Yarnell Memorial Trail: The Beginning

June 28th, 2013: Lightning ignites a wildfire near Yarnell, Arizona.  Two days later nineteen firefighters from the city of Prescott were overrun and killed attempting to contain the fire.  The Yarnell Hill fire proved to be the deadliest wildfire the state of Arizona had ever experienced and the greatest loss of firefighters in the line of duty this country had seen since September 11th.

Now, nearly three years after the incident, the American Conservation Experience is helping to build a memorial trail to commemorate the Granite Mountain Hotshots who lost their lives that day.  The trail itself is going to be the memorial with commemorative plaques for each member of the crew placed throughout the walk which leads to the site where the firefighters were trapped and eventually killed.

For this project ACE sent a total of three crews, roughly eight people each, to work on the trail at the same time. The crew that I was assigned to is the crew that will be doing most of the rock work for the project (at least in the beginning). This means we'll be building steps and retaining walls where the trail is too steep to be made only of dirt.  This first hitch involved a lot of training both in general trail building and rock work for our crew specifically.

The first staircase we built consisted of four steps, three anchors, a keystone, and a capstone.  The steps' functions are pretty self explanatory, those are the ones you step on.  The anchors are there to keep the staircase in its place.  Some staircases have anchors running along both sides but for these steps we were able to use the hillside to anchor our steps on one side.  The keystone goes at the bottom of the staircase and usually gets completely covered in dirt so you don't know it's there once it's in place. Its purpose is to keep the steps from sliding forward by acting as a sort of front anchor. The capstone is the stone that secures the keystone to the anchors. The two pictures above show the staircase with just one step plus anchors, keystone, and capstone (left) and the staircase once it was finished (right).  The whole thing took about four days for myself and two others to complete it.  It was tough work both mentally and physically but we learned a ton along the way. I love how tangible the results are with this kind of work.  That staircase isn't going anywhere for a hundred years and we could see our progress right in front of us as we worked.

As I suspected, the sights were quite beautiful for this project. The sunrise and sunset painted the entire sky blazing yellows, reds, and oranges.  Especially when there was light cloud cover.  The low dessert is its own interesting and unique ecosystem full of every type of prickly thing you can imagine.  Every night we fall asleep to the sound of javelinas and coyotes barking and yelping in the distance.  Looking in any direction you see shrubby desert in the foreground and hazy, blue mountains in the distance.  My friend from California tells me that the haze is actually smog from Phoenix but even so I think it completes the scene quite nicely.  It gives the mountains a mystical sort of fuzziness.  I see the milky way every night before I go to bed (often accompanied by a handful of shooting starts)  and Jupiter and Venus are there every morning when I wake up.  All in all it's quite a beautiful place to work/live in if I do say so myself.


I will be working on this project for the next few months. Hopefully our end date will be when the trail is finished but that entirely depends on how fast we can work.  Either way you can expect to see a lot more pictures of desert and steps because that will be my life until mid April.  As always thanks for reading. Catch'a next time!