The flames made a low roaring sound as they crawled over the dry brush and leafless trees like a line of soldiers pushing forward without fear. The walk to the fire site was a difficult trek. We’d driven almost two hours to the fire camp, and then hiked for nearly an hour through ice and snow, climbing steep inclines and through the aspens. My feet and face were numb before I even smelled smoke, but I’d forgotten about the cold hours ago, looking through the lens of my camera.

Taco ran up the hill, out of breath and drenched in sweat and dirt, stopping in front of Jubal to report. “Fuel break completed on the eastern edge.”

Smitty was behind him, panting and holding a drip torch in one hand, his pulaski in the other. Watts was holding a chain saw, his shoulders sagging. They looked equally exhausted and content, every one of them in their element and ready for their next order.

Jubal slapped him on the shoulder. “Good work.”

Tyler was supposed to have the day off, but that didn’t stop him from helping his team dig a two-foot-thick fire line. I watched him cut at the ground with the pulaski like it was nothing, directing the men around him as if a wildfire wasn’t burning the world less than a mile away.

Clicking through previous pictures, I noticed they were Tyler-heavy, but that didn’t stop me from zooming the lens and snapping another close-up of his sweaty, sooty profile against the setting sun. He was sort of beautiful—from every angle—and that made it hard for me to leave him out of a shot. The green pines stood waiting to be saved, and with the cool gray color of the smoldering smoke and the warm oranges of the fire on the horizon, tragedy made a beautiful backdrop.

“Helo’s coming in!” Jubal yelled, holding the radio to his ear. “Wind turned!”

I looked to Tyler, confused. “There’s no wind.”

“Up here there’s not. A fire makes its own weather. Farther out, we might not have wind at all, but where the fire’s burning, it’s sucking oxygen and can create thirty or forty mile per hour winds.”

More hotshots whom I hadn’t yet met had been called in. With chain saws in hand, a small group called sawyers was limbing trees to cut gaps in the canopy above, keeping the fire from hopping from one tree to another. Each sawyer had a partner called a swamper who gathered the cut limbs and bushes and threw them on the other side of the fire line.