Walking Through the Ashes

This book chronicles the story of a volunteer firefighter who finds himself helping to battle the largest wildfire in the history of the State of Arizona. Starting in the tiny village of Cibecue, Arizona on the White Mountain Apache Reservation and, eventually, encompassing the entire Mogollon Rim, the human-caused Rodeo-Chediski Fire explodes and forces the evacuation of over thirty thousand people. This story exposes the friction between the United States Forest Service and the small, rural, fire departments in the White Mountains of Arizona and details the differing viewpoints on how the fire should have been fought. The author, a former resident of Tucson, joined the Linden Fire Department in 1999 as a volunteer and on June 18th, 2002 found himself face-to-face with a huge, out-of-control wildfire that threatened to destroy whole towns and neighborhoods on the Mogollon Rim