, the fuel conditions, all of those things. So if you need more resources, they'll say, hey, look, we need helicopters.

Give us the world. Send us everything you got. More fire engines, more hot shot crews. We need tankers, et cetera. Whatever it is that you feel like you need. Over time, if that first crew loses that fire, the whole sort of infrastructure responds in a way that you set it up for failure.

Instead of trying to catch this thing that's escaping, you try to corral what has become the beast. And so generally that means instead of putting a line right on the edge of the spreading fire, you step back and you put it on top of the ridges that are two miles from the fire. And then you make this big box around the fire and you burn out the fuel between the box that you built and where the wildfire is. And that's how they contain it.

But the scenario that is honestly more common for hotshot crews would be called a campaign fire. So a fire that's been burning for a week or two weeks or two months where they have, it's all established, it's broken up into divisions. There's a camp of 1200 firefighters there with showers. And it's an entire infrastructure that just pops up to support the firefight. And in a case like that, you wake up at 530, you go get your coffee and your breakfast and

You stand around and you listen to the briefing where the incident commanders give you, this is the situation. The weather team stand up and say, here's what the weather's going to do today. Basically, it's a trickle down where you get your assignment very clearly and what your task is for the day.

In the context of Yarnell, it was a very different scenario there for those guys because that fire was an emerging incident. So the fire had started and the hotshots were among the first resources, fire crews on scene. And so it was their job to sort of assess what was happening and then make their decisions based on whatever they saw on the ground. So talking about terminology and the words that the hotshots used. So we spoke about in the black and in the green.

How do you know where these areas are? And do you know where to go to get to safety all of the time? Yeah. I mean, just to take a big step back, in the green is anything that's not burned. The black is anything that is burned. What you talk about is having one foot in the black. So if something has burned, it is very unlikely to burn again. So if...

Your greatest concern is getting burned up. And that's a good thing to be concerned about. Having one foot in the black is going to be a very safe way to make sure that doesn't happen. When you're out in the field doing your work, there's a quite intricate communication network, right? And especially weather, which can change, that has to be broadcasted and communicated to the teams in the field. Can you talk about that network a little bit, how everything works together?

Yeah. So fire is a weather phenomenon, really. So it behaves just like the weather does. And because of that, there's a whole branch of the fire service. They're called IMETs, incident meteorologists. And these guys get deployed to fires and their job is to like do micro forecasting for a single incident. So they take big regional trends and they focus them down to the area of wherever that fire is burning. And then it gets even smaller. So you can say like this river valley is going to see winds at 30 miles an hour, but it's

come two o'clock in the afternoon, act accordingly. But crews, they sling weather. And what that means is that every hour, one guy on the crew has this little pack that they carry that they can measure the temperature and then the humidity. And they measure these two factors, which are very important to how a fire burns. And then they broadcast them over the radio and they say, temperature is 95 degrees. It's up three degrees from our last reading and humidity is 6% down 2% or something. So, and all that stuff gets broadcast over a fire.

I know you were involved in quite a big fire in Northern California's Trinity Alps in 2006. Can you tell us a bit about that fire, its story, and your involvement and what it was like with your boots on the ground there?

So that was, I was on the hot shots at that point. And it was one of these fire seasons, you know, like fires tend to sort of like move around like whack-a-mole. And this year, the Northern California and the Trinity Alps, just, it was very dry. And for whatever reason, it was just, that was that area's year. And so we got this cool assignment. We were flown by helicopter and landed the helicopters just up on this awesome ridgeline with these beautiful view of these, I don't know what they are, 9,000 foot peak.

way in the wilderness. And our job was to build a fire line from the rocks up on these mountains all the way down this ridgeline down to this river. And that was supposed to hold the fire. So that's what we did. We spent four or five, six days spiked out

up there and building this fire line with chainsaws and pulaskis and poison oak and it was just like all shades of misery and it was an awesome assignment well one night after we finally got the line tied in which means there was fire line from the rocks all the way down to the river our job was to start a burnout operation so to take strips of fire and lay them parallel to that

fire line and that fire would then back down to meet where the wildfire was and theoretically it would all go out. But as tends to happen, nature had other plans and we had like 30 foot flame lengths that were running up at our line and it was dark and our superintendent was like, everybody in the green, everybody in the green, which means, you know, you wade into the unburned fuel and your job is to watch the embers as they fly over like these swarms of bees just going...

just flying everywhere and landing in the brush around you. And you wait around in this and you're looking for these embers and waiting to see if they're going to catch. And if they catch, then your job is put it out before the fire spreads. So, I mean, it's sort of a terrifying thing to think about, but that's what we were doing. Right. And I can remember just asking my captain, I was like, do you feel good about this? I, you know, I don't, this feels terrible.

scary. And he was like, I feel good about it. You know, as a first year hotshot, like all you can do is defer to the experience of the captains and superintendents of which I had very good captains and a superintendent. So like I trusted them without question. What ended up happening is that at some point the division, which is sort of like the general for a certain chunk of land that the fire is burning on, made the decision that it was too dangerous for the hotshot crews to be working in there.

