look as if they have been etched on glass. The scene shocks with recognition. The great, many-boled ponderosa, dead for centuries, still guards the Sublime Road. Every sinkhole in the swelling meadow has a story. Every cavity in the old road revives an instinct. Eight months seem like a weekend. The sense of freshness and familiarity is overpowering. There is only the North Rim.
And fire. Scan the snowpack at Little Park. If it is deep and furrowed, there will be no spring fire season, and fires will be coincidental, spasmodic, ignited peripherally around the points that outline the Canyon. But if, by mid-May, the snowpack is broken into floes and the meadow is braided with briskly running streams, the fires may come early, and they can enter into the interior. They will go to the heart. This year the ground is raw with dead grass, mud, and duff. There will be fires.
So come early. There is no feeling like it. There are ample jobs; there is a promise—a wild hope—that can leap chasms; there is an animal thrill as the crew builds and the fire danger escalates. The Rim erases the outside world. Snow gives way to smoke. Nothing else matters.
* * *
The fire is at Deer Creek, and there is not much that can be done. Jim and I greet 210—the Park helicopter—with a firepack, some handtools, canteens, sleeping bags, and a Mark III pump with accessories, all ransacked from the fire cache. It’s the best we can manage on short notice. The cache is in disarray. Unopened boxes, heaped late in the fall, collect like snowdrifts in corners; slip-on units hang from the ceiling like monstrous beeves; packs are scattered, rifled, and incomplete from winter pilfering; saws are unassembled and pulaskis unsharpened. Jim hastily tests the Mark III while the 210 is a distant speck over Oza Butte. We barely complete our enter-on-duty (EOD) papers before climbing into the helo. The fire will probably expire before we reach it. If not, the pump should give us an edge, and there are few occasions to use it properly on the waterless Rim. At least we have a fire.
We fly over Tiyo, The Dragon, Sublime, Rainbow Plateau, Powell Plateau, a topographic fugue of Rim peninsulas and Canyon gorges. Then we cross beyond the edge of our fire maps. Deer Creek is a narrow gorge, like an opened coffin, with springs gushing out of limestone and a creek that debouches into the Colorado River itself. The fire is below the springs in a floodplain of grass, rushes, mesquite, and cottonwoods—ignited by yet another river party, conscientiously burning its toilet paper. We land at a small knoll, an Indian ruin overlooking the creek, and agree to a pickup the next morning at 1000 hours. A handful of cottonwoods, probably hollow, puffs with sad smokes. The hot air of the Canyon cloys and suffocates.
The Mark III, lugged painfully to the creek, proves worthless, full of sinister, hopeless sputters. Methodically we attack the cottonwoods with pulaskis and shovels, until we suddenly realize that the fire—from somewhere, somehow—has crossed the stream. The scene explodes. Within minutes the fire races through reeds, shrubs, cacti, cottonwoods and across the narrow floodplain and up the rocky slopes. The rush and crackle of flame echo off the cliffs. The box canyon concentrates a convective column black with roiling smoke; fire lookouts from Flagstaff to the Arizona Strip report the towering column, rising angrily like a thunderhead; Dick Johnston, fire officer for the North Kaibab National Forest, sights the smoke while taking out the trash at his Fredonia home; two hikers, who just minutes previously painfully staggered down from Surprise Valley, scramble back up the trail with the agility of bighorn sheep. Then it ends. Within thirty minutes the fire has run its course. The head dies out amid the Tapeats sandstone, and there is nothing left but flaming trees and smoldering pack rat middens stuffed under boulders. A group of river rafters appears, also drawn by the awesome smoke, and wonders if the Park Service knows about the fire. “We are the Park Service,” Jim informs them.
Nightfall creeps over the gorge, and we retire to our camp at the ruins for a fitful sleep. The evening is oppressively hot, filled with the obnoxious odors of tamarisk and sour woodsmoke, and when we rise at dawn, haze hangs in the gorge like a prehistoric smog. We mop up scattered pockets of flame and smoke, more to keep ourselves busy than to control another outbreak. Jim surreptitiously tries, without the least success, to start the Mark III.
