Spare Us the Firebugs

Story and Photos by Dean Worbois

It was one hundred-plus degrees in Horseshoe Bend as Duncan led me to a window booth of a longtime favorite restaurant overlooking the river.

When he was bringing the pot to refill my coffee, I mentioned that I had just driven up from Hill Road in Boise, running west with the irrigated green to the south and the dry July foothills to the north. The wild grasses that had grown tall in the wet spring had been completely drained of moisture—turned to straw by the last two weeks of hundred-degree temperatures.

I recalled a few years earlier, when the same conditions plus a little wind had fanned a forty-foot wall of flame over a crew fighting a range fire south of town. Three young firefighters had lost their lives. 

When I mentioned the flash paper conditions along the road, Duncan launched into a story.

Three weeks earlier he and his girlfriend had moved into a home close to Banks, where the north and south forks of the Payette River join up. Because of the heat, Duncan quickly started to clear brush and trim trees on the hillside that went down to one of the world’s great whitewater rivers.