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HELP US TO NEVER LET IT HAPPEN AGAIN

Author John N. Maclean in his new book, FIRE ON THE MOUNTAIN: The True Story of the South Canyon Fire, has done a masterful job in researching and recounting the details of the moments before, during, and after this cataclysmic event. Detailing the account of the elements in fighting a major fire is akin to the particularization of the basics of a military battle, but what John Maclean has done here could never be compared to such dry analysis. While he has faithfully brought together the myriad actions, observations, and decisions that went into this complicated drama, he has also captured the soul and the humanity of the many people involved.

This book is totally engrossing. The reader experiences the gamut of emotional response to the events:  the intellectual stimulation of plotting the complicated maneuvers of firefighting, an understanding of the rush of adventure, frustration with slow bureaucratic action, foreboding, alarm, horror, and a deep, deep, deep sadness. What we hope to achieve out of studying an event like this in such excruciating detail after the fact is to gain a further understanding to help us to never let it happen again.

Joyce Meskis, Owner, Tattered Cover Book Store
KUVO Denver Radio Review

John Maclean was many-hundred miles from Montana and the lodgepole cabin his father and grandfather built when he read the first wire service account of the fire on Storm King Mountain. Twelve firefighters were dead and another two were missing near Glenwood Springs, Colorado, after a 50-acre brush fire exploded to 2000 acres in an end-of-the-afternoon windstorm. Three of the dead were smokejumpers; the other nine were members of a hotshot crew.

Maclean sat stunned in his cubbyhole in the newsroom of the Chicago Tribune. The blowup on Storm King Mountain was a mirror image of the fire that 45 years earlier killed 12 smokejumpers and a back-country guard in Montana -- and that consumed the last 14 years of his famous father's life. Norman Maclean had agonized over the Mann Gulch Fire, hoping to help the survivors and surviving families understand what happened late on the afternoon of August 5, 1949, on an incline above the Missouri River. And why.

John Maclean knew that he would have to write about the fire on Storm King Mountain. He also knew that he didn't want to.

Sherry Devlin
The Missoulian

Maclean weaves a riveting tale that gradually builds to the horror of July 6 when the fire, pushed by 50 mph winds, chased the firefighters up a steep slope and overtook them. Maclean has done a masterful job of showing the chaos of underfunded, undermanned government agencies struggling to make their best guesses as to where best to deploy their resources as well as detailing the breakdowns in communication that contributed to the tragedy.

Mark Eddy
Denver Post

The wildfires at Mann Gulch and Storm King Mountain invite comparisons for how they burned and who they killed; the books on each -- one by the father, one by the son -- will invite comparisons, too. But the books and the writers are too different in style and purpose to judge one against the other.

John Maclean explores the South Canyon Fire with a different attitude and with different skills than those his father brought to study Mann Gulch. John Maclean, a former newspaper reporter and editor, gives readers thorough and compelling journalism.

Maclean's reporting is exhaustive, drawing from nearly 10,000 pages of official reports, plus countless interviews, news reports, visits to Storm King and Mann Gulch -- nearly five years of work. Maclean's prose isn't as impressive as his reporting, but it doesn't need to be. His writing is meant to serve his reporting, to reveal what he learned in a clear and honest way that won't bore the reader. It doesn't.

Michael Downs
The Missoulian