Dispatch From a World on Fire

It’s 6 am in mid-July, and I’m standing in a fairground turned firefighter camp in the small town of Ridgeway, Colorado, listening to a morning briefing about the 38,000-acre Gold Mountain fire just to the east. Fingers of smoke settle in drainages coming off the Cimarron range and San Juan Mountains stretching skyward around us. The sky is cloudless and light blue as alpenglow paints the peaks nearby. Fire experts give weather forecasts (monsoonal rains predicted), containment updates (14 percent), safety protocols, and more.

In every direction on the compass from where we stand, there are a dozen plus fires raging, varying in intensity and size. Some are record-breaking like the Aspen Acres near Pueblo, east of the Continental Divide. It has burned over 100,000 acres and destroyed 337 homes and over 800 structures so far. Between Aspen Acres and Gold Mountain is another fire as well—the Elk Fire, cresting the wooded 10,000-foot ridgelines. And the infernos aren’t just limited to Colorado. So far, it’s been a record fire season for the American West, one that is stretching resources and teams across the nation. Real-time apps that track wildfires are lit up with orange icons, showing blazes across almost every Western state: Utah’s Babylon, Oregon’s Grasshopper Fire near Mount Hood, eastern Washington’s wildfires torching Spokane, the Quail Springs blaze by Nevada’s Area 51.  As a result, Washington’s under a state of emergency and the United States as a whole is at Planning Level 5, or PL5, the highest level—which means that every fire crew, hotshot team, helicopter and resource is requested or in use.

Globally, current wildfire statistics are equally alarming. Some 7.4 million acres have burned across Canada, with much still burning. France, Spain and Greece are all facing extreme blazes and evacuations. With fires raging across cities, counties, and continents, 2026 is proving to be one of the most severe fire seasons yet.

At the Ridgeway fairground, a safety expert announces updates over a loudspeaker to hundreds of firefighters and support crews taking in the information: “We are near the peak of this. Details matter. Be focused and take care of each other.” Nearly everyone here is wearing forest-green cargo pants and boots and clutching large cups of black coffee. Patches and logos adorn shirts, ball caps and hoodies displaying unit teams and regions: Alpine, Salt Lake, Redwood. Some 900 firefighters from 37 states and the Virgin Islands have traveled here—nearly doubling Ridgeway’s normal population—to fight the blaze that’s still visible in pockets on the mountain looming above us. To support them, a pop-up mobile tent and trailer town has been erected and organized meticulously. It boasts briefing spaces, offices, dining facilities and specialized catering trailers that ensure each firefighter get 5,000 calories a day—all coordinated to support units on the ground cutting to fire breaks as well as those at the fire line.

Despite the clear morning sunrise, a heaviness hangs over us. Two days prior, an experienced Canadian firefighting helicopter pilot, Nicolas Dale, crashed while dipping water from Silver Jack Reservoir just to the northeast. A few witnessed the tragedy, but no one knows what went wrong. 

After the briefing, I meet Jamie Carpenter, a team leader with Incident Team 2 from Boulder County, Colorado. Carpenter has worked as a firefighter for 22 years and is currently managing roughly 100 people, about four to five crews, as well as equipment and resources, across a two-mile stretch of fire line just north.  I ask him about the toughest part of the job. After pausing, he swallows back some emotions and says, “Our work is inherently dangerous, so the hardest part is knowing that I’m putting people in harm’s way. Despite our best efforts to mitigate hazard, sometimes people get hurt and worse.” After a pause, he adds with a cracked voice, “It’s hard.”

By 7 AM, a line of trucks carrying firefighters, chainsaws, and tools turns left from the fairgrounds and heads to the front lines of the Gold Mountain fire. Those left at the fairground retreat to a command office where maps and data fill tables and walls. Leaders record video updates for the pubic while others from the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, flight operations, and more hunker on phones and laptops and orchestrate logistics.

The incident command team working the Gold Mountain fire during my visit is one of many called in for 14-day stints.  They are made up of specialists from federal and local authorities, typically organized by region. After their two-week duty, most will get only a few days off before being putting back in rotation to move to another fire, wherever they are needed. And this summer, they are needed everywhere.

