Fire on the Mountain

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 merely 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, smokejumpers, 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.

John N. Maclean is the author of Home Waters, a memoir of his family’s four-generation connection to Montana’s Blackfoot River, which his father, Norman Maclean, made famous in A River Runs through It. He spent thirty years at the Chicago Tribune, then wrote five nonfiction books about wildland fire that are considered a staple of fire literature. Maclean, an avid fly fisherman, lives in Washington, DC, and at a family cabin in Montana.

"The New York Times Book Review""Fire on the Mountain" renews our awe of and reverence for fire's primal, inextinguishable essence, which crosses state lines, lifetimes and generations.