Wildfire or a DEA Cover-up? Yosemite National Park

In the summer of 2013, one of the largest wildfires in California history tore through the Sierra Nevada, burning more than 257,000 acres and leaving homes, ranches and beloved landscapes destroyed in its wake. As the Rim Fire grew, so did the rumors about who was responsible. Was it a drug cartel, rafters, government mismanagement, or a local hunter who knew these forests better than most? COME SEE US ON TOUR - LIMITED TICKETS LEFT! For a full list of our sources, visit npadpodcast.com/episodes For the latest NPAD updates, group travel details, merch and more, follow us on npadpodcast.com and our socials: Instagram: @‌nationalparkafterdarkTikTok: @‌nationalparkafterdark Support the show by becoming an Outsider and receive ad free listening, bonus content and more on Patreon or Apple Podcasts. Want to see our faces? Catch full episodes on our YouTube Page! Thank you to this week’s partners! Ka’ChavaGo to Ka’Chava: The Premium All-in-One Nutrition Shake | Ka'Chava and use code NPAD for 15% off your first order. IQBARGet 20% off all IQBAR products, plus FREE shipping. Text PARK to 64000. Message and data rates may apply. See terms for details. QuinceFind the fall pieces you’ll reach for most at Women's Best Sellers — Mongolian Cashmere, Silk & Care. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers, plus get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK, too. SmallsGet 60% off your first order, plus free shipping AND free treats for life at Fresh Human-Grade Cat Food Delivery | Smalls. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:31Speaker 01

  Did you know that if your spouse goes missing, but you don't tell anyone, that's not necessarily a crime? That surprising fact is at the heart of the brand-new season of Bear Brook, the award-winning true crime podcast from New Hampshire Public Radio. I'm your host, Jason Moon. In season three, A Private Matter, we investigate another New Hampshire mystery. A beloved Christmas tree farmer with dementia vanishes from his small town. His wife never reports him missing. Can he still be found?

• 1:03Speaker 02

  If you knew Jay as well as I do, he's private. He doesn't want everybody to know his business.

• 1:11Speaker 03

  Pat, I don't believe you.

• 1:14Speaker 04

  I kind of revert back to that Bear Brook saying, what if we were to just come across something? And I wrote down, she said, I found him.

• 1:24Speaker 01

  Follow Bear Brook on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:32Cassandra Yahnian?

  Wildfires can change a landscape in a matter of hours. Forests that have stood for generations can disappear, wildlife is displaced, livestock killed, and homes reduced to foundations surrounded by ash. Even after the flames are gone, the loss remains. For the people who know these places best, it was losing the view from their kitchen window, the trail they had walked since childhood, the pasture their family had worked for generations, and a landscape they assumed would always be there. In the summer of 2013, that kind of loss came to California's Sierra Nevada when the Rim Fire tore across more than a quarter million acres.

• 2:14Cassandra Yahnian?

  At the time, it was the third-largest wildfire in California's history, and for weeks, thousands of firefighters battled a fire that consumed everything in front of it. But when something this devastating happens, eventually, people begin asking how it happened, and then they start asking who is responsible. Before long, people were blaming marijuana growers, drug cartels, rafters, environmentalists, the Forest Service, and eventually, one of their own. Because when people lose a place they love, knowing how it happened isn't enough. They need someone to hold accountable. Welcome to National Park After Dark.

• 3:12Danielle LaRock?

  Hey, everyone. Welcome back to National Park After Dark. My name's Danielle.

• 3:16Cassandra Yahnian?

  And I'm Cassie, and we're going to Yosemite today.

• 3:19Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah, yeah, we are. And you were just there, in the flesh.

• 3:23Cassandra Yahnian?

  I was. I was. I was there, and that's actually what inspired me to cover this episode today because I went to visit. I visit a good friend of mine, Claire, who is a guide in Yosemite. She's amazing. If you got her, tell her I say hi. But she showed me around Yosemite in a really cool way, and I got to see it from her point of view, which is really cool. If you know a guide in a location, they just know all the best spots. But while we were there, I was at the Evergreen Lodge, and I met a bunch of other guides who asked me to cover this subject on the podcast. So hello, everybody. I am officially covering it. And it's a really interesting story that I really didn't know anything about. So we're going to talk about the Rim Fire today.