Salt Lake 1

Twelve hours later, I meet Cameron Sessor at a road closure on the west boundary of Section Foxtrot. (Large fires are organized geographically by incident command centers, with paramilitary tactical frameworks based on regions—starting with Alpha, and Zulu, and filling in with sections as the fire grows.) He is captain with Salt Lake 1, a team of 21 firefighters who have spent seven years working together. Sessor himself has worked as a firefighter for 12 years. He hopes his current team will gain Hotshot status soon. Hotshots are elite, 20-person firefighting teams that tackle the most dangerous, remote and complex wildland fires. There are just over 100 interagency Hotshot crews in the U.S., all of which are heavily vetted and thus frequently requested. Right now, they are in high demand.

Sessor and his crew are covered in sweat and dirt, but they are visibly excited about their work. “It was a great day,” Sessor says, brimming with adrenaline. He shows me videos of the men cutting lines days earlier in Arizona as flames towered behind them. After Arizona, Sessor’s team was quickly relocated to Gold Mountain, where their expertise was specifically requested.  I make portraits of the entire team. The firefighters stare into my lens with hardened eyes, but as their teammates rib them, many light up with laughter, revealing bright smiles. Their enthusiasm and camaraderie are palpable.  If they reach their Hotshot status goal, it would elevate their responsibility, stature, and demand. It would also heighten their risk.

Jamie Carpenter, who leads Section Foxtrot and every crew in it, drives past, the last to leave for the day. He, too, is covered in dirt. He waves and heads to camp for dinner. Later, Carpenter tells me that Salt Lake 1 was brought in by request to attack the fire more aggressively.  “They are as good or better than any crew I’ve seen,” he says.

When I ask Sessor about the risk he and his team face day to day, week to week, his answer surprises me. “The hardest part of the job, over the past 12 years has been the work-to-home balance and the transition back into normal life,” he says. “Last summer I was gone for about 120 days with little time off. You’re living in a highly structured, high-intensity environment for months where everything is urgent and regimented, then suddenly you’re dropped into the complete opposite. No structure, no schedule, just quiet.”

This season, Sessor’s team has already been on the road for five 14-day tours and worked the frontlines in four states on a half-dozen fire. He expects they will be needed to travel and work on four or five more tours through the end of October.

From the Above

The week before meeting the firefighters, I’d flown in a single engine plane at 13,500 feet over the Rocky Mountains around the outskirts of the Gold Mountain and Elk Fires, beyond restricted airspaces. Philip Winfrey, a veteran mountain pilot, manned the controls navigating the weather, altitude, airspace and smoke.  For a brief period, I opened a side door for a clearer view of the chaos below. A biting alpine air buffeted and cooled the cockpit—a reprieve from the intense 100-degree desert heat we had flown through earlier.  The smell and acrid taste of smoke filled our senses.

What I saw—and didn’t see—was jaw-dropping. Below us, at about 13,000 feet, was a treeless alpine ridge. But directly below that, nothing was visible.  A thick blanket of blueish-white smoke shrouded every valley floor and flanked the ridges of every mountain and ridge, including two 14,000-foot peaks, Uncompahgre and Wetterhorn, to the south. And off the right wingtip, rising from the sea of grey, was a plume of black smoke spiraling into a mushroom cloud that rose thousands of feet above us. It hauntingly mirrored scenes of a nuclear explosion.  But this was just one nuclear-sized hot spot in one fire among many.

“That plume has to be 25,000 feet or higher,” Winfrey crackled over the wind in our headsets. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” I responded. At the base of the plume, orange flames danced unpredictably—exploding and leaping into glowing towers twice the height of the tall pines they engulfed—then vanished behind walls of smoke.

As the sun set, we turned north and flew to Grand Junction. The bird’s-eye perspective revealed not just the scale of the infernos but also the reach of the smoke that is blanketing much of Colorado and beyond. In every direction, everywhere, we could see the haze of smoke from fires across the west.

