In 1994, a wildfire on Colorado's Storm King Mountain was wrongly identified at the outset as occurring in South Canyon.
This unintentional, seemingly minor human error was the first in a string of mistakes that would be compounded into one of the greatest tragedies in the annals of firefighting. Before it was done, fourteen courageous firefighters—men and women, hotshots, smoke jumpers, and helicopter crew—would lose their lives battling the deadly so-called South Canyon blaze.
John N. Maclean's award-winning national bestseller Fire on the Mountain is a stunning reconstruction of the killer conflagration and its aftermath—a page-turning true adventure of nature at its most unforgiving, and a powerful, indelible portrait of a unique breed of heroes who regularly and without question place their lives on the line.