• 4:08Danielle LaRock?

  Personal request. That's a first, I think. For someone to come up to your face and be like, please cover this, and you say, okay.

• 4:17Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yeah. Yeah, maybe it is. Maybe it is a first.

• 4:21Danielle LaRock?

  Well, before you fulfill all their dreams, we do have a couple of things to say before we say more things for the next hour. And that's, we're going on tour, and this is just your weekly reminder of that. And we just realized, you can tell we haven't done this before. We just realized we haven't said a formal, hey, just so you know, we're doing VIPs in select cities. And we thought we would mention that because it's important.

• 4:51Cassandra Yahnian?

  Maybe you want to know what that is. We're doing VIPs, where we're doing an intimate Q and A that comes with signed tour posters with your ticket, and we're doing it in a select amount of cities. So check out where you're going. I know we're definitely doing it in Chicago, and there's a bunch of tickets left. So if you want to see us in Chicago and get VIP, it is certainly available. But yeah, check out your city where you are, see if VIP is available because we are doing it, and it'll be really fun. We can chat. Ask us anything you want.

• 5:21Danielle LaRock?

  Anything. You know I'm an open book, so.

• 5:24Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 5:25Danielle LaRock?

  Well, maybe not. Yeah. I have a PR person. You know, in interviews with celebrities, they're like, hey, yeah, you can have 20 minutes with her, but you can't ask her this. Don't even think about bringing this up.

• 5:38Cassandra Yahnian?

  Think about asking about it. My rule is, don't ask me about any movies.

• 5:43Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah, you won't get far in that conversation, so you might as well just not do it.

• 5:48Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yeah. Just assume I've never seen a movie in my whole life, and do not ask me at the VIP.

• 6:00Danielle LaRock?

  All right, tell me a Yosemite story.

• 6:02Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yeah, so we are going to Yosemite, and we're actually also going to the Stanalos National Forest, which is right outside, it borders Yosemite and extends outward for a long time beyond it. This fire actually started in the national forest and then made its way into Yosemite. So we're kind of all in this region. And this is a really interesting story because it's not only about this fire that ravaged the area, but it's about the cause of it and kind of a lot of drama that unfolded and rumors and a lot of things that happened following the spire.

• 6:43Danielle LaRock?

  Okay.

• 6:45Cassandra Yahnian?

  In the summer of 2013, California was in the middle of a serious drought. In the central Sierra Nevada, the effects were being felt across the Stanalos National Forest. The nearly 900,000-acre forest stretches across the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada, just west and northwest of Yosemite National Park. It's the kind of place where people come to spend their summers outside, camping beneath towering pines, hiking and backpacking into the mountains, fishing along its rivers and lakes, swimming, boating, and exploring miles of forest roads. There are developed campgrounds and small mountain communities, but also enormous stretches of rugged backcountry where roads disappear

• 7:27Cassandra Yahnian?

  and the terrain becomes steep, remote, and difficult to access. And by August of 2013, all of it was incredibly dry. The central Sierra Nevada was experiencing its second straight year of a significant drought. Over the previous two years, the area had received only about 50% to 70% of its normal precipitation. And in the eight months leading up to August, it had received less than half of what was typical. Summers there are naturally dry. Most of the moisture that feeds these forests arrives during the colder months, much of it falling as snow at higher elevations, with very little precipitation typically falling between June and September.

• 8:09Cassandra Yahnian?

  But after two unusually dry years, the forest was heading into the hottest part of the summer, already starved for moisture. Grass and brush had dried out, fallen branches and logs contained less moisture, and dead vegetation covering the forest floor was ready to burn. The longer the drought continued, the more fuel there was available to a potential wildfire. And because so much of the national forest is made up of steep slopes and deep, remote canyons, any fire that did start could be incredibly difficult for firefighters to reach and contain. Conditions had become serious enough that the Forest Service placed fire restrictions across the national forest, limiting where visitors could have campfires.