At 1000 hours, the helo has failed to show; at noon we eat the last of our rations; at 1400 hours, we slink off the knoll for the timid shade of a mesquite. Deep within Canyon gorges our radio is worthless. We are dead to the Park. Not until 1600 hours does 210 appear, delayed, the pilot explains, by assorted “river emergencies.” The helo rises, like a fluttering raven, out of the Canyon. The snowbanks under spruce and fir shock us back to life.
At the cache I grab some C rations for dinner, while Jim, readying the Mark III for storage, tries the starter rope once more. The pump coughs, rocks the cache with noise, and roars with a cacophony that could fill Transept Canyon. “Dammit,” he mutters. “Nothing at this place works except at this place.”
The smoke column rises from southeast of Cape Royal, near Lava Canyon, where the Colorado River makes its great bend to the west. Flames move briskly through desert grasses, shrubs, and scattered pinyons. The fire burns in a narrow canyon but will soon crest onto a broad terrace. If it continues it may spread through one of several brush-covered debris cones that span the vertical cliffs of the Redwall limestone; it could, conceivably, continue all the way to the Rim. Winds gust upslope in slow coughs.
Park fire officer McLaren orders fire retardant and requests a small crew from the North Rim. The “crew” will be an ad hoc group—a handful of recent regular fire crew arrivals, but mostly reserves, curious and untrained, who have been impressed into service from duties as garbage and fee collectors, a carpenter and plumber, even a ranger. The reserves are unenthused, and everyone is unacclimated. Even the regulars have only just arrived, and they have not yet unpacked their gear, which clusters on bunks like lichen-backed stones.
We begin arriving by helicopter around 0900 hours, store our firepacks amid a large rock outcrop, and throw dirt along the advancing flaming front. The grasses have the kindling temperature of Kleenex; even the prickly pears burn hot. No fireline needed here, only a vigorous perimeter of hot-spotting and cold-trailing—knocking down flames and using burned-out patches as a surrogate fireline. But the fire moves upslope through the rugged terrain much faster than we do. We will be saved only by the slurry. For nearly an hour a B-26 and a PB-4Y2 drop retardant, operating out of the retardant base at the South Rim airport. McLaren directs the drops from the Park helicopter. We follow behind the slimy trail of slurry, extinguishing flames that escape it or that burn under its pink patina. The helo brings in more firefighters and removes one, overcome by heat, back to the North Rim. When the B-26 shortens its return time and suddenly appears on a drop run directly over us, Wil and Dave take refuge behind some large sandstone boulders; the retardant cloud, in a slow, graceful vortex, swirls around the boulder and paints them pink. When finally contained, the fire totals 350 acres—a quarter mile wide and a mile and a half long.
Dave and Wil establish a small helispot, where 210 can land, then we fly the perimeter. At areas that need mop-up we drop off two-man teams, each with at least one regular fire crewman, along with shovels, saws, and fedcos. The chief problems are pack rat middens tucked around giant boulders and hollow-trunked junipers that can smolder for days and in a high wind throw sparks outside the old burn. While the scenery is spectacular—great fault blocks, bands of ancient lava, a topography of terrace and ravine, an unblinking desert sun—the heat is oppressive. Then 210 is called away to other Park duties, and, fully equipped, we climb on foot through the colossal silence. Mop-up slows. The reserves tire quickly; they have long since sweated away the flush of excitement; they want to go home. Around 1700 hours we fly them off the line and reposition a handful of fire crew regulars at another trouble spot. Two hours later the only smokes are safely within the deep interior of the burn. As the last crew departs, the Chuar fire—in the lee of a Canyon sunset—is engulfed by deep, cool shadows from the Rim.
Building 176 echoes with emptiness. Its screen door flaps in the evening winds. One by one we shower, open cans
