Firefighters who were there tell the story of the deadly Thirty Mile blaze: 'It's snowing fire'
In their green U.S. Forest Service van, Kampen and a few comrades barreled down the narrow canyon. Fingers of flame raced them to their escape route. The heat was demoniac. It reached through the van's walls and closed windows, made them jerk away. Treetops wore crowns of 30-foot flames.
Not seven hours before, Kampen's 21-member crew had driven up the Chewuch River valley with a simple goal: stamp out a pathetic, 5-acre blaze so they could move on to a real fire. But as the mercury climbed on another scratch-dry Eastern Washington day, the smoldering fire awoke, rumbled and then roared.
Smoke blotted out the sun. The fire beneath, which had grown 200-fold in a few hours, sprinted to claim the road. Kampen ordered nearby firefighters into the van. The difference between those who reached safety and those who did not would be seconds.
The van plunged toward the fire. A third of Kampen's crew was with him.
Fourteen were still behind.
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Three weeks later, the Thirty Mile Fire is bottled up, a fading 9,300 acres of smoking embers and harmless flare-ups. The funerals are over and survivors are trickling back to work.
Not since 14 firefighters died on Colorado's Storm King Mountain in 1994 has the Forest Service faced such scrutiny, about suppression tactics, the youth and training of firefighters, when and where to let a fire run its course. An investigative team expects to release findings next month.
It is not yet clear whether mistakes were made that caused a routine mop-up to become a killer.
But to those who survived, what should have happened matters less than what did. A review of dispatch logs and interviews with fire managers, witnesses and several who survived tell their story.
Pete Kampen's telephone rang at 12:30 a.m. He snatched the receiver and said, "You're late."
Kampen, 30, had expected to be rousted at midnight. A wildfire veteran, he was excited. The first big blaze of the season was raging south of Winthrop in Okanogan County and he wanted in.
Big fires promise a lot: Adrenaline. Time in the woods with friends. Overtime. And for Kampen, an opportunity to knock off a few "paper-shuffle" details and be promoted to lead a crew.
He pulled into the station at Leavenworth by 2:30 a.m., well before the designated rendezvous time. His headlights swung across two bodies, heads propped on packs, sleeping under the trees: Thom Taylor and Nick Dreis. Two more impatient fire dogs.
Kampen liked Taylor. They were the same age, and had worked the woods together for years, some summers marking timber for sale around Leavenworth. And Kampen, a substitute teacher, had once taught Dreis — as he had eight or 10 other firefighters — at a Leavenworth high school.
This day, Kampen would be in charge as crew-boss trainee, under Ellreese Daniels, a 24-year Forest Service veteran.
Kampen scanned his manifest. It included 10 firefighters from the Naches Ranger District, including the popular Tom Craven, a thick, handsome 30-year-old from Ellensburg, one of five firefighting brothers. "Anytime you get a Craven on a manifest, you know you're going to have a good time because they're all funny guys, and you're gonna get a lot of work done," Kampen said.
More than one-third of the 21 firefighters that day were rookies. But they were enthusiastic and strong, and Kampen had experienced men to oversee the three squads.
At 4 a.m., they headed north. It was, Kampen thought, a strong team, especially Tom and Thom: Craven, the powerful, former college running back who once flirted with the NFL; and Taylor, a mountain goat who could work all day on ankle-turning slopes.
In the scenic Methow Valley that day, all eyes were on Libby Creek.
A melting hose dripping from a state fire engine started a fire that had ballooned to 1,200 acres in an afternoon and threatened 50 homes.
The Libby South fire boded ill. The region was in its worst drought in a quarter-century and the moisture in forest fuels had already sunk below mid-August levels. In May, early-season lightning sparked 60-foot flames in trees still dusted with snow. Fire managers had to plow through drifts to fight them.
By Tuesday afternoon it was 102 degrees in nearby Twisp. The air smelled like a sauna, woody and dry. Outside the Forest Service's Methow District headquarters, Smokey the Bear's arm pointed to a fire danger of "extreme."
Firefighters up Libby Creek scratched out lines around an abandoned house. Behind them, a cloud crept over the brown hills, growing taller, anvil-headed. "See the thunderheads building?" asked D.J. Hill, a fire-information officer touring the fire lines. He turned to a buddy. "That's bad juju."
It was not a thunderhead. It was another fire, 50 miles north up the Chewuch, and it was exploding.