A few days later, I flew over the detritus of the Snyder Fire, which had burned over 28,000 acres over roughly three weeks, but had since stopped.  A black swath snaked through the red-rock desert country. Below us lay a ranch with hay meadows and hundred-year-old cottonwood trees lining a creek, now transformed to white and black ash. The creek was dry and the trees were mostly incinerated.

Below one sandstone butte, the pilot pointed out where three Rifle Helitack firefighters—38-year-old Emily Barker, 27-year-old Nick Hutcherson, and 27-year-old Sydney Watson—had been trapped and killed in a burnover incident on June 27 as the Knowles and Gore Fires merged with the Snyder Fire. A fourth firefighter, 43-year-old Nathan Matthews, succumbed to his injuries on July 24 and a fifth is still recovering.  A fire report stated that dry fuels and winds up to 50 mph had created extreme fire behavior and low smoke prevented a helicopter rescue. The Snyder Fire remains the deadliest of 2026.

We turned our plane east and flew toward the Continental Divide where the Willow Fire was burning up at 11,000 feet, just below tree line near Mount Massive, a 14,000-foot peak east of Leadville. To the northwest, new fires had just started near Meeker, Colorado; to the southwest, the 64,000-plus acre Ferris Fire remained active.  And to the east, Aspen Acres fire by Pueblo was tracking to be the largest wildfire in the state. 

Burn Scars

Driving home from the makeshift firefighter camp at Ridgeway, along Colorado State Highway 133, I end up passing a barren hillside that has limited vegetation to this day, one of the scars from Colorado’s infamous 1994 Wake Fire. At the time, it was a record-breaking inferno that burned 3,850 acres, one-tenth the size of this year’s Gold Mountain Fire. Further on, I can see the memorial of the Storm King Mountain Fire on a distant hill. Started by lightning on July 2, 1994, it was one of the deadliest wildfires the state had ever experienced. It burned only 2,000 acres, small compared to today’s standards, but tragically killed 14 Hotshots from different teams.

Shortly after, I turn into my town. I pass multiple large neon highway signs warning of extreme fire danger. To the north, I note the barren swaths of tree-less burn scars left by a fire that hit closer to home.

Eight years ago, I stared into the jaws of a July inferno that would eventually torch over 15,000 acres. The Lake Christine Fire started at a shooting range just above the town of Basalt. Instead of fireworks that 4th, the neighborhood watched flames consume juniper trees behind town as a helicopter crew did what they could to contain it. In my 1890s-era stick house—a defenseless tinder box—we stayed up most the night, poised to protect what we could with garden hoses. By morning, winds had billowed the small blaze into a fury that swept over the mountain above us and toward town. Flames leapt 200 feet in the air.  As the town scrambled to evacuate and save what valuables we could, I snapped photos between hurried trips to my truck—of both the fire and of my home, figuring it would be the last I’d see it.

But then something happened. An air force of planes arrived in the sky: first, single-engine tankers and then a DC-10 that unleashed a slurry of red fire retardant a few hundred yards from my front door.  It returned less than an hour later with another load. It had diverted from another fire when word got out about how close our historic train-junction town was to being swallowed by flames.

“Without a doubt, that tanker saved the town,” says Scott Thompson, the local fire chief of 26 years and a firefighter for 45. The next day, Thompson’s team coordinated with firefighters and 50 wildland fire trucks from across the region to hold the fire’s southern boundary at a commercial section of town.

Jon McNally, a helicopter pilot who has flown for 20 years and fought fires for ten of them, lives near Basalt. He flies all over the country as a contract pilot—for much of it, long-lining buckets of water on fires. Last year, he worked as a relief pilot for the Grand Canyon Bravo Dragon fire, which was the largest wildfire in the U.S. in 2025, excluding Alaska.  This year, he has worked in Colorado, Arizona, and California.  For six years, he worked with some of the firefighters of Rifle Helitack who ended up perishing at the Snyder Fire.  On July 6, he flew their “Last Call” flyover at their memorial and posted it was the “hardest flight in twenty years of flying.”