• 8:52Cassandra Yahnian?

  And this was mostly, it had to be in an established campground, in a campsite, at an established fire pit. You couldn't just have fires anywhere. By the middle of August, the forest was primed to burn. That summer, 31-year-old Keith Matthew Emerald found himself back in the same area where he had grown up, this time on a solo hunting trip. Keith knew these forests well, and with deer season underway, he packed up his bow and headed into the backcountry around Jawbone Ridge, near the confluence of the Klavi and the Toowalamie Rivers. This was an incredibly remote part of the forest. Jawbone Ridge rises above the river canyon, where the slopes are incredibly steep and access is limited.

• 9:37Cassandra Yahnian?

  For someone hunting alone, getting in and out meant navigating a landscape that was already difficult under normal circumstances. But on the afternoon of August 17, while he was out there, smoke began rising from the area. At around 3:15 PM, a fire was reported near Jawbone Ridge, and it quickly became clear that Keith was in a dangerous position. He was still down in the canyon as the fire began spreading through the surrounding vegetation, cutting off his ability to hike back out the way he had come. With the fire blocking his way out, Keith stayed down in the canyon and waited. He knew that the column of smoke rising above him would eventually bring firefighting aircrafts to the area, and that being spotted from the air might be the best chance for him to get out.

• 10:23Cassandra Yahnian?

  So he made his way towards the river and climbed onto a large, flat rock where he would be easier to see from above. About an hour after the fire was reported, a helicopter came into the canyon. At the controls was 70-year-old Jerry Bonner, a veteran pilot with decades of experience flying helicopters in California. From the air, Jerry and his crew spotted Keith waiting on the rocks below. In such steep terrain, there weren't many places to safely put a helicopter down, but the rock gave Jerry just enough room to reach him. He maneuvered the helicopter into the canyon, landed long enough for Keith to climb aboard, and carried him out to safety. Once they were back on the ground, Keith was handed over to a Forest

• 11:06Cassandra Yahnian?

  Service employee who offered to help him get back to his truck. Once Keith was back in town, the Forest Service employee drove him to the home of his friend, Tandon Olson. Keith still needed to retrieve his truck, so Tandon agreed to drive him back towards where he had left it. On the drive, the two men talked about what had just happened. Keith had gone into the forest for a hunting trip and ended up being rescued by a helicopter from a wildfire. But then Keith told Tandon something he wasn't expecting. Keith said that the fire was his fault, that he had started it. Keith had just admitted to his friend that he was responsible for the fire burning behind them, but at that point, there was little indication of just how

• 11:50Cassandra Yahnian?

  consequential that admission would become. Small wildfires were not unusual in this part of California, and for the local residents watching smoke rise from the national forest, this initially looked like another fire that crews would be able to contain before it became anything extraordinary. Even as firefighters began responding, the fire remained relatively small during its first couple of days. But then, two days after the fire began, the winds shifted. The flames were pushed out of the canyon and into miles of dry forest beyond it, and in a single day, the fire nearly quadrupled in size. As the fire grew, so did the response to it,

• 12:31Cassandra Yahnian?

  and investigators began trying to determine exactly how it had started. Keith eventually admitted to authorities what he had already told Tandon, that he was responsible. He explained that while hunting, he had stopped to make lunch and built a small fire in an existing fire ring to heat a can of soup. When he was finished, he buried the can and some other trash in the fire pit, but hot embers escaped and landed in the surrounding dry vegetation. The hillside caught fire, and in the steep terrain, Keith said there was nothing he could do to bring it back under control. By then, the consequences of that fire were becoming increasingly

• 13:11Cassandra Yahnian?

  difficult to comprehend. The Rim Fire, as it was named, was spreading across thousands of acres, drawing an enormous firefighting response and threatening communities and wilderness far beyond the canyon where it began. Eventually, it crossed into Yosemite National Park, where it would burn more than 77,000 acres, roughly 10% of the entire park, and the largest fire in Yosemite's recorded history at the time. The flames threatened the park's giant sequoia groves and burned through areas around Hetch Hetchy, Hodgson Meadow, and along Tioga Road. Before it was finally over, the Rim Fire would burn more than 257,000 acres in total,

• 13:55Cassandra Yahnian?

  becoming the third-largest wildfire in California's history at the time, and causing more than $127 million in damages. All for a can of soup.