Kampen's company arrived at Twisp at 8 a.m. to bad news.
The Libby South fire — the big one their convoy had just passed near Carlton — would not be their first assignment.
The previous evening, a Canadian air tanker heading home had spotted 5 to 8 acres aflame far up a valley to the north. It was too early in the season to let even a small blaze get a foothold, fire managers would say later.
Pete Soderquist, the district's fire-management officer, pulled firefighters, including the elite Entiat Hotshots, off Libby South to corral the fire. Kampen's crew was to take over for the Hotshots until dinnertime, hacking a fire break to prevent the flames' spread, soaking it with hoses, and stamping out the fire's dying breaths.
The crew was crestfallen. The dreary mop-up might take days. "We were all stoked for a big fire," said rookie Matthew Rutman, 26.
Thoughtful, lanky, with black sideburns and slight lope in his gait, Rutman had applied to be a firefighter from some unknown Internet café, while traveling through a Central American country he can no longer recall. He knew little of Washington state; his one trip to Seattle was in 1999 — to protest the WTO. He didn't know Wenatchee but liked the obscure sound of the name.
Like the experienced firefighters, Rutman wore a Leatherman tool on his hip, but he also carried something less common: In the pocket of his margarine-yellow Nomex shirt, a small notebook — a home for scraps of thought, directions, whatever should not be forgotten.
They arrived at the Chewuch fire at 9:04 a.m. The blaze had jumped the small, shallow river, settling on the southeast side. Flaming debris had ignited more than a half-dozen "spot" fires ahead of the main blaze. The Hotshots had lassoed some, but others still needed to be ringed. The largest was perhaps a quarter-acre.
"It's a sad little fire," Kampen said.
He was more concerned about ankles twisting in the stubborn hummocks of grass, the thick alder and vine maple that thrived near the river at 3,400 feet.
As the bosses talked, the crews waited, bored. A fire investigator arrived, and poked around the remains of the sloppy campfire where the flames originated. He pulled a hot dog from the ashes and offered Rutman a taste.
"No, thanks," the rookie said. "I'm a vegetarian."
Kampen finally briefed his crew. At 10:22 a.m., USFS Regular No. 6 Type II Fire Crew got to work.
The Chewuch River drains past the Pasayten Wilderness through a glacier-carved canyon that rises thousands of feet to the sky before it tumbles, with new width and depth, into the Methow River at Winthrop. The canyon is lined with ponderosa, lodgepole and Douglas fir. The river valley, barely a quarter-mile wide in the northern sections, has stands of aspen and fire-friendly spruce. Grassy meadows mix with chest- and head-high thickets. On either side lies what terrain firefighters call "goat country."
Kampen's crew planned to hit the fire hard over the next two days — garrote it with fire line to choke off its fuel, soak it with water pumped from the river, stomp out its dying embers. Fire managers told him to expect help from a second crew later in the morning. Kampen thought his helicopter was already overdue.
Fighting fire is the act of holding contradictory impulses in one's head. A fire cannot be tamed without aggression. It cannot be survived without caution. Kampen reviewed the day's safety zones.
Defying the heat and the ridicule he sometimes endured, squad boss Taylor wore a flame-retardant shroud under his helmet that protected his neck and face.
The firefighters scraped a tight noose of bare earth with their pulaskis and wetted the spots. Rutman worked as a "swamper," clearing logs cut by chainsaw.
They warmed to the task. Jessica Johnson and Devin Weaver, both from the Naches Ranger District, joked with Rutman that their work ethic should earn the squad a moniker. "It was our first fire, and we were celebrating," Rutman said.
Nights on a fire are a blessing. Cooler air and higher humidity settle in. Flames drop to the ground. Fire rouses itself as sun burns off dew and temperatures rise. This one, later dubbed Thirty Mile, was shaking its grogginess.
More spot fires were cropping up, moving faster. The crew adjusted its plan. They would anchor their fire line to a slope of loose rock before the fire reached a "stringer," a finger of timber that would send it up the canyon's steep walls and beyond control.
As the morning wore on, Kampen grew exasperated. Where was the other crew? The helicopter had not arrived to take observations and, later, drop water. His radio was on the fritz, fading in and out as he tried to reach dispatchers. He had to pass messages through Daniels, his trainer.
