Young Men and Fire (14 page)

All I meant by “funny” is that the wave was going the wrong way from the way I thought it should be going or, more exactly, the wind blowing it was going the wrong way for a prevailing wind on a big mountain river at this time of day. This early in the day in hot summer, the prevailing wind on a mountain river should be blowing upstream as follows. The rising sun hits the tops of mountains first. The warming mountain air, being lighter than the cool valley air, will rise, and the valley air will rush upstream to take its place. In the late afternoons or evenings, it is generally the other way around—the tops of mountains cool first, cool air is drawn into the warmer valley below, and the prevailing wind is usually downstream. From here on I kept watching the waves on the river and trying to connect them with Mann Gulch.

I wasn’t able to make that connection immediately, but I was able to find a reasonable explanation for the odd downstream wind that blows in the Gates of the Mountains on hot mornings. The air deep in the Gates of the Mountains is always much cooler than the air on the plains outside the Gates. As the river passes through the cooler air inside the cliffs to the plains, the hot plains air rises and the cool air is drawn downstream to replace it. Accordingly, in the cliffs of the Gates
of the Mountains, the prevailing wind in the morning and early afternoon is downstream, just as it is in the late afternoons and evenings when the mountains cool.

Coming downriver and thinking about prevailing winds as I was, you see ahead several great bends in the river so complete they look from a distance as if the river ahead has run into a mountain and disappeared under it. Captain Meriwether Lewis, coming upriver, must several times have wondered if ahead he wasn’t about to run out of river, leaving him and his crew with boats and oars but nowhere to row to. It must have been an overwhelming sight to come suddenly upon what seems to be the abrupt end of a big river several hundred miles before it should end.

The explanation for this mirage only slowly emerges as the mountain ahead under which the river disappears takes shape. Slowly, it emerges as a promontory sticking out into the river and causing the river to make a sharp bend to the northwest. It is an obstacle that turns the river at the mouth of Meriwether Canyon, just upriver from Mann Gulch. The promontory begins at the mouth of the canyon where Lewis and his crew camped overnight and extends half a mile before allowing the river to pass around it. As the river bends north again, the waters swirl with considerable force into the mouth of Mann Gulch just below the promontory. After that, we don’t care anymore where the river goes—to the Mississippi supposedly.

For several miles we have been following a downriver wind wondering if it could by chance have any connection with Mann Gulch. The mountain ahead becomes more interesting when it turns into a promontory between Meriwether Canyon and Mann Gulch than when it was a mirage under which a river disappeared. As a promontory, it supplies the connection between the prevailing downriver wind on the Missouri and the blowup of the Mann Gulch fire.

When the prevailing downriver wind (call it Wind Number One) first struck the promontory near the mouth of Meriwether Canyon, it split as if it had struck a big rock in a river and part of it (Wind Number Two) went straight ahead over the promontory and then straight down it in eddies on the Mann Gulch side. Some eddies became fire whirls throwing spot fires, and soon some of these spot fires jumped Mann Gulch to the opposite, grassy, slope. It was no great jump, the gulch being narrow and its grasses on the north side cured and already heated by radiation. Wind Number One, the main downriver wind, continued around the promontory until it met the mouth of Mann Gulch and sent Wind Number Three surging upgulch. Wind Number Three struck Wind Number Two at right angles, creating a giant fire whirl and starting the fateful race up Mann Gulch. As the fire swirled upgulch, a convection effect added strength to Wind Number Three: cool air from the river rushed up the narrow funnel at the mouth of Mann Gulch to replace the hot air rising from the fire.

By now it should be clear that an important part of the story of the Mann Gulch blowup is a Story of Three Winds. These three winds not only help to explain the basic structure of the blowup; they also explain other details. For instance, the powerful upgulch wind (Wind Number Three) struck, the burned fallen trees on the north side of the gulch; they lie parallel to each other and also parallel to the top of the ridge. The burned fallen trees opposite, on the south side of the gulch, are the work of Wind Number Two. This is the wind that crossed the promontory and headed almost straight down to the bottom of Mann Gulch. It would explain why the burned fallen trees are parallel to each other but perpendicular to the top of the ridge. There is probably an upgulch wind in Mann Gulch much of the summertime. What we have called Wind Number Three only added power to it, but power it needed to have. It was the wind that ran its race against the Smokejumpers and won.

It must be remembered, though, that these three winds are all part of one, first observed as a wave on the Missouri going the wrong way. Although Wind Number One did not act directly on the fire, it furnished the power for the other two that did. It was, so to speak, the supply ship, the other two the destroyers. As a Story of Three Winds, it solves still other puzzles the fire left behind. When Jansson was with Gisborne on the day of Gisborne’s death in Mann Gulch, Gisborne saw that the track of the blowup headed straight toward the part of the ridgetop where Hellman had been burned.

Occasionally in life, there come times that mark the end of puzzles. As was said earlier in this chapter, it is all cockeyed and it all fits.

A
LTHOUGH BLOWUPS WERE NOT ANALYZED
to the satisfaction of fire behavior scientists until the 1950s, it would be almost an
a priori
certainty that Harry Gisborne had long been interested in them. He had both a general theory about what caused them and a corollary theory as to what specifically caused the Mann Gulch blowup. He was to discover in Mann Gulch on the last day of his life that both his theories were wrong. To his credit, though, he was the first one to point out his error and was happily preparing to wake up the next day to correct his theories and probably soon would have, since his theories were basically on the right track.

