Yarnell Hill

The Granite Mountain Hotshots were working a fire in chaparral outside Yarnell when a thunderstorm outflow turned the wind through a hundred and eighty degrees and drove the fire back toward them at unsurvivable speed.

They came down off a safe black ridge and moved through a box canyon toward a ranch designated as a safety zone. The fire reached them first.

All nineteen deployed their shelters in a bowl of thick brush. The temperature was over two thousand degrees. None survived.

The twentieth member of the crew, Brendan McDonough, had been posted as lookout on a hill and was picked up by another crew. He lived, and read the roll at the memorial.

It was the greatest loss of American firefighters in a single incident since the eleventh of September, and the greatest loss of wildland firefighters in eighty years.