Young Men and Fire: Searching for Answers

I am only halfway up the north slope of Mann Gulch, and I am exhausted. My daypack seems to gain weight. I struggle to keep my wife and our guide in sight. I have anticipated neither the steepness of the climb nor the effect of the altitude. Yet being here in September 1996 is a logical consequence of having read Norman Maclean's Young Men and Fire 4 years earlier.

The short boat ride on the Missouri River north of Helena, Montana, was serene. Bald eagles completed their morning flights. Mountain goats fed at the water's edge, oblivious to the three of us in our motorized raft. Soon after the river turned sharply left, we landed by a modest sign that commemorates this site of tragedy.

Forty-seven years earlier, a random lightning strike during a brutally hot and dry summer started a small fire atop the south wall of Mann Gulch, a rugged box canyon opening on to the river. The following day, 5 August 1949, 15 smokejumpers parachuted into the canyon to contain the fire. They were joined on the ground by a forester from a nearby station. By 5 p.m., the crew had gathered their equipment and began an orderly march toward the fire.

The fire suddenly transformed into an explosive, fiery wind and charged toward the firefighters. They threw down their tools and raced desperately through the dry brush and grass up the north slope of Mann Gulch. Eleven of the …