He realized that the blaze couldn’t be outrun the gulch was too steep, the flames too fast.

After a few minutes, Dodge glanced over his shoulder and saw that the fire was less than fifty yards away. They dropped their gear and started running up the steep canyon walls, trying to reach the top of the ridge. In a matter of seconds, the fire began to devour the grass, hurtling toward the smoke jumpers at seven hundred feet a minute.ĭodge screamed at his men to retreat. Dodge was suddenly staring at a wall of flame fifty feet tall and three hundred feet deep. An updraft began, and fierce winds howled through the canyon as the fire sucked in the surrounding air.

He and his men were only a quarter mile uphill. Suddenly, the wind reversed, and Dodge watched the fire leap across the gulch and spark the grass on his side. When the smoke jumpers started down the gulch, a breeze was blowing the flames away from them. Dodge moved his men along the other side of the gulch and told them to head downhill, toward the water. By the time the firefighters arrived, the blaze was already out of control. The fire began in the trees on one side of the gulch. Mann Gulch, nearly three miles long, is a site of geological transition, where the Great Plains meet the Rocky Mountains, pine trees give way to tall grasses, and steep cliffs loom over the steppes of the Midwest. When the jumpers left Missoula, in a C-47 cargo plane, they were told that the fire was small, just a few burning acres in the Mann Gulch. A parachute brigade of fifteen firefighters known as smoke jumpers was dispatched to put out the blaze the man in charge was named Wag Dodge. On the afternoon of August 5th-the hottest day ever recorded in the state-a lightning fire was spotted in a remote area of pine forest. The summer of 1949 was long and dry in Montana. Brain-imaging techniques are revealing how our minds produce insight.

The smoke jumper book summary