Excerpt from Hotshot by River Selby, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

In a Lessons Learned training video we watched a firefighter recount his deployment in a burnover. He'd forgotten his gloves and the skin of his hands "slipped right off." All around him the fire roared like a freight train. Quiet came, but he knew it wasn't over. He was in the fire's eye, and he said it was like the eye of a tornado. I've heard this description by many survivors, likening wildfires to more familiar weather events. A fire needs three elements: fuel, heat, and oxygen. Fire breathes oxygen, inhaling cool air from below and expelling a hot, moist mixture of carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, toxic gases, and small particles upwards. With dry-enough conditions and plentiful fuel, the fire's rising heat (called a smoke column) quickly expands in size and strength, destabilizing the surrounding atmosphere and creating its own weather system, called pyrocumulus. A pyrocumulus is essentially a cumulonimbus (thundercloud) create by fire. The air condenses as it rises, and because it's hotter than the surrounding atmosphere this can cause lightning, created when cooler air collides with warmer. Unlike cumulonimbus, pyrocumulus systems can float smoldering embers, called firebrands, aloft, sometimes for over a mile, and expel downdrafts along with lightning, exacerbating and increasing fire behavior while simultaneously starting new fires. The ember wash descends like a swarm of fire-bearing locusts. In 2002 powerful fires like these were not necessarily rare, but they weren't commonplace, either. The number of fires throughout the United States has doubled since 2005, and in several U.S. regions, including the West, fires are burning at a much higher severity.

As we lay in our shelters, I couldn't help imagining the freight train sound of a fire roaring over us. Faces, most of them from glossy black-and-white photos, cycled through my mind. During my first fire season I'd read every book I could find about wildfire, all deconstructing "tragedy fires," as they're called in the fire world. Young Men and Fire, written by Norman Maclean, was the first, and my favorite. An investigation into the 1949 Mann Gulch Fire in Montana, the book offered a minute-by-minute narrative of the fire, its change in wind direction, and the second fire ignited by crew boss Wag Dodge ahead of the flame front, which saved Dodge's life but may have killed some of the men he was charged with protecting. Young Men and Fire painted its subjects, nearly all smokejumpers, as heroes. I read it compulsively, constantly flipping back to the glossy center pages and staring at the photos of the men in their gear.

During my second year on the contract crew, in 2001, four firefighters died in Washington State, on the Thirtymile Fire. Caught in a canyon during a fire's blowup, they deployed their fire shelters but were killed by asphyxiation. Three of those who died were below the age of twenty-two. Six years after the event, John Maclean, Norman's son, published The Thirtymile Fire. In 2013, nearly an entire hotshot crew, nineteen men in total, died after deploying their fire shelters on the Yarnell Hill Fire, in Arizona. Their crew was called the Granite Mountain Hotshots. That happened less than three years after I had stopped fighting fires, which meant I was enjoying my summer—an impossibility for any hotshot. For two years I'd avoided news about wildfires, but here was this crew. These men. Nineteen lives. Although there were multiple investigations into their deaths, book deals, a film, few people asked why they were there in the first place, when fire behavior was so unpredictable. They sacrificed their lives but the fire kept burning.

And their fire shelters? Apparently the fire was too hot.

After several minutes Owen yelled for us to get up. Few people spoke as we refolded our practice shelters, put our tools away, and refilled our waters. I quietly observed, wanting to see if anyone noticed me. Other than the instructive exchanges with Jonah and Nickolas, I hadn't spoken to anyone all day.

Excerpted from HOTSHOT © 2025 by River Selby. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Atlantic Monthly Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, Inc. All rights reserved.