Outside Magazine

Sometime before 7 A.M. on November 8, Kit Bailey, an assistant chief with the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, got a call about a new wildfire that sounded ominous. It had started 30 minutes earlier on a ridge above Pulga, an old Northern California gold-mining town notched into the windy and wooded Feather River Canyon.

Bailey, a 57-year-old German-Irish man with gray hair and a handlebar mustache, knew the area well. During a 39-year career that included stints as a hotshot, smoke jumper, and a chief officer on a Type 1 team, he’d fought many “stubborn fucking fires” in the canyon. Tucked into the Sierra Nevada foothills, the place had always provided ideal habitat for blazes, which could stay fueled for months by the grasses and pines clinging to the gorge’s steep walls.

The Camp Fire—named for a tributary of the Feather River—didn’t stay confined for long. A northwest wind blowing at 40 miles an hour pushed flames into a grassy swale on the canyon’s north slopes. Within minutes, 700 feet of hillside turned to ash. Soon the fire vaulted into a stand of ponderosa pines on the plateau north of the Feather. Smoke and heat tugged burning needles off branches. Then the wind snatched them up, and a blizzard of flaming matches was suddenly cartwheeling thousands of feet into the air. The needles landed a mile or more ahead of the main blaze, and new hot spots bloomed. The fire leapfrogged north and west, burning an area the size of Central Park every eight minutes.