Page 50 - The Silver Fire

July 4, 2013 - Yarnell Hill
A post by Harley Shaw of Hillsboro.
Yarnell Fire Photographs, below.
Top - Courtesy of Todd Tamscin, www.toddtamcsinphotography.com Middle: Peeples Valley, photo courtesy of EPA.
Bottom - looking west from I-17, courtesy of USFS.
Outrage was my first reaction when I read about the 19 Granite Mountain Hotshots who died this week on Yarnell Hill. I know that country. I’ve worked there. Before any additional information became available, I knew these young people died trying to save human-built structures, not wildlands or forest.
Historically, Yarnell and Hillsboro had a lot in common. Yarnell’s reasons for being were mining and ranching. Over time, it became more and more of a retirement community with a diverse human population. Before about 1980, perhaps 150 people lived there. With the “white- flight” of the ‘80s and ‘90s, that changed. Urbanization and sprawl, so characteristic of Arizona’s landscapes, set in and new houses began to appear on the brushy hillsides. Several studies of historic vegetation change in Arizona have disclosed that shrub and woodland densities increased immensely between about 1900 and now. People still argue over causes, but climate change, undetected until the 1960s, is one that is frequently cited. The
you will get a picture of the situation. Had that been the case, neither of our towns would have survived.
Yarnell Hill rises abruptly from
lowland Sonoran Desert north of Wickenburg almost vertically to become a rugged escarpment of massive granite boulders interspersed with dense Arizona chaparral—ergo scrub oak, ceanothus, Manzanita, stuff that evolved to periodically burn and burn explosively. Yarnell itself sits (or rather sat) in a tight valley surrounded by granite and chaparral. Scattered evergreen oak trees—Emory oak, Arizona white oak, probably others—along with scattered junipers provided a gentle landscape amenable to our own savannah- adapted species. It was an idyllic setting with and ideal southwestern climate—low enough to avoid the extreme cold of places like Flagstaff, high enough to avoid the extreme heat of Phoenix. Much like Hillsboro, you couldn’t find a better place to retire. And on the whole, real estate was pretty cheap. You didn’t have to be a billionaire to settle there.
Yarnell Hill was notorious among travelers in the 1930s and 1940s in Arizona. For many years, the highway that ascended it was the only paved road connecting Phoenix, Wickenburg, and Prescott. This was true into the 1960s. More importantly, however, the automobiles of the
THE BLACK RANGE RAG - WWW.BLACKRANGE.ORG
Details remain sketchy, because the Yarnell Hill Fire is still burning. Apparently, in spite of the valiant effort of those young people, the entire town of Yarnell, at the top of the hill bearing its name, is gone. The early estimates are saying 200 houses lost. That tells me that the fire consumed much more than the original small settlement of Yarnell.
picture that evolves is one two forces converging toward disaster—gradual, almost undetectable increasing woody vegetation on the one hand and encroachment of unknowing newcomers building homes in a growing tinderbox on the other. As with our own Black Range fire, it was just a matter of time. If you can envision placing Hillsboro and Kingston halfway up the slope between Kingston and Emory Pass,
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iN MEMORY OF THE GRANITE MOUNTAIN HOTSHOTS