Amazon.com: Customer reviews: Fire on the Mountain: The True Story of the South Canyon Fire

Top positive review

Engaging, informative

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 6, 2023

Our two sons have worked as wildland firefighters, and our daughter once lived in the Glenwood Springs area. So this book spoke to us in several respects. Very engaging and exciting account of how the fire spread and was fought. And a very good explanation of how wildfires "work."

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Derek Chastain

Just OK, which I know is heresy within woodland fire community but hear me out.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 25, 2021

First of all, I greatly respect the men and women of the woodland firefighting teams especially in the western US where so many fires are difficult to access. Cal Fire, smoke jumpers, Type 1 or 2 or fuel mitigation or volunteers or BLM or local, all of you are heroes. I've studied the South Canyon Fire extensively, though many of you likely recognize it as Storm King Mountain. This book does a good job of exploring the underlying causes and weaknesses in the system that culminated in the disaster. However, it tends to fixate on some things like the meteorologist, while not exploring the individuals' experiences on the day of the blowup. It's a good book, just not a great book. I say thank you to those of you who suit up in the green pants, yellow shirts, and work your tails off to protect life and property.

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From the United States

R. Knowlton

Definitely Supplements the South Canyon Reports

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 2, 2011

Verified Purchase

I've studied the South Canyon fire on and off ever since I helped build the memorial trail on Storm King Mountain way back in 1995. Just a young 19-year-old then, my only remaining memories are of carrying landscaping material, briefly sitting beside a father as he dug the hole for his son's/daughter's cross, and choking up with exhaustion and tears as I tried to climb the last 150 yards to Zero Point. The book helped me to have a much broader understanding of the incident after all these years.

This books fills in a lot of the back stories and firefighter biographies that are not present in the two South Canyon incident reports. It certainly doesn't answer all the questions about the fire--they likely exist in the ten thousand pages of reference material cited by Maclean at the end of the book--but it's certainly worth reading for anyone looking for more insight into the incident.

Written in a nice prose style, Maclean builds suspense throughout the first five chapters, even though I already knew what the final outcome of the fire was. It put an ache in my gut more than once as Maclean described the everyday activities and fateful chance decisions of the firefighters 24 to 48 hours before their deaths. The prose isn't perfect: On more than one occasion, Maclean refers to previous wildland incidents (such as Mann Gulch) in a choppy fashion in an attempt to relate it to South Canyon. The attempt is probably lost on the casual reader. References like that only made sense to me because I've studied the fires (or took the time to look them up while I was reading the book). The obligatory photos in the center of the book are in black and white (hence the -1 star) and aren't very useful when it comes time to understanding movement in the last minutes of the firefighters' lives. To get useful pictures, the reader will need to download one of the official reports, which will have much more detailed reference photographs.

The book provides a nice level of detail that allows me to study the leadership decisions and risk management associated with the fire while providing useful insight into the emotional side of the tragedy.

12 people found this helpful

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Bonnie

book

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 4, 2013

Verified Purchase

I have read this book several times and purchased this one as a gift for a friend. We had just hiked the storm king mountain trail and I wanted him to read the full story.

One person found this helpful

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Kindle Customer

Four Stars

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 9, 2015

Verified Purchase

tough read

One person found this helpful

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terrill parrish

Four Stars

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 16, 2014

Verified Purchase

A good read.

One person found this helpful

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Wiredferret

A humanizing view of a systems tragedy

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 13, 2012

I like reading failure analysis books. I think understanding the complex moving parts that seem so small in the moment and add up makes me a better writer, possibly a more conscientious person.

This book is a narrative about bad decisions that seemed only a little bad at the time, and added up to something catastrophic. The weather, the decision-making structure, the equipment, the decisions on the ground, they all added up to something that we call an accident. And it was an accident, in many ways. No one person is to blame, none of it was directly foreseeable, and yet we can learn so many ways to do it better.

Maclean is inclined to come down a bit harder on the BLM than the firefighters, but overall, it does not feel like anyone is excused from their poor judgment. I especially liked MacLean's focus on the impact of the deaths on the community. I was a senior in high school in 1994, and knew kids on hot shot teams. One friend ran the radios for her dad's crew, another was funding college. I think a shudder went through the whole ecosystem of wildfire fighters when Storm King happened. This was not your father's Mann Gulch, this was people we knew, at least in type. We could see their sports records in our gyms, and their sisters in our class.

