It is a story of Montana, of the ways of wildfires, firefighters, and fire scientists, and especially of a crew, young and proud, who "hadn't learned to count the odds and to sense they might owe the universe a tragedy." This tale is also Maclean's own, the story of a writer obsessed by a strange and human horror, unable to let the truth die with these young men, searching for the last - and lasting - word. For Maclean, who witnessed the fire from the ground in August of 1949, and even then he knew he would one day become a part of its story. These first deaths among the Forest Service's elite firefighters prompted widespread examination of federal fire policy, of the field of fire science, and of the frailty of young men. Now a master storyteller finally gives the Mann Gulch fire its due as tragedy. Exactly what happened in Mann Gulch that day has been obscured by years of grief and controversy. The parents of the dead cry murder, charging that the foreman's fire killed their boys. Wagner Dodge, throws himself into the ashes of an "escape fire " - and survives as most of his confused men run, their last moments obscured by smoke. Only seconds ahead of the approaching firestorm, the foreman, R. Two hours after their jump, all but three of these men were dead or mortally burned from a "blowup" - an explosive, 2,000-degree firestorm 300 feet deep and 200 feet tall - a deadly explosion of flame and wind rarely encountered and little understood at the time. On August 5, 1949, a crew of fifteen of the United States Forest Service's elite airborne firefighters, The Smoke Jumpers, stepped into the sky above a remote forest fire in the Montana wilderness.
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