Around noon, Kampen walked out to the road for a clear signal to dispatchers. When could he expect the chopper? And he wanted more crews. Someone needed to roust the Hotshots, napping at a camp two miles away.
Asked if he wanted a 300-gallon dump from a small air tanker, he demurred. The temperature was too high and the canyon too tight for the "air tractor." He'd wait for the tardy helicopter, which could fly lower.
The fire was fully awake now, restless and unruly. But the veterans, particularly Kampen and Daniels, were calm. It was nothing they hadn't seen before.
A welcome voice crackled over the radio: Daniels' boss, Gabe Jasso, from his plane above, would be their lookout.
Kampen was brusque but calm: Check on my reinforcements. And where was the Hotshot crew? People weren't in danger, he thought, but they were about to lose the fire. Jasso said the Hotshots had never gotten the earlier message. Kampen sent someone to wake them.
Dispatch logs made public do not record Kampen's repeated requests for a helicopter. Fire manager Soderquist and others contend air support was moving as quickly as it could.
"You can't just ask for that and get something in 15 minutes," Soderquist said. "Maybe Pete's expectations were higher than the reality of the situation could provide."
Amid the flames, the veterans picked up the pace. Kampen swung a pulaski. Craven took the chainsaw from Dreis and knifed through the trees. They beat the fire to the corner and tied into the creek. A small victory for the spent crew. Many had drunk a gallon of water in four hours.
At 12:52 p.m. the Hotshots arrived. A parade of their distinctive white helmets began busting new line to the scree field.
But a spot fire erupted in spruce in front of the fire line. Then fire reached the stringer.
"These guys were kicking ass," Kampen recalled. "We just didn't have the horses to do it."
They pulled back to their rigs and surrendered the south side of the river to the awesome flames. They had come within 50 feet of tying into the rocks.
"We were losing it," Rutman said. Yet "it was one of the most fantastic things I've ever seen."
Firefighters pulled out files and honed the ax blades on their pulaskis. They munched peanut butter and jelly. Rebecca Welch, another Naches District rookie, napped, as did a few others. Mostly they watched the fire across the river, eating through the thin, dog-hair lodgepole and "crowning" from treetop to treetop without touching down. During the hour-plus lunch break, the fire mushroomed to 1,200 acres, spreading up ridge and river.
Barry George, the assistant fire-management officer, arrived to survey the scene. He left with one request: Try to keep it from hopping the road. There the valley surged 2,000 feet to the first peaks of the Pasayten, which stretched into Canada. Flames could run unchecked for weeks.
Above, the bright blue day quietly threatened more trouble.
A weak disturbance in the upper atmosphere began to nose in, said Jim Prange, a National Weather Service meteorologist brought in to assist investigators.
As a fire grows on a clear, hot day, superheated air surges upward. Air close to the ground rushes in to replace it, birthing winds that stoke the flames. As more hot air rises, the cycle continues. Already, near-record temperatures had created instability in the air, allowing the heated air above the fire to rise high. The incoming disturbance likely caused yet more instability, providing further "oomph" to the fire, said Prange.
And it was early afternoon — the time when fires often shake their leashes and run free.
At 2:54 p.m., another spotter plane headed to the fire. Trailing it were three air tankers with bellies full of retardant.
Around 3 p.m., the engine crew trolling for spot fires reported a living-room-sized spot. They needed a hand crew.
Craven, the former football star, jumped up: "Let's do it."
His squad and Daniels worked their way up the road. More spots bloomed, some as small as a desktop. Someone yelled for Rutman, on a log near the river taking pictures, to gear up.
Craven led a group to tackle the northernmost spot, 50 feet off the road, in the thick brush, barely the size of a room. Kampen and his crew tackled another, 75 feet downriver, next to the road. They could see one another's vehicles, but not each other. The Hotshot crew pulled up downstream, to jump still another spot by the river.
Kampen called Taylor: Bring your squad and tie in with Craven's group to the north. Kampen jumped in to help on the middle fire. The fire was active, but Daniels did not yet have the "bad gut feeling" that has kept him safe during a lifetime of firefighting.
Without warning, the smoke column tumbled. The sky went dark and red. It hailed embers, red bouncing off hardhats, the vans, the road.
"Ellreese," Kampen snapped into his radio, "I'm getting spotting across the road."
Same here, Daniels answered.
Now Kampen was scared. "Get back in the van — now," he ordered the six firefighters with him. "Ellreese, we're getting out now," he barked at the radio.
