to hotshotting. Scott’s parents—a construction worker and an English teacher—had raised him to appreciate the outdoors. He hiked, rafted, snowboarded, and backpacked any time he had the chance. Working in the woods came naturally for Scott. For five fire seasons, he lived out of the back of his Toyota pickup while running chainsaw for the Payson Hotshots, up in the White Mountains to the east. He called hotshotting his dream job. The eight months of intense labor paid for his winter travels. Heloved the hard work, the adventure, the brotherhood. But the first year he dated Heather, his job put stress on their untested relationship.
They’d been close that winter, finding and creating time to shoot guns, hike, and cook together, but Heather began to feel that Scott was more a friend than anything else. Raised Christian, he’d been a bit of a prude, too. Their relationship lacked romance, and that felt even more pronounced when he was away for weeks on fire assignments. After a few other guys showed interest, she decided to end it with Scott. When he finally called her during a fire assignment, she told him it was over. He’d actually laughed. Not because he thought it was funny. There just wasn’t anything else to do. He was on an empty ridgeline, talking on a satellite phone, somewhere very far from Prescott.
They didn’t speak again until he moved back home that winter. Heather called Scott first. She missed her friend and invited him to go to a shooting range in the hills outside of town. He brought his Glock 19. A squirrel popped out of the rocks, and he fired off three rounds but missed. He handed her the gun and she killed it instantly at thirty yards. He skinned it to make a chili dinner. That night, Heather asked if he was seeing anybody.
“Want to make sure you’re not wasting your time, huh?” Scott said.
That February, he moved into her duplex apartment, on the corner of a busy street, with a yard big enough for her Belgian Malinois and a sign on the door with a picture of two German shepherds that said DOGS WILL BITE . Scott hung the squirrel’s hide in the garage, where it served as a prompt for a funny story.
Despite his allegiance to the Payson Hotshots, Scott applied to Granite Mountain over the winter of 2012 to stay closer to Heather. The job had the added benefit of moving him closer to his goal of becoming a structural firefighter. Scott filled out what he called “the most complicated and in-depth hotshot app I’ve ever seen” during a break from cleaning his M4 assault rifle at the kitchen table. He was one of Marsh’s top candidates.
Heading out for the first assignment of the season, Scott musthave remembered getting dumped the last time he’d called Heather from the fire line. He recalled a conversation they’d had just weeks before the crew was sent east for staging.
“If I get a call, I have to go,” Scott had told Heather before they adopted the puppy together. “Hotshotting is my job, babe. You know that.”
“I get it, Scott,” Heather had said. “I’m all in.”
—
Not long after leaving Prescott, the buggies dropped down into the cottonwoods along the Verde River, a muddy stream that drains the twelve-thousand-foot San Francisco Peaks, to the northeast. They caravanned past Montezuma Castle, a forty-five-room dwelling the Sinagua people built into a sandstone cliff wall nine hundred years ago, and climbed into the junipers and piñons along an old backcountry highway that parallels the Mogollon Rim. On one side of the two-thousand-foot escarpment were the meadows and pine forest that cloak much of the Colorado Plateau; on the other, the Sonoran Desert. Near the cliff’s edge, the road turned to dirt and Steed’s truck skipped a bit transitioning from the blacktop to the gravel washboard. He didn’t slow, and a cone of dust billowed out behind.
Granite Mountain was no longer going to Albuquerque. Barely out of Prescott, the SWCC had reassigned the crew to
They’d been close that winter, finding and creating time to shoot guns, hike, and cook together, but Heather began to feel that Scott was more a friend than anything else. Raised Christian, he’d been a bit of a prude, too. Their relationship lacked romance, and that felt even more pronounced when he was away for weeks on fire assignments. After a few other guys showed interest, she decided to end it with Scott. When he finally called her during a fire assignment, she told him it was over. He’d actually laughed. Not because he thought it was funny. There just wasn’t anything else to do. He was on an empty ridgeline, talking on a satellite phone, somewhere very far from Prescott.
They didn’t speak again until he moved back home that winter. Heather called Scott first. She missed her friend and invited him to go to a shooting range in the hills outside of town. He brought his Glock 19. A squirrel popped out of the rocks, and he fired off three rounds but missed. He handed her the gun and she killed it instantly at thirty yards. He skinned it to make a chili dinner. That night, Heather asked if he was seeing anybody.
“Want to make sure you’re not wasting your time, huh?” Scott said.
That February, he moved into her duplex apartment, on the corner of a busy street, with a yard big enough for her Belgian Malinois and a sign on the door with a picture of two German shepherds that said DOGS WILL BITE . Scott hung the squirrel’s hide in the garage, where it served as a prompt for a funny story.
Despite his allegiance to the Payson Hotshots, Scott applied to Granite Mountain over the winter of 2012 to stay closer to Heather. The job had the added benefit of moving him closer to his goal of becoming a structural firefighter. Scott filled out what he called “the most complicated and in-depth hotshot app I’ve ever seen” during a break from cleaning his M4 assault rifle at the kitchen table. He was one of Marsh’s top candidates.
Heading out for the first assignment of the season, Scott musthave remembered getting dumped the last time he’d called Heather from the fire line. He recalled a conversation they’d had just weeks before the crew was sent east for staging.
“If I get a call, I have to go,” Scott had told Heather before they adopted the puppy together. “Hotshotting is my job, babe. You know that.”
“I get it, Scott,” Heather had said. “I’m all in.”
—
Not long after leaving Prescott, the buggies dropped down into the cottonwoods along the Verde River, a muddy stream that drains the twelve-thousand-foot San Francisco Peaks, to the northeast. They caravanned past Montezuma Castle, a forty-five-room dwelling the Sinagua people built into a sandstone cliff wall nine hundred years ago, and climbed into the junipers and piñons along an old backcountry highway that parallels the Mogollon Rim. On one side of the two-thousand-foot escarpment were the meadows and pine forest that cloak much of the Colorado Plateau; on the other, the Sonoran Desert. Near the cliff’s edge, the road turned to dirt and Steed’s truck skipped a bit transitioning from the blacktop to the gravel washboard. He didn’t slow, and a cone of dust billowed out behind.
Granite Mountain was no longer going to Albuquerque. Barely out of Prescott, the SWCC had reassigned the crew to
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