Fire on the Mountain

About this book

"On the morning of July 3, 1994, the site of a forest fire on Storm King Mountain in Colorado was wrongly recorded by the district's Bureau of Land Management office as taking place in South Canyon, thereby mislabeling forever one of the greatest tragedies in the annals of firefighting. That seemingly small human error foreshadowed the numerous other minor errors that, three days later, would be compounded into the deaths of fourteen firefighters, four of them women. In this dramatic reconstruction of the disaster and its aftermath, John N. Maclean tells the heroic and cautionary story of people who were experts in their field but became the victims of nature at its most unforgiving."--BOOK JACKET. "In telling what happened to these people and revealing the horrors of being trapped by a blowup, the most dangerous fate that can befall a firefighter, Fire on the Mountain sets out to solve these mysteries: Why wasn't the fire, which burned in sight of an interstate highway, put out earlier? Why did Don Mackey, who had found his way to safety, turn back to the fire? How did such a disaster, a near twin of the notorious Mann Gulch fire of 1949, catch so many professionals off guard? And why did nearly two days elapse before the bodies of two of the victims who died within sight of I-70 were found?"--BOOK JACKET.