I read with interest the Arizona Daily Sun article entitled “Decades after the Radio Fire, How Mount Elden’s Recovery is Playing Out” by Emery Cowan (June 18, 2017). Here I offer a different perspective on Radio Fire.
In 1977 I was a member of the Fulton Hotshot Crew based in Sequoia National Forest. On June 17, 1977, the day the radio fire broke out, the Fulton crew was at Flagstaff Airport, waiting to be transported to a fire near Payson. The fire weather briefing to the crew that day read: hot with a relative humidity of less than 10%. We saw the pillar of smoke from Radio Fire rise from across Flagstaff.
Bill Sandborg, the Fulton crew supervisor, placed a call and assigned us to the radio fire department. We were transported to a neighborhood near the edge of the fire and began the first attack which cut the direct line of fire uphill. We didn’t get far when the fire exploded and we retreated down the line to the base of the mountain. We spent the rest of the late afternoon and night waiting for the neighbors to post point fires.
Over the next few days, the Fulton crew built the Westside Line from the top of Mount Elden to the apartments on the outskirts of town. Myself and several other Fulton crew members were hit by a rock fall while crossing a steep, burned train line while working on the Westside Line. Stones the size of basketballs spun quickly, bouncing down the draw at 20 miles per hour. We all avoided being hit by dodging the rock and hiding behind the large trunk of a burned pine tree.
Twenty years later I was on a commercial flight from Dallas to California via Flagstaff. The scar from Radio Fire was still clearly visible; The regeneration was apparently very slow. I can imagine the longtime residents of Flagstaff also reminding the 40+ year old dead stumps and fallen trees on Mount Elden of what they did and thought when Mount Elden burned.
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