On June 4, 2021, amid flowering saguaros and prickly pear cacti, a wildfire bloomed in the Sonoran Desert in central Arizona. Its nascent flames gorged on nonnative grasses desiccated by a long, severe drought, and the fire was further nourished by the weather. A nearby weather station recorded a temperature of 36° Celsius (97° Fahrenheit). And it was so dry that the blades of firefighters’ bulldozers — used to clear brush — sparked small flames as the heavy vehicles dragged on rocks.
Fire ecologist Mary Lata of the U.S. Forest Service first heard about the fire over the radio while conducting fieldwork off to the north, in the Tonto National Forest. “I remember hearing them talking,” she says, “and little by little realizing they weren’t going to catch this one.”
By June 7, winds had blown the wildfire east-northeast into the Pinal Mountains, in the Tonto’s southern reaches. The flames ascended rapidly, overcoming rock cliffs — defying the expectations of veteran firefighters, Lata says — and sweeping through vast, unbroken stretches of chaparral. When the fire reached the highest elevations, crowned by pine forests, it swallowed those too.
The Telegraph Fire, as it’s now called, grew so intense that it began to create its own wind, its rising heat generating a convective force that sucked in air from the sides, Lata says. “Of all the fires I’ve worked on, Telegraph was the nastiest.”
On the fifth day, the fire neared the city of Globe. By then, it had already consumed an expanse that exceeded the area of Globe five times over. The blaze would go down as one of the largest conflagrations in Arizona history, engulfing some 700 square kilometers of land — equal to about half the area of Phoenix. But the fire would not swallow Globe.
Instead, on a ridge just outside the city,…
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