CALIFORNIA: The McGee Fire

September came to California with a searing surge of heat and threat of fire. From the coast hills clear up to timberline in the High Sierras, timber and brush were crackling dry and ready to flare like spilled gunpowder. Then electric storms came, and lightning lit the kindling; within ten days, 400 big and small fires flared across the countryside. By last week, when rain fell, some 300,000 acres had been charred to ashes by California’s most disastrous fires in 30 years.

“This Is a Classic.” At noon one day early this month, a Sequoia National Forest lookout sighted smoke from the nearby McGee ranch. At 6 p.m., despite fire crews and bulldozers, the McGee fire topped a ridge and ran wild. Normally, air conditions at nightfall and along ridge lines slow down forest fires, but that evening hungry breezes sucked flames over the crest and down through the forest. Hundreds of spot-blazes flared up behind the fire crews, who pulled back fast. Thereafter, the fire and the fight raged for days.

Soon jeeps and trucks, bulldozers and tank trucks were trundling up the rugged mountain roads. The Forest Service called in National Guardsmen and volunteer crews from prisons (including the “Stanislaus Hotshots” who fought twelve forest fires without a single convict trying a single escape). It flew in 225 Zuni and Hopi Indian fire fighters, mobilized in all 1,200 men from foresters to migrant fruit pickers. Crew bosses hustled them through smoke and heat to the fire line, 40 miles long.

For three days firebreaks were slashed through the forest with ‘dozers on the flat and hand tools on the steep slopes. Again and again the fire lunged across. Along Mill Flat Creek on the fourth day, the crews prepared a 20-ft. break and a final stand. All morning they stamped out blazes flaring up across the line. But at 2 p.m. the fire roared across, raced three miles in 38 minutes, destroyed a fresh 4,000-acre tract of prime timber — 2,000,000 trees—before evening. “This,” said one ranger, “is a classic fire. It’s the kind the boys will be talking about for the next 20 years.”

Ill Wind. District Ranger Lou Geil, 43, the fire boss, had no time to waste talking; the fire was storming close to the park’s Wilsonia Village and one of its most precious preserves: a great grove with thousands of magnificent sequoias, including the General Grant tree, the second largest on earth (267 ft. high and 107 ft. in circumference).* Geil mobilized every man possible, laid miles of pipeline overnight, pumped continuous sprays of water for 24 hours on smoking trees to save the village and the enormous grove.

By then Lou Geil was running the fight against the McGee fire (“a vicious animal,” he called it) like a military operation. A veteran of some 200 fire fights during his 15 years in the Forest Service, he mapped firebreaks like trenchlines, set backfires like counterattacks to slow down the rush of the great blaze.

Every night as the evening shift of winds slowed down the inferno, he held a strategy conference with his staff. Every morning at his headquarters, in a commandeered summer-cabin camp, radios crackled with early reports from observers along the fire line. His orders flashed over two radio nets to the crews manning the fire line.

Up the twisting mountain roads to the fire area rumbled a stream of truck convoys with essential supplies: tools, pumps, stoves, snakebite kits, seeping bags of disposable paper, and hundreds of other items. One of Geil’s supply men ordered 500 Ibs. of hamburger from a flabbergasted butcher in a nearby town (“take your time; take half an hour”). The men got food in their camps twice daily (at 4:30 a.m. and 8 p.m.), and box lunches on the fire line during the day. On the eighth day, with the fire almost under control, a wind sprang up.

Seedlings & Time. Smoke boiled 10,000 ft. into the sky; the fire raced with the wind through a deep-timbered basin towards the Boole sequoia (world’s third largest) and towards the steep gorges of the Kings Canyon, as deep in places as the Grand Canyon. “If it jumps down,” said Geil, “we’re in trouble. That’s mankiller country. If we don’t catch her here, there’s no stopping her. She could go for miles on both sides of the river.”

As the fire stormed downhill through the basin, Geil sent in a picked crew with curt orders to dig a last-ditch firebreak. His orders: the crew must be prepared to hole up in the cliffs, to live without supplies, lay through the fire if trapped,* but “tie up” the basin. They did. Last week a ranger and three Indians with 1,200 ft. of line clambered into Kings Canyon (which drops 4,000 ft. in two miles) to keep the fire from shooting along the canyon’s wall. Hemmed in, the fire came at last under control. Loss: 17,000 acres of timber. The fight against the fire alone cost $750,000.

Last week’s rain wet down much of California, but at week’s end fire still crackled in the deep combustible duff of the forest floor. In the Sequoia and other blackened forests, the Forest Service was making brisk plans to replant. Said Fire Boss Geil, his face drawn and his eyes hooded with fatigue: “We’ll plant seedlings, and we’ll prune them, and in 70 or 80 years we’ll have the timber back. It’ll take a lot of work. Tomorrow we start.”

*The General Sherman sequoia, reputed to be “the oldest living thing on earth” (some 3,500 years) and largest of all trees, is 272 ft. tall and 101 ft. in circumference, weighs 2,150 tons (155 tons for the foliage alone) and contains 600,000 board feet of lumber—enough to build a whole town.

*A ranger’s advice: “If you get trapped, don’t try to run uphill. You’ll never make it. Go through the fire into the burned zone. You may get singed, but it gets cooler the farther you go.”