Amy B Wang

The Republic | azcentral.com

The command that blared from the radio was one Gary Dahlen had never heard before, not in all his years piloting helicopters over wildfires.

All available helicopters prepare for an emergency launch.

He hardly knew what to make of it. "I was thinking maybe structures were threatened," Dahlen said later.

He was waiting at a helicopter base in Placerville, Calif., an old gold-mining town where oaks turn to pines as the Sierra Nevada range rises toward Lake Tahoe.

Just uphill, where the American River's south fork cuts a knife-sharp slash through the forest, a wildfire dubbed the King Fire had been exploding up the canyon walls and beyond since Sept. 13. Now, two days later, the airborne and ground attack on the fire was underway.

Dahlen had been out doing "bucket work" all morning, picking up water in the bucket that dangled from his yellow Bell 205, dropping it onto the flames in the forest below. At midday, he returned to the base to refuel and await orders. Then he heard the unusual radio call.

He quickly climbed into his flight suit, then into his seat.

As the helicopter's turbo engine whined to life,someone from the fire command staff came sprinting toward the aircraft, reached in and punched latitude-and-longitude coordinates into Dahlen's GPS.

That was when he learned the emergency: It was a shelter deployment.

A crew on the ground, somewhere in the steep wilderness beyond the base, was stuck in front of the fire. Deployment meant the crew had unpacked their fire shelters, blankets of reflective foil and insulation, and prepared to climb inside them.

For a firefighter, deployment is a last resort. Some firefighters inside shelters survive, as the flames roll past them. Some do not. In 2013, the Yarnell Hill Fire in Arizona overtook 19 firefighters, members of the Prescott-based Granite Mountain Hotshots. Realizing they were trapped, the firefighters deployed their shelters. None survived.

In the cockpit of his helicopter, Dahlen looked at the coordinates on his GPS. The long line for his water bucket was still shackled to the airframe. But the trapped crew was 10 miles away. He lifted the Bell into smoke-dulled afternoon light and headed toward the flames.

• • •

Earlier that morning, Kevin Fleming had been working with a hand crew and a bulldozer operator to cut anything that could burn around a five-acre spot fire. The team of 12 hefted axes, rakes and specialized tools for brush-clearing. The bulldozer helped punch through down to bare, fireproof dirt. A solid line around the spot fire would render it unlikely to spread any farther.

Spot fires were a huge worry on the King Fire. Much of the forest was dark with overgrowth, but had been baking all summer in California's historic drought. As it burned, it lobbed embers into the sky that drifted miles downwind, spreading more fire and more worry wherever they landed.

And while Fleming's crew worked on their spot fire, they did not see the ones burning just below them.

Two miles away, downslope, another fire had been smoldering under the cover of a natural phenomenon called an inversion layer. A layer occurs when an invisible band of cool night air settles over a canyon or valley. As the day breaks, the band of cool air remains sunken, creating a lid over any warmer air rising below.

The inversion layer kept a solid band of smoke low over a canyon below Fleming's crew. With the smoke still and thick, no one above could see the spot fires growing.

Fleming was a veteran by fire-crew standards, starting on the line as a teenager. He beat testicular cancer when he was 28. Now, at 32, he was a father-to-be and a fire captain with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, leading a crew of inmates, a common scene on a wildfire.

The inversion layer had begun lifting around midday, and as it lifted, it pulled more fresh air into the canyon, feeding the unseen flames. The rising heat began a march uphill, a fireline that was soon devouring 100-foot-tall pine trees in its path and speeding north toward Fleming and his crew.

Crews would later say it covered two miles in four minutes. By the time Fleming's crew saw what was happening, their escape route was cut off. The crown of the pine forest around them was already ablaze.

Fleming's adrenaline raced as he tried to plot their next steps. But everything was happening too quickly. The bulldozer with the crew caught fire. It seemed they had nowhere to go.

Fleming reached for his handheld radio. He called in the crew's GPS coordinates. He knew air support on the fire was in full tilt and hoped a tanker could at least drop water on them to reduce some of the heat.

Then he gave the order for the move every firefighter trains for, and the one no one ever hopes to make.

He ordered his crew to deploy their fire shelters.

They climbed into the thin foil blankets and waited.

• • •

Gary Dahlen strained to see through the thickening smoke as the yellow Bell helicopter hovered over the GPS coordinates he had been given.

He scanned the terrain below, pine forest crisscrossed by logging roads, and all around, more orange flames torching upward. At last, he spotted the sight he had feared: 12 silver shelters, deployed.

They lay in the bare stripe of a narrow logging road, each with a firefighter inside, the forest crowding around them.

On his radio, Dahlen called to the ground captain, inside one of those shelters below him.

"I see you," he said. But could the ground crew hear him?

In Dahlen's mind, the sheen of the fire shelters evoked one clear memory, one that stood out even among his 28 years as a contract helicopter pilot over countless wildfires.

A year before, when the Granite Mountain Hotshots were killed, he had hung on every word, like everyone in the fire community. "Those 19 'shots," he would call them.

"I can assure you that I'm very aware of what happened in Arizona last year," Dahlen, 60, said later. "Those 19 'shots that we lost last year were very much on my mind."

Now he was looking down at the largest fire-shelter deployment to happen since the Yarnell tragedy.