• 14:07Danielle LaRock?

  All for a can of soup.

• 14:09Cassandra Yahnian?

  I hope it was a really good can of soup.

• 14:13Danielle LaRock?

  And I don't want to speak too soon because I don't know where this is going, but the feeling that I have right now is, at least he owned up to it.

• 14:20Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yeah, at least he's saying, "Hey, I did it. This happened."

• 14:25Danielle LaRock?

  I'm sure they would have, through investigation, discovered the source and linked it to human error.

• 14:32Cassandra Yahnian?

  For sure.

• 14:33Danielle LaRock?

  But for him to come forward that early on and say, "Hey, that was my mess up, like my fuck up," it takes... You gotta commend him for that. I don't know.

• 14:44Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yeah, and that was my thought too, when I was first.

• 14:48Danielle LaRock?

  Okay, and see, I don't want to get... I don't want to support him too much.

• 14:52Cassandra Yahnian?

  No, I totally agree with you. I think that was my thought first, and then we get into the weeds of it and we'll talk about this confession as we go.

• 15:01Danielle LaRock?

  Okay, okay.

• 15:02Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yeah, this story is going to get really complicated, and there's going to be a lot of views and questions of how this fire started and why it was handled the way it was.

• 15:14Danielle LaRock?

  It goes beyond soup?

• 15:16Cassandra Yahnian?

  It goes way beyond the soup.

• 15:17Danielle LaRock?

  Okay, all right.

• 15:19Cassandra Yahnian?

  The infamous soup. So of course, not long after Keith admitted to authorities that he had started this fire, he was arrested, because you can't just start a... Even if it's an accident, you can't just start a wildfire that decimates hundreds of thousands of years.

• 15:33Danielle LaRock?

  You just burned 77,000 acres. Someone's gotta pay.

• 15:35Cassandra Yahnian?

  257,000, 77,000 in the forest, or in the national park. So you can't just like walk away scot-free from that. And knowing all of this, it kind of seems like it's a pretty straightforward case. He admitted he started the fire, he explained how it happened, and then he was arrested. But that information didn't become public nearly as quickly as the fire was spreading. While investigators were working behind the scenes, the people living in the path of the Rim Fire were watching this enormous disaster unfold without having many answers about how it started, why it had been allowed to grow so large, or what officials were doing to stop it. And those questions became increasingly urgent as the

• 16:19Cassandra Yahnian?

  fire grew. Communities along Highway 120 were suddenly dealing with smoke, road closures, evacuation warnings, and the possibility that the fire could reach their own homes. Groveland, a small historic town outside of the national forest and along one of the main routes into Yosemite, became one of the communities watching the fire particularly closely. People there were accustomed to living with wildfire risk, which was part of what made the Rim Fire so confusing. Small fires started in the surrounding forest all the time, and residents were used to seeing firefighters respond and put them out. This one had also started small, so people wanted to know why this particular fire had been able

• 17:03Cassandra Yahnian?

  to escape the canyon and become so enormous. They were essentially like, watching this all unfold, and they're like, "Hey, is anyone gonna do anything? What's going on? Why, why? We see fires all the time. Why is this one getting so out of control, and why aren't people taking care of it?" But during those crucial first days, there wasn't a clear public explanation. The Forest Service would later acknowledge that communication with the surrounding communities could have been much better, including holding more public meetings and giving residents more opportunities to ask questions and voice their concerns. Without that, though, people were left trying to piece together what was happening from

• 17:44Cassandra Yahnian?

  whatever information that they could get. And in a small town, rumors began to spread. It wasn't until nearly a week after the fire began that officials held a public meeting in Groveland. By then, the Rim Fire had become a major emergency, and the room was filled with people looking for answers. But there was still no official determination of what had caused it, and Keith's admission had not yet become public. During that meeting, Twain Heart Fire Chief Todd McNeil offered one possibility. He told the crowd that the fire was highly suspected of having originated at an illegal marijuana grow site somewhere

