UBC: Maclean: Fire on the Mountain

Fire on the Mountain: The True Story of the South Canyon Fire by John N. Maclean

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


The fire on Storm King Mountain in July 1994 (which has gone down to posterity as the South Canyon Fire due to a mistake that feels--with the perfect vision of hindsight--like an omen of all the snowballing mistakes to come) was a clusterfuck of epic proportions. It is also eerily similar to the Mann Gulch fire of 1949 (written about so brilliantly by John Maclean's father Norman Maclean in Young Men and Fire that I have never yet managed to write anything coherent about why I think it is the best American nonfiction book of the twentieth century). John Maclean makes those parallels explicit.

Fire on the Mountain and Young Men and Fire are very different books, writing about the same tragedy happening for different reasons: the Mann Gulch fire killed thirteen smoke-jumpers because nobody knew the warning signs of a blow-up to watch for; the South Canyon fire killed fourteen firefighters (three smoke-jumpers, two helitacks, and nine hotshots), not because nobody knew the signs (Mann Gulch and tragedies like it had taught them those), but because (1) the topography of Storm King Mountain was such that the firefighters couldn't see what the fire was doing; (2) the fire was so mismanaged that the people on the ground were working without the information that might have saved them, the information that would have told them they needed to be watching for a blow-up, and (3) authority, decision-making, and actual knowledge of the fire were separated out in very bad ways. What both tragedies share, aside from the fluke of topography that made them split-second deadly, is critical underestimation of the fire's danger by everyone involved, firefighters on the ground as much as the people sending them out there.

Maclean père's book is about trying to figure out what happened in Mann Gulch, both what people did and why and what the fire did and why. Fire on the Mountain is much more an attempt simply to drag all the pieces of the story out where they can be seen. I do not for an instant think that Maclean fils had an easier job: the overlapping of jurisdictions, authority, and responsibilities between the BLM and the Western Slope Coordination Center never did entirely make sense to me, and it only got worse the more agencies and organizations got involved. It's also very difficult to describe topography in prose. It took me several times through Young Men and Fire before I got a grip on the physical attributes of Mann Gulch, and insofar as I understand Storm King Mountain, it's because I already have at least a rough understanding of Mann Gulch.

This is John Maclean's first book (if I've got his bibliography right), and it shows. He doesn't have the command over his narrative that he demonstrates in The Esperanza Fire: Arson, Murder, and the Agony of Engine 57; there's less clarity, less control. But it's still very good.



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