Jasso, from above: "Everybody pull out."
The Hotshot crew jumped in its rig and sped south. Kampen's van chased them. It was 3:58 p.m.
Some 500 feet ahead, flames shot horizontally, threatening to cross the road. Kampen accelerated. "There was no question in my mind that we were driving through it," he said. The van tore through just as the door closed.
Daniels and the other 13 were trapped inside.
Slowed by brush, Daniels' team stumbled to the road and into the van. They drove past Craven's squad, hoofing by foot alongside, only to meet an unbroken wall of flames blocking their exit. We're going to die, someone said. But Daniels coolly turned back and picked up Craven's team.
Crammed together in the van, the 14 headed north, looking for a place to ride out the fire. They found a wide spot, with fewer trees and brush, where the road met a huge slope of rocks. A good place.
"Usually it burns off and then you can just go through," Daniels said.
The crew milled about, skittish. Two hikers pulled up in a pickup. Craven gave an impromptu lecture on fire behavior.
"I went over to listen but really couldn't focus," Rutman said. "We were trapped and watching the show. Earlier the fire was cool. This wasn't cool."
Taylor clenched a cigarette in his lips, hands shoved in pockets of his Nomex pants, and watched the fire climb the valley's far walls. Karen FitzPatrick, a month out of high school and three weeks out of fire school, held her camera aloft, smiled big and snapped a picture of herself. Smoke billowed behind.
Rutman doesn't smoke, but he bummed one anyway. He thought of wandering up into the rocks with some of the others. Instead, he sat down on the road, pulled out his journal and began to write.
On the safe side of the fire wall, Kampen was "going nuts."
"I'm going back in to get them."
Don't be stupid, someone replied.
Then Daniels' voice crackled on the radio. He was fine, calm.
"Got the crew in a good place?" Kampen asked.
Yes, they were fine.
They joked about Daniels' rental van. "Got the van in a good place?"
Jasso's plane was circling overhead every 60 to 90 seconds. As the radio link between Kampen and Daniels grew spotty, Jasso relayed. He couldn't see flames at the center, but he could see horizontal smoke, eating timber.
"It was rolling like a little tornado on its side," he said. "It was a funnel, laying down flat. It was swirling, like you see in water."
He would talk to Kampen, then to Daniels, then to dispatch. Daniels again. He told Daniels to keep talking to him, keep talking to his crew. He would give quick commands: "Check on everyone."
But thousands of feet above the peril, he felt impotent. He flew up and down the canyon, as if pacing.
"It was such a helpless feeling," he said. "A helpless, worthless, horrible feeling."
The hikers, Bruce and Paula Hagemeyer, circled their truck anxiously. They pulled on long pants and jackets. Paula covered her mouth with a wet bandanna. Daniels yanked it away: It would steam her lungs if the air began to bake.
Rutman perched on the road, his pen betraying his nerves: "The wind rips through the canyon, I watch the top of trees swaying violently from the high winds that the fire is creating. It's changing and twisting all around us."
Daniels thought the fire might push north on the other side of the river and miss them.
Firefighters shuffled about. Some stood on the road, others in the rocks above. Not all heeded Daniels' call to come down.
Daniels stared at the churning fire, its gaseous center curling in on itself. "When it came in it was just rolling and rolling. It was eating up just everything that it had in its way."
The fire raced up the far side of the valley — "rolling right by us now, just across the little creek," Rutman wrote.
Then, suddenly, it fell back on itself and pushed straight at them.
"Here it comes," Rutman wrote. "The sun is covered, bright orange, then yellow, then red...
"And now it's gray, here come the flames again. It's snowing-"
Snowing fire. In the flash of Rutman's camera, red embers whitened like snowflakes. Daniels barked to pull out their fire shelters. They brushed embers from their clothes, their hair. They wore their shelters like capes against the falling ash. Down the road, trees were delicate silhouettes, backlit by the coming fire.
It was 5:24 p.m. Kampen, his squad and the Hotshots sat blind on the other side, waiting. Then Jasso's voice snapped from above: "Daniels has deployed."
The fire washed over them. A sound like a jet. A locomotive. A tidal wave. A scream.
From beneath his shelter, Daniels talked to Jasso.
"You could hear his inflection change, and you knew things weren't good," Jasso said.