• 18:25Cassandra Yahnian?

  within the national forest. It wasn't presented as this conclusion of a completed investigation, but in a community that was desperate for answers, this theory took hold. Illegal marijuana cultivation on remote stretches of public land was a real problem in California. Law enforcement agencies had discovered large grow operations hidden inside national forests, sometimes containing thousands of plants, and raids on these sites were happening in this particular region. So when residents heard that the Rim Fire might have begun at an illegal grow site, there was already enough truth surrounding that idea to make it feel plausible.

• 19:06Danielle LaRock?

  And if you're familiar with, or want to know more about, weed in national parks, Cassie did a whole episode on it.

• 19:14Cassandra Yahnian?

  I did. I titled it, "Don't Grow Weed in National Parks."

• 19:17Danielle LaRock?

  No, I think you said, "You can't grow weed."

• 19:20Cassandra Yahnian?

  Oh.

• 19:21Danielle LaRock?

  In a national... You are very firm about it.

• 19:23Cassandra Yahnian?

  You can't do it. You technically, like, they will grow in national parks, you're good, but like, you can't. It's super illegal.

• 19:31Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah, so illegal.

• 19:35Cassandra Yahnian?

  I think you shouldn't do that. That's a bad idea.

• 19:37Danielle LaRock?

  And so bad for the environment.

• 19:39Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yes, that was a huge thing I went into for that episode, is just how much trash and like weird irrigation systems are put in, and how detrimental these grow operations are to the environment, but also how dangerous they are to just regular old people going for a hike, because you can't see that stuff.

• 19:59Danielle LaRock?

  You're gonna stumble across some...

• 20:00Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yeah, you can't know that stuff, because there are some dangerous people behind those grows. So if you stumble on a grow...

• 20:07Danielle LaRock?

  Back away slowly and quietly.

• 20:10Cassandra Yahnian?

  And don't be seen. Yeah. So this is now with this whole thing with the rim fire and this possible grow operation, there's of course, a lot of lore and concern around that. So people were really holding on to this idea that maybe it started because of an illegal grow. For a lot of locals, this explanation made a lot more sense than the idea that someone from the area had accidentally started it. It was kind of like no one from around here would do something like that. It has to be some crazy cartel activity that's happening. People who lived and hunted around the national forest understood how dry the forest was and how dangerous fire could be at that time of year. So the thought that

• 20:54Cassandra Yahnian?

  a person local to the area could have started the fire was like outrageous. It was like, no one from around here would ever do that. The thinking was that a local hunter or someone recreating in that area would have known better. Someone illegally growing marijuana deep in the forest, on the other hand, became an easy explanation. Then footage from the Groveland meeting made its way onto YouTube. McNeil's speculation was separated from much of the uncertainty surrounding it. And online, the distinction between highly suspected and this is what happened quickly began to disappear. Before long, the story circulating wasn't that investigators were considering an illegal marijuana grow as a possible

• 21:35Cassandra Yahnian?

  origin. It was that marijuana growers had started the rim fire. And of course, you know, when things get on the internet, things-

• 21:44Danielle LaRock?

  It's like wildfire.

• 21:45Cassandra Yahnian?

  It sure it's, from there, spread like wildfire. One version claimed the grow wasn't being operated by a few people hiding plants in the woods. It actually belonged to a Mexican drug cartel. According to the rumor, authorities had discovered the operation and the marijuana needed to be destroyed, leaving two options: burn it where it was, or put it through a wood chipper. Somehow, the marijuana had been burned, the fire had escaped, and now the federal government was covering up the fact that its own actions had caused one of the largest wildfires in California's history. So essentially, people were saying, this is a DEA cover up. They went in, they

• 22:27Cassandra Yahnian?

  fucked up, and they burned the forest down, and the DEA, the DEA is trying to cover their tracks.

• 22:33Danielle LaRock?

  The DEA is like, actually, it was a guy that was trying to cook dinner, and we have nothing to do with it.

