that specialize in controlling wildfires. Nearly all hotshots are attached to federal land management agencies with most assigned to the U.S. Forest Service.

Early Sunday morning, June 30, the Granite Mountain Hotshot crew, the only crew in the United States that is part of a municipal fire department, left their home base at the Prescott Fire Department, and began hiking through the dense high desert scrub.

By sunset that evening, 19 members of the crew would be dead, trapped in a box canyon, engulfed in flames, six hundred yards short of the nearest town. Only the crew’s lookout, who was whisked out of danger by another hotshot crew, would survive.

While investigators have pieced together many of the minute-to-minute events, documenting exactly where and how the fire spread and the myriadare not from the truly wild fires, burning far from civilization, but instead come from places where homes and entire neighborhoods are constructed in the midst of forests and grasslands.

In the 1990s alone, an estimated 8.4 million homes were built in what fire experts call the wildland-urban interface or, fire-prone natural areas that abut settlements, according to a 2006 U.S. Forest Service report. The Arizona Republic tabulated more than 257,000 new homes in fire-prone areas statewide, and 32,000 in the Prescott Valley.

“Urban sprawl is colliding with wild lands,” said Stephen Pyne, a fire historian at Arizona State University, who has written several books about wildfire and is also a former hotshot. “That matters because these two don't mix. Fires in one don't belong in the other.”

U.S. forests and