So it was like 10 o'clock at night and we had to hike nine miles out with the fire just like bucking behind us, ripping behind us and walked down this long ridgeline to this river and hiked up the river to where our buggies were. And come the next morning, we found that all of our gear that we had left up there, things like meals ready to eat and extra chainsaws and extra Pulaski's, all that stuff had been burned over.

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I got a grant from National Geographic to go to Papua New Guinea and go make a film about kayaking. In Papua New Guinea, that's the final frontier, man. There's not many places farther away than that. It was awesome. Yeah, the film was called The Last Frontier, actually. It was a great experience. It was really fun. But yeah, I had put in for this grant and the plan was if I got it, I would go to New Guinea. And if I didn't, I would go back to Fighting Fires and I got the grant.

When you heard about the Granite Mountain Hot Shots, what was the first thing that went through your mind? I mean, it was fuck, right? Like that's an entire hot shot crew. Where were you? I was at home and I got a text from my friend that said, check the news. And so I checked the news and I can just remember feeling completely devastated. You know, it was one of those events that if you ask any firefighter, former or current, they can tell you where they were when they heard the news.

And you were sent to Yarnell to cover the aftermath of what happened to the Granite Mountain Hot Shots, yeah? There's the initial reaction of shock, but then do you try to figure out what happened? With Yarnell, it was never clear what happened, right? I spent something like two full months with my head to the ground reporting on that story.

So the initial reports were really murky, right? All that we knew was that an entire hotshot crew had been killed. And we knew some other factors. We knew that the area had been droughted. We knew that there was most likely a thunderstorm involved. We knew that there was a town that was burning. So initially, it was just this question of what the hell just happened? Because you have to keep in mind that hotshot crews are not a new entity. They've been around since the 1950s.

Never in the history of hot shot crews had an entire crew been killed. I guess when people think of Arizona, they think of deserts, sand, cactuses. But when you look at it with more experienced eyes than myself, what do you see there in Arizona? Or what did you see? Yarnell sits right in this pass of the Weaver Mountains on top of this very steep road. And it sits amongst these boulders that are all giant granite.

Dolly-esque boulders. They're beautiful. It's a beautiful setting surrounding the small town of Yarnell, which is like a place of bikers and ranchers, or these big hills, really steep hills covered in chaparral. Just refresh our memory on what chaparral is. Chaparral is a mixture of just highly flammable bushes.

Bushes that like to burn is probably the easiest way to think about it. Like scrub brush, basically. Scrub brush. That's good. That time of year, so it was June 30th. What's it like in this landscape? It's parched, right?

Right. So the Southwest is the first place to burn in the country almost every year. And that year in particular, it had been so dry. And so come June 30th, if you live in the Southwest, you're just waiting for those first raindrops to fall because that's when the monsoon kicks in. So there's this weird thing that happens right before the monsoon kicks in, which is basically that if you're going to pick a day to burn, the worst day that you could pick would be the day before it starts to rain.

And that was exactly what happened here in Yarnell, which was just like the landscape was parched. Everything was so ready to burn. But not only that, you had this atmospheric instability that's caused by the monsoon coming in. And so what you can think about it is like the atmosphere is primed for thunderstorms. It just needs the additional moisture to create those. And so it turns out that fires are a pretty good trigger for thunderstorms.

And in a landscape that's basically a tinderbox, how would a hotshot or hotshot crew fight this fire?

The hotshot crew is going to go out and do the same thing on this fire that they are going to do on most of them, which is to build what's called an anchor point. You start where the fire started and you build lines along the edges of it. I mean, if you think about it as building a lasso, throwing a lasso around the fire, you got to make sure that you've caught the entire thing. And the safest place to start is where the fire started. That's what the hotshot crew was doing on the morning of June 30th when they arrived, is they were building that anchor point.

The morning started and it was a relatively low priority fire. You know, it was this, the fire was burning on a ridge above the town of Yarnell. The greatest concern was that somehow this fire way up on the ridge was going to threaten Yarnell or the small community of People's Valley. Granite Mountain was a local resource. Like they were far and away the closest hot shot crew to the fire. And they were sent to the back of the fire where they were a little bit reluctant because they wanted to be more in the front. Yeah.