There's a Red Flag Watch up in my hometown today, and it seems good to remember what we have learned and keep re-learning.

Read if: You also like failure analysis, you are interested in descriptions of the chance that causes people to live or die.

Skip if: Reading about the death of people just trying to do their job is going to bother you.

Also read: Young Men and Fire . Godforsaken Sea: The True Story of a Race Through the World's Most Dangerous Waters .

3 people found this helpful

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Deep South

good factual and well written

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 5, 2009

Having knowen several of the people in the book including two who were killed and being a wildland firefighter my self for a number of years I feel that I can speak with some inside knowledge of the book. I don't consider myself an expert by any means but know the agencies and their cultures and how decisions are often made or not made.

The writer did a good job researching it and took the time to do it right. It reads well, is factual and tells the truth about what happned. I just feel sorry so many had to die including my two friends.

It shows how skilled, trained and experienced firefighters end up suffering from supervisiors and managers who loose common sense and logical thinking as they progress up the ranks. It also shows how long hours, tunnel vision and ignoring the established rules can lead to tragedy. I knew of the problems in western Colorado from friends and had a couple of bad experiences well before the fire and given the chance would not take an assignment there if possible. But fire is a lot like the military you take what you are given with out question and work as hard as possible to get the job done.

This book is a true account and is hard to put down once started.

4 people found this helpful

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Lessons not learned?

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 25, 2012

I picked up this title having read "Young Men and Fire" by this author's father. Both books detail tragic wildfires which each took the lives of multiple firefighters. "Fire On the Mountain" concerns the wrongly named South Canyon Fire in Colorado in 1994. The author provides background on the circumstances leading to the fire which was actually on the slopes of Storm King Mountain. A series of flawed decisions or decisions postponed along with a perfect storm of weather conditions led to a blowup of the fire and the race for life which followed. MacLean reconstructs events from survivors interviews and research of the official records. Well written.

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Amazon Customer

Good Book

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 17, 2015

I found this easy to read. Story is compelling. I would recommend it to all.

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George F. Kremer

Young Men and Fire

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 14, 1999

Maclean's work, "Young Men and Fire" starts to unravel myriad layers involved in modern firefighting and just why these layers can, have and will turn deadly. The number of "players" in the begining of the book can prove difficult to keep track of, but each is well researched and given a chance to speak. Although Maclean's opinions are not held back he does offer several different points of view contrary to his own and others. Despite a feeling that Maclean may be "blaming through hindsite" his offering comes closest to the fear and finality of working a wildfire gone bad. Perhaps Maclean's message, as was his father's, is that we haven't learned from the past. This is pointed up yet again in the near-tragedy this past summer in Nevada; that of six young firefighters being trapped on a ridge while a wildfire took a run at them. This incident wasn't made public til recently and the "blame" was the same as Mann Gulch, Storm King Mountain and the next blow-up that takes the lives of firefighters. Maclean's opinions aside, the book is a great read with an underlaying message of, "Never forget these lessons, let their sacrifices be enough."

14 people found this helpful

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Steve

Wild Fire Forgives No One

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 6, 2000

This is an important, memorable book. It makes the point that the public doesn't often understand: forces of nature are not compassionate or forgiving and they do not care about human politics.
While some may criticize MaClean for faulting so many parties, including the deceased, the fact is that a cumulative string of errors took place and after so many contributions to those errors, tragedy became inevitable. I visited Storm King Mountain while the fight was still going on and heard in interviews with members of the command staff many of the same errors that took place in the Oakland Hills fire of 1991.
I think MaClean offered a compassionate and sympathetic view of human nature as he analyzed the problems leading up to July 6.
MaClean has performed a service for the firefighting community in that his dissection of the chain of events can become the basis for improved training and command doctrine, thereby, I hope, preventing another tragedy in our annual wildfire cycle.

6 people found this helpful

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Fire on the Mountain: The True Story of the South Canyon Fire

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