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.