Fire on the Mountain

Written by John N. Maclean

Narrated by John N. Maclean

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.

No one is better equipped to tell this story than the author, whose father, Norman Maclean, wrote the classic account of Mann Gulch, Young Men and Fire, in whose publication the younger Maclean assisted after his father's death. Fire on the Mountain took almost five years to complete and involved nearly fifty thousand miles of auto travel. The audiobook brings to light many new facts about the fire through dozens of freedom of Information Act requests and countless interviews with survivors and members of the official investigating team, one of whose members refused to sign the final report after a long and bitter debate about where the blame for what happened should be placed.

Fire on the Mountain is, however, more than mere investigative journalism. While offering action and adventure storytelling at its best, it also provides deeply moving insights into the lives and dreams of a special breed of people who put their own well-being on the line as part of their daily jobs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
• Release date: Oct 1, 1999
• ISBN: 9780743547291

John N. Maclean

John N. Maclean is the author of Home Waters, a memoir of his family’s four-generation connection to Montana’s Blackfoot River, which his father, Norman Maclean, made famous in A River Runs through It. He spent thirty years at the Chicago Tribune, then wrote five nonfiction books about wildland fire that are considered a staple of fire literature. Maclean, an avid fly fisherman, lives in Washington, DC, and at a family cabin in Montana.

Reviews for Fire on the Mountain

[Kila RingSlinger · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I've read other books about wildland fires but this one is the most reverential I've read thus far. The conclusion reads like a eulogy to those that died.

This is yet another book that should be read by those who believe their government cares about anything but power.

For all those in power who do nothing and fail to learn from history, there are those who have died as direct result from too much governmental power and not enough common sense.

[branjohb · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is a well written book that reads like a good novel, but is about one of the worst firefighting tragedies in the American West. The author does an excellent job placing you in the shoes of the firefighters and victims. The author also does not pull any punches when it comes to assigning responsibility to the government agencies that could have prevented this travesty by sharing resources and jumping on this fire before it became unmanageable. It just goes to show you, give the government something to do and they will screw it up, every time.

[exfed_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Following in his father's footsteps, John Maclean has become the preeminent writer to document wildland fire fatalities. The misnamed South Canyon Fire (on Storm King Mountain) slowly progressed from a "nothing" fire, to a blowup that killed 14 young men and women. These firefighters were the best of the best -- hot shots and smoke jumpers. How did the end up in the wrong place at the wrong time? Maclean probes into the complexity of fire suppression: from agency infighting to unfilled resource order to disengaged managers in charge of the fires. A must read for wildland fire professionals, land managers with fire responsibilities, and anyone else interested in understanding the failures of the firefighting bureaucracy.