The radio blared back at him. It was the fire captain, inside his shelter on the ground, confirming radio contact: He could hear the helicopter.

Dahlen's relief was tempered by reality. A wall of fire approached, consuming "100 percent of what was in front of it," he would later say. "It dawned on me they were in a bad place." If they stayed on the road, he concluded, there was no way they would survive.

The pilot scanned the area around them for a bare patch, an escape route, something. Then, he found something.

About 200 yards to the north from where the firefighters lay, the forest shifted from tall pines to lower manzanita brush.

The clearing was still "in the green," unburned and dangerous. But it was more open than the pine forest, and might buy them crucial moments to assess the spreading flames and move farther to safety.

Fire roared toward the shelters. If they ran for the clearing, Dahlen estimated they would have to make it in three minutes.

Two hundred yards north, wearing heavy boots, under heavy smoke. Three minutes. Could they make it?

The logging road was relatively flat.

Dahlen keyed up his radio again.

Get out of your fire shelters, he told them. And follow me.

And, he warned: You'll need to run.

• • •

At the fire shelters, Fleming issued his crew a new order.

Run.

All 12 men yanked their fire shelters off and began sprinting up the logging road, foil blankets draped over their heads and backs as they ran.

Around them, flames climbed through the tree crowns, 100, maybe 150 feet overhead. They were running through fire.

Smoke seared their eyes as they ran north. Up ahead, they could see a yellow helicopter, hovering close to the ground.

With one hand, Fleming clutched his fire shelter; with the other, his radio, his lifeline to the voice of the pilot just above.

Through the noise, the pilot's voice kept breaking through.

Now turn to the left, he said. Now to the right.

Some of the firefighters' legs began cramping.

"You have to run faster," the voice urged them.

The crew knew the fire was running just as fast. But there was no turning back.

The pilot's voice reassured them, one more time. This is the right way.

The flames licked just behind them, so close that they ripped and curled the fire shelters of those firefighters who were last in line.

Then, in an instant, they burst from the timber and into the low brush. Fleming could feel the fire drop down, the intensity of the heat diminish.

Pilot and fire captain scanned the wilderness. There was no way the helicopter could land.The closest clearing was another 4½ miles by foot — up another road and over a ridge. But the fire was behind them, slower now. The crew headed up the road as the helicopter pulled away.

• • •

Gary Dahlen set the yellow Bell down in the clearing and waited, rotors turning. He wasn't sure when the crew would arrive, or from what direction.

More than an hour later, he saw the first fire uniforms approaching from behind. He ran to greet them.

At the edge of the clearing, Kevin Fleming recognized the yellow helicopter first. He knew it was the same one he had seen, hovering just ahead of them as they had run through the forest.

He approached the man in the flight suit and asked — was he the pilot?

Yes, Dahlen replied.

And then: "He just threw his arms around me and gave me a great big hug," Dahlen said. "So that's how we started out our meeting, with a man hug."

Dahlen had one thing to say in return, to Fleming and the rest of the crew:

"You're the luckiest son-of-a-bitches in the world."

"I know it," Fleming said. "I know it."

• • •

The two men returned the next day to the area where Fleming and his crew had deployed their fire shelters.

Nothing remained.

"Everything was burned," Fleming said. The dozer they had been working with was charred.

Fleming estimates they would have had to remain inside their fire shelters for three or four hours, as the fire burned over them. Some have told him it could have been survivable; others have said it would not have been.

The story of the men's close escape reached the rest of the world quickly. Late that same afternoon, a CalFire official issued a brief statement that the team had deployed fire shelters and escaped safely.

The story of Dahlen's rescue came out more slowly. Fire experts, who had been listening to radio traffic that day, pieced together the basics.

Dahlen simply went back to work. About a week later, during a morning briefing at the command post, where crews usually get information about tactics for the day, commanders made an unusual pause in the proceedings.

They pulled Dahlen to the front of the crowd of firefighters, spent a few minutes describing how his quick actions saved lives, and handed him a simple honorary certificate. Someone snapped a few pictures. Then the firefight went on.

But the work wasn't unnoticed. CalFire officials posted a picture of Dahlen's certificate on their Facebook page. Nearly 6,000 people clicked "Like." The comments went on for days.

And his story resonated in the hearts of those who could most imagine another ending.

Tammy Misner, whose son, Sean, was one of 19 Granite Mountain Hotshots who died in the Yarnell Hill Fire, has a flood of memories when she thinks about what happened at the King Fire.

"It's incredible. Someone was leading him," she said. "He saved these 12 guys. He saved their lives."

She paused then, thinking back to Sean's memorial service at a high-school stadium in coastal California, where he grew up. They had planned for a helicopter to fly over the service.

"I remember they weren't sure whether or not it was going to happen," she said. "And then just before it was supposed to start, it appeared in the sky." She watched it go and then walked out onto the center of the field.

It was a yellow helicopter, too.

Dahlen and Fleming agree what happened at the King Fire was a miracle.

"He definitely saved our lives, I know that," Fleming said. "It's still mind-boggling to me that everything worked out as good as it did."

Dahlen said he was just doing his job.

"We had three minutes to save their lives," Dahlen said. "Had I been three minutes later, there would have been a different outcome. I have no doubt about that."

Republic reporter Karina Bland contributed to this article.