He notes that every fire he faces, no matter where it’s located, is now called “unprecedented.” The size, the speed, the unpredictability—it has often not been seen before. “We’ve never seen a fire run six miles in a few hours,” he says. “Now we do.” 

McNally also stresses that aerial firefighting doesn’t stop fires, it only slows them. “You need boots on the ground to follow your work and ensure everything is out. Everything needs to work right.” When asked about the blaze that nearly consumed the town he calls home, McNally says, “Basalt got lucky. A lot of things lined up.” 

For those managing fires on front lines, it is becoming harder to know when to fight them or to let fuels burn down, which can trigger age-old natural, regeneration cycles, but also can risk losing control.  Native communities did controlled burns for years and many fire experts today recommend them, but in an era where hotter and drier are the new norm, everything is harder to predict.  When asked about that balance, McNally responds, “It’s a tough call. You are damned if you do or damned if you don’t.” For his part, Fire Chief Thompson wants to see more forest management, fire breaks and fuel removal to help manage blazes. “Homes, especially in remote regions, need to be updated,” he warns, “or built to withstand a fire without a fire truck showing up.”

Fire Season All Year

How long will the fires continue to rage across the state, the West, and beyond? The answer may be a dire one. Decades of drought in the southwest, along with one of the worst snowpacks in recorded history this past winter in the seven-state Colorado River Basin, and a record spring heat wave, have created exponential amounts of dangerous dry fuel loads just waiting to burn.

Monsoonal rains have helped slow some fires in the West such as Gold Mountain, but with rain comes lightning and flooding. “It’s been so hot and dry that the soils are crusted and baked, much like what a fire does to them, preventing the rains to even soak in,” Thompson tells me, adding, “my stress level is at 100. I go to bed every night right now thinking about lightning strikes and the next fire.” In addition to a series of small lightning-strike fires—five in ten days, which his team was able to suppress—he has witnessed flash floods occurring “not in steep ravines, but across farmer’s fields because the ground is so hardened and dry.”

Every firefighter I spoke with out here echoes a common sentiment.  There no longer is one fire season. It now continues all year. Everyone from fire chiefs to hotshots, pilots and meteorologists—they all say that the weather is weirder, less predictable, and the extreme drought keeps fires burning longer.

Meanwhile, Salt Lake 1, the team I met at the Gold Mountain fire in Colorado, took only four days off before being called back to work. This time, they were heading to Idaho’s Washington County to fight the Tartar Fire. On the evening of August 1, Captain Sessor sent me videos of he and other team members working night and day, flames glowing all around them. The next morning, despite their efforts, the fire had grown exponentially and ran to over 97,000 acres, forcing highway closures and evacuations.

“We have been nonstop going for 26 hours,” Sessor wrote via text the next day. “The fire blew out and then doubled in size. It hit the town last night. It was a fight. We lost houses. Livestock.  Saved some. Unreal. Looks like a bomb went off.”

They ended doing a 32-hour shift and three more hard days.  During a brief moment of reprieve, he told me by phone, “One-third of our year will be on the road on the frontlines—fighting fire.”

Two days later, Sessor contacted me to report that a Sikorsky S-64 “skycrane,” one of the helicopters they had regularly worked with this year, had crashed in Utah with two souls on board while fighting the Widemouth 2 fire, which has burned over 115,000 acres in a month. Extreme fire conditions prevented search and rescue teams from reaching the site for more than a day. The news of their deaths on August 7 deepened the solemn mood that has settled across firefighting base camps and incident command centers across the West.

“We relied on that specific ship on multiple fire years this year. I never met the pilot or spotter in person, but they helped us succeed more than once,” Sessor texted, adding that he still has the helicopter’s call sign “written on my yellows,”  those bright, fire-resistant long-sleeve shirts worn by wildland firefighters.  “It’s a hard reminder of how dangerous this job is and that we need to take time to appreciate our crew members, families and friends,” he concluded.

The next morning, he and his team returned to work a blaze somewhere on the “the line”.