Kyle Dickman

It’s a year and half before the Washburn Fire blew up near Yosemite’s famed Mariposa Grove of sequoias in mid-July of 2022, and Garrett is inside the hollowed-out trunk of a sequoia that burned in the Castle Fire. That fire, which started outside of…

“This is interesting. Not too thick,” said Jim Crawford, an atmospheric chemist wearing a motion-sickness patch behind his ear. It was afternoon in late July 2019, and Crawford was bearing down on a skein of wildfire smoke visible from the cockpit of…

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…

Around 4:00 p.m. on June 30, 2013, a 30-year-old hotshot named Christopher MacKenzie pulls a camera from his pocket and shoots a short video. Downhill from him are ten firefighters, all members of the Granite Mountain Hotshots. In the background, the…

Joe O’Brien, a research ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service, tucks his helmet into his chest, steals a breath of clean air, and steps closer to the fire now engulfing a $23,000 camera. Overhead, a drone that sounds like angry bees is darting in…

My parents like to say they raised my older brother, Garrett, and me in the Church of Seventh Day Recreationalists. As a kid growing up in Oregon, I remember asking them if we could actually stay home one weekend instead of camping or hiking or…

On a warm day in April, at the outset of the 2018 fire season, Laura Trader, a fire ecologist at Bandelier National Monument, braced herself against a 50 mile per hour wind and looked out over several hundred-thousand acres of burned land in New…

On Sunday night, like a desert hurricane, winds heavier than 70 miles per hour whipped Napa Valley, California from the northeast. Then the fires began. Were they the work of an arsonist with a sick sense of timing? Or multiple snapped power lines?…

In 2011, a New Mexico wildfire went from normal to nuclear, kicking up a 45,000-foot column of tornadic winds and burning debris. Three local scientists set out to learn why. Below, a breakdown of how a the 2011 Las Conchas wildfire blew up on June…

ON JUNE 27, 2011, A WORRIED HOMEOWNER NAMED MARK Winkel stood on his porch and pointed his telescope at a wildfire ripping through the forest several miles from his home outside Los Alamos, New Mexico. The blaze had started 12 hours earlier when a…

There’s a lot about wildfires that makes me uncomfortable. I don’t like that they raze 3,000 houses per summer, and I hate that they kill an average of 30 firefighters each season. I’m still adjusting to the once-proud pines in my New Mexico backyard…

Jake Wood founded Team Rubicon a year after returning from Afghanistan, where he served as a Marine sniper. It was January 12, 2010. Wood, then 26, was in boxers on his couch in Burbank, California, when, 16 miles west of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, a…

Every few days this spring, another small wildfire breaks out in the Pinelands, a 1.1-million-acre tract in southern New Jersey that spans seven counties and is home to some 500,000 people. So far this year, firefighters have doused the flames before…

“This thing’s going to burn until the snow flies,” Joe Flores, a Forest Service firefighter from Vernal, Utah, says to his partner, Todd Gregory, as they race ahead of yet another out-of-control wildfire. Flores, who’s fought fires for 21 years and…

Northern California’s burning. Oregon’s ablaze. Three firefighters died in Washington on Wednesday while trying to keep flames from razing the entire town of Twisp. With weeks of fire season still to go, the federal government has already spent more…

The 2015 fire season is poised to become among the worst in American history. More than 6 million acres have burned nationwide, most of that in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest, and the season has just come into its prime in drought-plagued…

If Eric Marsh had any doubts about sending one of his firefighters alone into the path of a raging wildfire near Yarnell, Arizona, the veteran superintendent didn’t speak them out loud. He certainly had reason for concern. Marsh was in command of the…

Wildfires are burning more acreage, more houses, and costing more money to control than at any point in U.S. history. And this year's fire season threatens to be as bad or worse than any in recent memory. As the first wildfires begin to burn across…

With California in the midst of a megadrought and most of the West nearly as parched, this year’s wildfires already threaten to become the biggest, costliest and most destructive in U.S. history. Scarier still is that the federal Forest Service…

On Saturday, September 23, the state of Arizona released the “Yarnell Hill Fire: Serious Accident Investigation Report,” a multi-agency investigation that looked into how, and why, 19 members of the Granite Mountain Hotshots were killed fighting a…