Nobody knew how the fire was going to shake out that day, but because they were one of the first crews on scene, they got sent to, as you say, the heel of the fire, the back of the fire. And what the fire did is it ended up burning a long way to the north, way out of the range of the hot shots. So while they were at the heel of the fire, there came a moment where everything seemed to change. What happened then? What made things change?

The weather. When plants burn, all the moisture that they contain gets released into the atmosphere. So if you have an unstable atmosphere, which it was on the day of June 30th, all that moisture just gets shot way up. I mean, it can go 20,000, 30,000 feet up into the atmosphere where all that moisture starts to sort of dissipate and you develop cells, T cells, thunder cells, big, they call them pyrocumulus clouds that perch atop of a smoke column. So I

I mean, the fire had been calm in the morning and then it started to pick up in the afternoon and it just blew the way that the winds were blowing. So what happened is thunderstorms developed a long way away over the town of Prescott, which is the town that the crew was based. That's where they live. And there's stories of the Hotshots' wives and girlfriends and they're like standing out and they're gardening. And they hear the thing that they have been just holding their breath for for weeks. And that's that first pangolin.

of rain falling on the corn stalks and it's awesome and they're psyched but what happens with that is all that cold air that's coming down with that rain whooshes back on the backside of those mountains and it rushes through the backside of the mountains down across the long flat desert between Prescott and Yarnell and it hits the fire that had been burning north toward the town of People's Valley.

And when that wind hits that fire, flames that have been like 30 feet, 35 feet tall stop.

And they turn the other direction. And the fire suddenly blows directly toward the town of Yarnell. And the hotshots are sitting up on this ridge and they can see the whole thing happening. They can see the fire blowing so fast away from them. And then what had been the backside of this fire, sort of this quiet, smoldering flank, jumps to life. And that is the fire that ends up killing them ultimately, but also burning the town of Yarnell.

There's lots we don't know, right? And leaving the black was, it's a bit of a question mark because the black is safe, the green is not. So why put yourself in risk? But there's just so many elements we can never know because nobody was there. I don't know what was going through those guys' minds, but those were hot shots. They had experience. They'd fought fires. They'd done the training. They knew that they were sitting on the bottom of a chimney.

And a fire was blowing up like nobody had ever seen ever before. Why did they leave the black? And so the answers are, they left the black because a town full of people was about to burn and they felt like they could do something to help. Why did they drop down into this canyon? And the answer to that is that they were standing on the rim of this ridge and they could look down at the bottom of this canyon, they could see a ranch. And surrounding that ranch was plenty of defensible space. So all they had to do was,

was get there, and they were totally safe. And so a lot of hotshot superintendents, or a number of them at least, have walked the same route that the crew has walked and come to the same conclusion, that they may have made that same decision. After the break, we'll hear about the aftermath of the Yarnell Hill fire from our guest and former hotshot, Kyle Dickman.

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We can paint a bit of a picture in the podcast, but I'd love for you to lay it out for us again here with your own experience. So it's like this sort of U-shaped canyon that faces the town of Yarnell. So if you were to stand right at the bottom of it, right before the walls start to climb steeply up around you, you would look downhill ever so slightly straight at the town of Yarnell and it would look pretty close.

And on both sides of you, there are giant granite boulders. They're huge. And behind you is a wall that you would look at and decide that you would not want to walk up it. And that's what the hotshots walked down. So they were heading from the ridge behind them, essentially down climbing this very steep slope, covered in brush, covered in big rocks, and heading toward the town of Yarnell. What was that like for you personally? I mean, it's like a very quiet and

reverent space. You don't want to talk. You just want to be there and think about what happened. And it's a site of horror is the truth of it. You can't really stand in that place without contemplating what those men experienced in their last moments. And it's not possible to be there without feeling the weight of that.

The area where they died, something special has been done there, yeah? Yeah, the state made it a state park. So you can hike in, it's kind of a long hike, but you can hike into that site and there's a memorial to where the men died. Also, you can see online that there's a final video taken by the hotshots, the Granite Mountain hotshots that was recovered.

And by looking at that, you can actually see the fire burning across the landscape. And I guess for you, by looking at that, does it share any insight for what could have happened? - I mean, I think in that video, you can hear Eric Marsh, who was the crew superintendent, talking to Jesse Steed, who was the crew's captain and had control of the crew at that time. You can hear him talking and there's like, there isn't a lot of respect for the fire and their voices. Like it's very clear that they know

That fire is getting pretty unruly and that in all likelihood, it's going to burn Yarnell. Right. So I don't think it's too much of a leap to say they knew that that town was in pretty serious danger. But you can also tell like in that video, there's the rest of the guys are just perched on top of these big rocks lounging around. They're probably snacking. They're probably drinking water. And like the mood somber as you would expect it to be both because the light is just dark,

There's black smoke everywhere, but also because they have front row seats to disaster. In writing your book, you spoke to many people, including the families of some of the hotshots. I can only imagine what it would be like to speak about something so devastating for these people.