Daniels yelled to the others on the road to keep calm. He sipped water and took shallow breaths. The flare-like fusees ignited in his backpack, which sat next to his shelter. He shoved them away, singeing his hand.
Rebecca Welch fit the Hagemeyers into her one-person shelter. They prayed. They squirmed to seal out the sparks and hot gases from the too-small space. The camper top on the Hagemeyers' truck began to melt, pooling like mercury in the dust.
Rutman crouched in his shelter, knees to chest. Embers pounded his flimsy shield in waves, "like a football team pelting you with snowballs."
Inside was black. He faced the road, searching for the coolest air, but sucking in heat. He began to hyperventilate. His hard hat kept him from getting his lips to the ground. Once or twice he looked up. The pinprick holes of the shelter showed eerie red constellations.
"I really felt there was a dark presence in the shelter," he said. "I felt like there was something else, something bad....
"You've got the wrong guy," he yelled at Death. "This isn't my time."
He fought the urge to leap up. He heard screams. He thought of his family and almost gave up. Then he remembered the Leatherman. He pulled it out and began to dig a hole to breathe.
No one is sure how long they lay there.
Up the steep talus slope above the road, the incline softened, briefly. Dry vegetation poked from between the rocks. A lone spruce tree hovered above.
Here, where six of the crew were huddled, it's not clear why some moved when and where they did. Perhaps, Kampen said, Taylor and Craven, sure-footed and strong, hoped to lead them to sanctuary: a bald, flat spot higher up, with no shrubbery to burn.
The fire slammed them as they ran. Taylor, in the lead, yelled for the group to deploy. Five fell in a cluster about 100 feet uphill from the road. Taylor dropped some distance above them.
Firefighters are taught to deploy on roads and rocks. And they're taught that once inside their shelters, they stay: conditions outside are worse.
But Jason Emhoff had lost his gloves. Heat baked the aluminum on his shelter, scalding his bare hands. He abandoned the thin covering and hid behind a boulder. Then he fled, leaping into the van.
Taylor, the fire veteran, feared he would die if he didn't move. He'd rather die running. He tugged his ever-present Nomex shroud around his ears and face and put on his safety glasses. He threw off his shelter and flew downhill, bounding over boulders. Pounded by a hail of embers and fire chunks the size of bowling balls, he splashed into the river. He left only his nose above water.
Someone gave an order: Get to the river. Those on the road rose. They hurdled a burning log, slipped down the bank and sprawled into the water, some with shelters overhead. They stayed perhaps 30 minutes, long enough to consider the absurdity of hypothermia.
Rutman and Welch held each other. People cried. Some giggled in shock. Where was everyone?
They finally dared to shed their tarps and climb to the beach. But the searing heat exploded the tires on the hikers' flaming truck, one by one. A tree fell atop the shelters they had just dropped. They got back into the water.
Daniels ordered a count. Taylor's head popped out of the water.
As Jasso circled above, Daniels updated him by radio. Each report was worse:
They were out of their shelters.
A few are burned.
Somebody is badly injured.
People are missing.
Mobilizing the EMTs in the squads, Kampen drove into the smoke. They sawed roasted trees to clear a path, moving them in increments because of their heat.
People stumbled out of the river toward them. Daniels was too shaken to talk.
Kampen found Taylor.
"Thom," he said. "We got four missing."
"No," Taylor said. He pointed to the rocks. "They're right up there."
The horn of the Hagemeyers' wasted truck blared, absurdly.
"Where's Craven?" Kampen yelled.
Again, Taylor pointed to the rocks.
Four shelters sat among the talus. One was on fire. The heat had split the rocks.
"Are they alive?" Kampen asked.
"No," Taylor said.
They found Emhoff in the truck, his burned hands splayed before him, the flesh of his fingers dangling.
As the soaked and injured were bundled in a truck and sent south, Kampen and Hotshot Mike Pipgras tried to hike the short distance up the rocks to the still shelters. Three times they tried; three times the ferocious heat turned them back. The lone spruce continued to burn.
He knew Craven was gone, but who were the others?
Kampen called roll. On his roster, he circled the names of those who didn't answer.
Seattle Times staff reporter Keiko Morris contributed to this report.
Chris Solomon can be reached at 206-515-5646 or csolomon@seattletimes.com.
Craig Welch can be reached at 206-464-2093 or cwelch@seattletimes.com.