Lightning cracked across Colorado’s skies on July 3, 1994. A thin plume of smoke soon rose from Storm King Mountain in the White River National Forest. A wildfire had started.

After reconnaissance by spotters the next day, a team of firefighters headed up the mountain. A Montana-based group of U.S. Forest Service smokejumpers and the 20-member Prineville Hotshots, an elite wildland firefighting crew based in Oregon, also joined the effort. They all believed they were taking on a small, relatively straightforward wildfire.

“We saw this little wisp of smoke and figured we’d have this fire whipped by midnight,” smokejumper Sarah Doehring recalled years later.

But high winds kicked up. The blaze exploded into a massive conflagration, spasming from 100 acres to more than 2,000.

Twenty-five years ago this Saturday, 14 firefighters -- including nine of the Prineville Hotshots -- died battling what became known as the South Canyon Fire. It was the deadliest wildland firefighting disaster since 1953’s Rattlesnake Fire in California.

What happened up on Storm King Mountain that terrible day? Those who survived were stunned at how fast, and completely, the conditions seemed to change.

“We were very aware of the wind, but I wasn’t real concerned about it,” former Prineville Hotshot Alex Robertson told The Oregonian in 2014. “There was very little smoke coming off the fire. I wasn’t seeing any torching, any flames.”

Fellow Prineville Hotshot Bryan T. Scholz, the team’s second in command, recalled being on a slope in chest-high brush and seeing only spotty flames and smoke. It was cool and relatively calm. Then the wind morphed from “gusty” into “a howler.”

Out of nowhere, a wave of fire rose up, an orange-and-black mass, booming “like a freight train.”

The Wildland Firefighters Memorial, at Prineville's Ochoco Creek Park, recognizes the 14 firefighters killed in the South Canyon Fire in 1994. (The Oregonian)LC- The Oregonian

“I noticed an increase in smoke coming up from the bottom of the fire,” Scholz said just days after barely surviving the ordeal. “I heard some sort of radio traffic from the smoke jumpers that they were having trouble. And suddenly we were running.”

The blaze’s explosion caught firefighters so completely off guard that even longtime firefighting experts couldn’t figure out what to make of it.

“What came on them so fast that they didn’t have time to react?” U.S. Forest Service manager and former smokejumper Ted Putnam wondered a year after the disaster. “The physical evidence suggests they were just slammed into the ground and lost consciousness.”

This much is now known: the multi-headed firefighting operation battling the blaze faced various coordination difficulties that led to confusion and a command breakdown.

Such problems were not especially unusual. Before cellphones and the internet, and the modernizing of various safety and operational procedures, communications in a remote wildfire could be ad hoc and unreliable. Back then, many firefighters didn’t even carry radios. Those who perished on Storm King ended up caught on the mountain with inadequate escape routes and little information about what they were facing.

A placard that's part of the Wildland Firefighters Memorial at Prineville's Ochoco Creek Park. (The Oregonian)LC- The Oregonian

The firefighters who died that July 6 were Kathi Beck, Tamera Bickett, Scott Blecha, Levi Brinkley, Robert Browning, Douglas Dunbar, Terri Hagen, Bonnie Holtby, Rob Johnson, Jon Kelso, Don Mackey, Roger Roth, Jim Thrash and Richard Tyler.

The disaster devastated the firefighting community. Kimberly Lightley, one of the Prineville Hotshots who survived the blaze, struggled with the trauma. She found herself drawn to the graves of her fallen firefighters in the year after the tragedy.

“That’s where I could let down my guard and sob,” she wrote years later in a firefighters magazine. “I was carrying around a fake smile, so folks didn’t know I was in so much pain. I had a lot of survivor’s guilt. I believed 100 percent that I should have died on that mountain with my friends.”

The firefighters lost in the South Canyon Fire will be remembered Saturday at an event at Ochoco Creek Park in Prineville, starting at 11 a.m.

They also will be remembered in Colorado. In recent years, the Storm King 14 Memorial Trail, west of Glenwood Springs, has become an annual destination for wildland firefighters, especially those who survived the South Canyon Fire.

The trail came into existence in a makeshift manner in the weeks after the fire as firefighters and family members of the fallen hiked to the area where the dead became trapped -- “to pay their respects and figure out what happened,” states a memorial website created by the South Canyon Fire Committee. The U.S. Forest Service then built out the path into an official trail. Placards along the way describe what happened that day and where, and there are memorial markers for each of the firefighters who died.

Experiencing the trail, which will be reserved for the families on Saturday, “is really powerful,” Colorado videographer Barry Stevenson says. Stevenson created a 13-minute video that showcases the mountain today and the memorials to the firefighters. He made it for family members and others who aren’t able to travel to or make it up the mountain.

“It’s a really hard hike,” he says. “But it’s beautiful.”

-- Douglas Perry

@douglasmperry

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