I guess I'd want to ask, what about these interviews stuck with you? And was there any one in particular? I just look back on it. It's not exactly my favorite period as a journalist. It was a hard thing to do. And it's a hard thing for those families, right? You go and talk to these people, and they are grieving as you can imagine they should be, right? The amount of pain these people are holding is...

It's unfathomable to me. I hope to never experience it. But yes, is the answer to your question. There is one that sticks out and it's Robert Caldwell. He was a squad boss on the crew and he was super smart, really kind, funny. I never met these guys, but you could just, you hear the way that people talk about this person and you get the sense that this is a wonderful person. And so I met his dad at a coffee shop.

And he was just telling me stories about, I'm just talking about his son and he couldn't control his eye. It was twitching nonstop. And I met with him a number of times. And every time I met with him over a number of weeks, his eye was twitching. And I don't know that I'll forget any of the interviews, honestly, but it is that gesture that I will never forget. Yeah.

I know we spoke a bit about how the circumstances are just a bit mysterious and it's hard to know what the solid takeaways are from that.

a disaster like this. But has there been any progress in various areas of firefighting after the incident? Yeah, I know that they upgraded. There was an update to the fire shelters. And there's been a sort of awakening, I think, in the fire community that they should take risk assessment more seriously. So firefighters can come onto scenes and say, look, there's a fire burning, but it's in this canyon. It's steep. It's inaccessible. There aren't good escape routes. We're going to call this like an eight.

on the 8-10 risk scale. So what are actually odds of being successful here? You know, there's a real push for people to be a little bit more thorough in their risk benefit analysis before they take actions.

Like even if everything goes right, what does that look like for us? And if everything goes wrong, what does that look like for us? But there are certain fires that when they start, there is nothing that firefighters can do to stop them. And those days exist. They happen a few times in every place every year, right? And I think that being able to look at that with clear-eyed calculus is a real advantage to firefighters. They need the power to say no because the pressure exists now.

where I think in this country, firefighters are expected to put fires out and they're heroes because of it. But wildland fires are not always controllable. And I think it's not just the firefighters who need to understand that. It's the public who expects these really poorly paid, very ambitious, hardworking young men

to go out and risk their lives to save something as ephemeral as a house. I think there just needs to be more awareness around the fact that fires are a natural phenomenon. We don't put people in front of hurricanes and tornadoes and say, hug it and see if you can put it out. But we're willing to do it with fires. How would you like to see things change? It's not going to get any better. Climate change is not helping us out here.

There are still lots of unburned forests that will burn, unburned fuel that's going to burn. There are still lots and lots of people who live in the places that are going to catch fire. We still have tens of thousands of firefighters who want to put those fires out every year and who are expected to put themselves between towns and flames, even if they can't do anything to stop them.

All of these things are just a reality. So what I would say is that best case scenario, we use more prescribed fire to try to manage these things before they get big and bad. That's probably not going to happen. So then what I would ask is that homeowners do the very, very, very, very hard thing and accept the risk of living in beautiful places that are prone to catching fire.

And we can't ask people who are willing to take unnecessary risks to take those risks to save our houses. Are we okay with people dying to protect towns? I am not. I'm sorry. I'm not. I'm not okay with firefighters dying to protect towns because I was one and I wouldn't be cool dying to save my house. Yeah. As a former firefighter and a hotshot, when you picture these men in your mind, what do you feel? What is the memory, the sentiment towards it all?

They were unlucky. Culturally, we expected them to do what they did. Maybe, right? Like there are lots of questions, but you are a hero if you save a town, as you should be. But at what cost, right? Well, Kyle, thank you so much for talking to us today on Against the Odds in Yemen. I really loved hearing your story. Well, thank you. I appreciate you having me.

This is the final episode of our series Granite Mountain Hot Shots. Thanks so much to our guest, former hotshot and contributing editor to Outside Magazine, Kyle Dickman. His book is called On the Burning Edge, A Fateful Fire and the Men Who Fought It. I'm your host, Mike Corey. This episode was produced by Pauly Stryker. Interview episode producer is Peter Arcuni.

Audio engineer is Sergio Enriquez. Coordinating producer is Desi Blaylock. Series produced by Emily Frost and Alita Rosansky. Managing producer is Matt Gant. Senior managing producer is Ryan Lohr. Senior producer is Andy Herman. Executive producers are Jenny Lauer-Beckman, Stephanie Jens, and Marshall Louis for Wondery. Wondery.

The missiles are coming.

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