On the morning hours of July 3, 1994, the website of a forest fire on Storm King Mountain in Colorado was wrongly recorded with the district’s Bureau of Land Management office as occurring in South Canyon, thereby mislabeling forever one of the greatest tragedies in the annals of firefighting. That apparently small human error foreshadowed the numerous other minor mistakes that, three days later, would be compounded into the deaths of fourteen firefighters, four of these women. In this dramatic about Fire on the Hill reconstruction of the disaster and its own aftermath, John N. Maclean tells the heroic and cautionary tale of people who have been experts within their field but became the victims of character at its most unforgiving.

No one is better equipped to show this story than the author, whose father, Norman Maclean, wrote the classic accounts of Mann Gulch, TEENAGERS and Open fire, in whose publication the younger Maclean assisted after his father’s loss of life. Fire in the Mountain took almost five years to complete and involved nearly fifty thousand kilometers of auto travel. The audiobook brings to light many brand-new facts about the open fire through a large number of independence of Information Act requests and countless interviews with survivors and users of the state investigating team, among whose people refused to sign the final record after a long and bitter controversy about where in fact the blame for what happened should be placed.

Fire within the Mountain is, however, more than mere investigative journalism. While offering actions and experience storytelling at its best, it also provides deeply moving insights in to the lives and dreams of a special breed of individuals who put their personal well-being on the line within their daily jobs.