He was a made-to-order picture of an early scientist, somewhat poetic and sometimes wrong, but often right and nearly always on the right track and nearly always dramatic. He tended to look for the extraordinary cause to explain the extraordinary effect, and, being himself an extraordinary effect, he had gathered about him a cult of young rangers, Jansson among them, to check in the field the theories he had developed at the Priest River Experiment Station, of which he had been director since 1922 and which he had made into the center of Forest Service research in the Northwest.

It is an extraordinary thing to say about a great woodsman, but he must also have been a charming man. He even developed the charming theory that certain conditions could be observed in November from which accurate predictions could be made about the fire season in the coming summer. He almost lost his cult of hero-worshiping rangers when he tried to get them to spend their Novembers looking for signs of next summer’s fires. They told him they still loved him even though he must be going crazy.

But they stuck with him to check his theory that fire whirls always whirl clockwise, a theory that also turned out to be
wrong—some whirl counter- and some clockwise. But the underlying assumption of the theory is right. Most fire whirls are caused by winds shearing off obstacles, that is, glancing off a side of them and so giving fires a spin and starting them to whirl.

His corollary theory about the cause of the Mann Gulch fire whirl and blowup makes this basic assumption. In a memorandum dated the August 30 following the fire, he urges his friend C. S. Crocker, chief of the Division of Fire Control, to instruct his fire dispatchers and spotters hereafter not to jump men on a fire if it “is so located that air will be sucked into it around a promontory to the left of the fire.” When you see any such fire, he says, “look out for a blowup caused by a big clockwise whirl.”

The two big blowups he had observed previously worked this way, he affirms, and so had all blowups observed by others he had questioned. And this is no doubt true; he just had too few cases on which to build a general theory.

For his theory to explain the blowup in Mann Gulch, there had to be a promontory in front of (upgulch from) the advancing fire and to its left as you face it, and in addition there had to be a wind blowing downgulch. The downgulch wind would shear off the promontory and strike the main fire behind it on its left side, starting a fire whirl with a clockwise motion, which would throw burning cones and branches outside the circumference of the main fire, where some of them would start spot fires in unburned fuel.

This is fancy and intriguing, like a lot of early science, but Gisborne was a fine enough scientist to know after a good look at Mann Gulch that it wouldn’t work there, for two very good reasons. First, the only promontory was behind the advancing fire, not in front of it. Second, all the survivors speak of an upgulch wind, not a downgulch wind, the other necessary ingredient of Gisborne’s theory. In Mann Gulch the firewhirl had begun in a way Gisborne had never seen—with an upgulch wind shearing off an obstacle behind the fire. If anything,
Gisborne seemed exhilarated by the prospect of having to get another theory to replace the old one.

It was November 9 when they climbed up Rescue Gulch, Gisborne half-convincing Jansson that if he rested every hundred yards he could make it. Jansson says that the half-hour trip took two hours, and he leaves a strange and moving report (for insurance purposes) about the whole day entitled “Statement to Accompany Form CA2 in the Case of the Death of Harry T. Gisborne.” The report was accompanied by a map (no longer to be found) with thirty-seven numbers on it signifying points where the two had stopped to talk. Still surviving, however, are four pages of notes indicating the main topics of conversation at each “rest stop” and often a direct quotation from the conversation there. They had not gone halfway through the fire area—only to stop 15—when the notation reads: “All his theories on the fire blasted.”

At stop 28, Gisborne said to Jansson: “I don’t believe your fire whirled. You only thought so because of what you have been told, by me in part.”

Gisborne must have been a fairly complex traveling companion. Much as he had been compelled to Mann Gulch by his theory about the cause of the fire whirl in the Mann Gulch fire, here he was, before the afternoon was over, half kidding and half scolding Jansson for believing that there had been a blowup in Mann Gulch, even though Jansson had almost died in it. He was even kidding Jansson for being led into this supposed error by being too subservient to Gisborne’s own theories.

To Gisborne, science started and ended in observation, and theory should always be endangered by it. Toward the end of the afternoon all he had observed showed that the fire had burned without fire whirls and that therefore both he and Jansson were wrong. Jansson was barely hanging on to his own experience of the fire whirl when they reached stop 32. Suddenly Jansson said, “That’s my whirl.” Gisborne immediately saw that a fire whirl had gone on a line for the top of the ridge
near where Hellman had been burned, and probably was the reason Hellman had been burned there and Diettert was burned a little farther on. “Yep,” he said, and was all fire whirl himself again. He wanted to take pictures of it and then and there in late afternoon to follow its course and map it. Jansson was afraid that they already had made too long a day of it, and he knew that it would be all they could do to get back to their truck before dark. He assured Gisborne he would have someone return to the gulch to map the whirl, and Gisborne, when he saw how perturbed Jansson was, apologized. He said to Jansson: “I’m glad I got a chance to get up here. Tomorrow we can get all our dope together and work on Hypothesis Number One. Maybe it will lead to a theory.” This was at rest stop 35. By now the rest stops were becoming stations of the cross.

They were following a game trail along the cliffs high above the Missouri River at the lower end of the Gates of the Mountains, and were only a quarter or a half mile from their truck when they reached stop 37. Gisborne sat down on a rock and said: “Here’s a nice place to sit and watch the river. I made it good. My legs might ache a little, though, tomorrow.”

In his report Jansson says: “I think Gisborne’s rising at point 37 on the map was due to the attack hitting him.” He goes on to explain in parentheses that “thrombosis cases usually want to stand or sit up because of difficulty in breathing.” Gisborne died within a minute, and Jansson piled rocks around him so he would not roll off the game trail into the Missouri River a hundred feet below.

When Jansson knew Gisborne was dead, he stretched him out straight on the game trail, built the rocks around him higher, closed his eyes, and then put his glasses back on him so, just in case he woke up, he could see where he was.