Chances are you’ve heard the story about the Mann Gulch Fire.
If you haven’t, here is a brief refresher.
On August 5, 1945, 15 smoke jumpers lept from a plane with the mission to control and direct the fire.
It should have been fairly easy, but when they got there, they discovered shifting winds had blown the fire up to 60 acres. Still, they thought it would be possible to control the blaze, so after a few passes to size up the fire, they jumped.
But, wanting to make sure they got to the fire quickly, they jumped from a higher-than-normal elevation, which caused some of their equipment to be damaged. Worse, the chute that was carrying the radios didn’t deploy, and their communication equipment shattered.
Thinking the fire to be a “ten o’clock fire”—meaning it would be out by ten am the next morning—they approached the fire in a more cavalier manner than they might have otherwise done so, where they found a lone man—Jim Harrison, a fire guard from nearby Meriwether Canyon Campground. Harrison was a former smoke jumper who took the job as a fire guard because it was safer.
As the crew approached the fire, they noticed it was starting spot fires ahead of itself, and the wind was blowing directly towards them. They tried to set up a line of defence, but the gulch they were in was creating a natural chimney effect, and the fire was far more serious than they expected.
The obvious way out was towards the nearby Missouri River, but as they moved towards the river, sparks flew overhead and started a fire between them and the river.
The only way for them to escape was up and onto the rocky north ridge, where there wasn’t anything for the flames to burn.
But they weren’t going to make it. The fire was catching up. It was one of the first times that a fire was blowing up, and in the space of ten minutes it grew from an estimated 60 acres to 3000 acres.
While the men struggled up the steep, rocky hill (sometimes with as much as a 75 percent incline) the fire was helped by the uphill direction, and began to catch up faster.
After only a few minutes, the crew foreman, Wag Dodge, realized the men were not going to make it, so he ordered them to drop their tools to lighten their load, allowing them to move faster.
And this is where we find one of the oddest and saddest parts of the story, because a number of the men refused to do so.
Here’s quoting from Norman McLean’s book on the subject, Young Men and Fire.
“Some of them wouldn’t abandon their heavy tools, even after Dodge’s order. Diettert, one of the most intelligent of the crew, continued carrying both his tools until Rumsey caught up with him, took his shovel and leaned it against a pine tree. Just a little further on, Rumsey and Sallee passed…Jim Harrison, who, having been on the fire all afternoon, was now exhausted. He was sitting with his heavy pack on and was making no effort to take it off.”
What happened next is the stuff of legends. Wag Dodge, realizing the crew wasn’t going to make it, so he set fire to the grass in front of him. In the few moments before the fire caught up to him, it burned a patch of grass, creating a space where the fire wouldn’t be able to burn.
This should have been the big heroic moment, as the crew gathered in the burned patch, finding salvation from the fire. Instead, only Dodge realized that the fire wouldn’t be able to burn the space that was already burned. The rest ran for the top of the hill.
Only four of the fifteen made it to the top, and of those, two managed to find a way out of the smoke and into an area of exposed rock.
It was a tragedy, and ranks seventh in a list of deadliest wildland firefighter incidents. It is also one of the most famous, as it was where the idea of an escape fire was first put into practice But one of the most interesting parts of the story is where people in the crew refused to drop their tools.
Interesting, because it is not unique.
For instance, naval seamen, when forced into the water, will often refuse to remove their steel-toed shoes. Karl Wallenda, the world famous tight-rope walker, fell to his death clutching his balance pole, when he could have easily dropped it and grabbed the wire that he was walking on. And that whole movie trope of the fighter pilot who refuses to eject as his plane is going down? Isn’t just a Hollywood invention.
There’s more stories like this of people who hold on to the tools, even when those tools are not appropriate.
So why do people, in the face of disaster, hold on to their tools, even if it might mean death?
Because it’s what they know. Letting go of the tool means changing their mind. Changing how they think. Approach a problem. It was, in the words of Karl Weick, a “cosmology event”, well outside their experience. Yet they tried to use traditional tools and approaches to deal with it.
It is a great metaphor for how we sometimes approach problems. You know the old chestnut: to a man with a hammer, every problem seems a nail. Sometimes we think that we can put out that fire with a pulaski and a shovel, even though the flames are 30 feet high and it’s coming at us faster than Noah Lyles. (That’s me trying to pretend I pay attention to the Olympics, but I had to look it up; I was going to say Ben Johnson, but…well…)
Sometimes, you need to put your head down and your back into it and do the work you know how to do.
But sometimes, you have to drop the tools and try something different, because new and different problems require new and different solutions.
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.
