To Be Young Once, And Brave

It probably began with a stroke of lightning on a juniper or spruce tree, or in the oak brush that dotted the parched sandstone slopes of Colorado's Storm King Mountain. For three days the fire behaved itself, apparently stalled on a mere 50 craggy acres near the resort town of Glenwood Springs (pop. 5,800), 60 miles west of Vail. Extinguishing it fast did not seem a high priority; 13 other fires were burning nearby, and more than 100,000 acres blazed elsewhere across the hot, dry U.S. West.

Eventually, last Wednesday, 52 members of fire-fighting units based in Colorado, Montana, Idaho and Oregon assembled in Glenwood Springs to put out the Storm King nuisance. They represented their risky profession's nomadic elite: smoke jumpers, who parachute out of airplanes onto wildfire sites; helitacks, who rappel from ropes and hop out of helicopters; and hotshots, the self-described "ground pounders," the infantry shock troops in the West's annual summer wars against unbridled conflagrations.

One of the units present was the 20-member Prineville, Oregon, Hotshots. That team included Scott Blecha, 27, a graduate of the Oregon Institute of Technology and a four-year veteran of the Marine Corps. who planned to quit fighting fires after this summer and seek a master's degree in engineering. Also on board was Bonnie Jean Holtby, 21, who had run track and played basketball in high school. And there was Levi J. Brinkley, 22, who phoned his mother back in Oregon to tell her that he and his Prineville colleagues had been to hell -- a fire in California -- and were now headed for heaven -- the Storm King site in Colorado.

So it may have seemed to every other crew member gathered in Glenwood Springs for what looked like a routine job. All they had to do was contain a modest-size fire, stopping its advance or nudging it in a safe direction. And they would do so at an altitude near 7,000 ft. on a 45 degrees slope, staring into the scorch of a natural inferno.

This would be a normal day's work for these fire fighters, and so it might have remained had not something terrible happened that Wednesday afternoon. Split into two crews, most Storm King fighters were apparently working below the fire's edge, trying to keep it from creeping down the 1,000 ft. to where it would menace the traffic on Interstate 70. Suddenly the wind wheeled around 180 degrees and began gusting at 47 m.p.h. The fresh infusion of oxygen into superheated air created a blowup, an unconfined explosion of unimaginable power. In a matter of moments, the fire above those on the slope had also become the fire below them.