• 22:39Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yeah. Well, at this point, no one even knows about Keith. They're not saying anything.

• 22:44Danielle LaRock?

  Soup is not in the picture yet.

• 22:45Cassandra Yahnian?

  The soup's not even the picture. People are just kind of like piecing together things. And they're like, this is why they're being so hush hush about it. This is why no one's told us the cause of the fire is because the DEA is involved.

• 22:58Danielle LaRock?

  And I commend the, I don't want to say creativity, because it's not creative. It's, you know, you're piecing all this different information together that, yeah, maybe, but I just find it so interesting that it's not just like a, hey, maybe it's the government. It's like, no, this is what happened. And it's this whole sequence of events that someone just made up. But there's so many reasons.

• 23:24Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yeah. And people are like, we know this happened.

• 23:29Danielle LaRock?

  It's like, who has the time?

• 23:30Cassandra Yahnian?

  With no evidence.

• 23:33Danielle LaRock?

  But, I mean, sometimes it is the government, and you have to call it out first, like that, you know? So.

• 23:41Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yeah, you can't trust the government all the time. And it does feel government-y.

• 23:47Cassandra Yahnian?

  No, but there were a lot of things that, we'll get into that, show that this explanation is a little bit farfetched.

• 23:56Danielle LaRock?

  Like, if you were to say, like, if you were to say, yeah, it was an illegal grow operation, and the cartel was involved, and like, something must have happened, and they like burned their, their supply?

• 24:10Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yeah.

• 24:10Danielle LaRock?

  And it got out of hand. Okay. But you're, you're bringing wood chippers involved are now in the, as like an option. It's like, where did that come from?

• 24:20Cassandra Yahnian?

  Well, I guess, actually, and this is funny, because I did not know this. I was the one in the research, but wood chippers are used when confiscating illegal grows, is they'll put the weed plants through wood chippers.

• 24:33Danielle LaRock?

  Oh, so it can't be-

• 24:34Cassandra Yahnian?

  Used.

• 24:35Danielle LaRock?

  And it's used, yeah. It's rendered destroyed. Yeah.

• 24:38Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yeah. So people were like-

• 24:41Danielle LaRock?

  People with a lot of, people who come up with explanations, it's like, how do you know that?

• 24:45Cassandra Yahnian?

  They do their research. They do their research. They're like, I have no evidence of this, but these are the things I know about this subject and why I'm connecting it.

• 24:53Danielle LaRock?

  It's like, I have a very particular, what is it? What's the Liam Neeson thing?

• 24:58Cassandra Yahnian?

  He's like-

• 24:59Danielle LaRock?

  A particular set of skills.

• 25:00Cassandra Yahnian?

  Skills.

• 25:07Cassandra Yahnian?

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• 26:33Cassandra Yahnian?

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• 27:47Cassandra Yahnian?

  Well, with all of these rumors and stuff that were going around, there were even supposed witnesses. People claimed marijuana had been seen at the site, which seemed to offer confirmation that the story was true. And once again, there was just enough reality underneath the rumor to keep it alive. Federal and local law enforcement really had been conducting marijuana eradication operations in the surrounding area at the time. So people were like-

• 28:15Danielle LaRock?

  It makes sense.

• 28:16Cassandra Yahnian?

  Makes sense. Nail in the coffin. We got it. We have all the evidence we need here. They really are here right now.

• 28:23Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah, we did it, Joe. Yeah, let's, we got them.

• 28:27Cassandra Yahnian?

  But authorities came in and were like, hey, that's not really how this works. This whole story that you guys are coming up with is not really how we deal with things. When marijuana plants were seized from illegal grow sites, DEA officers said that the contraband was removed and destroyed. They did not just set enormous piles of marijuana on fire, especially in the middle of a drought-stricken national forest. They would never, the DEA would never go in and light up a marijuana grow site. So they were like, that doesn't make any sense. And in this particular case, authorities said that the plants had been removed from the grow site, that they did find in the area, and it was put in a wood

• 29:10Cassandra Yahnian?

  chipper at another location. So they're like, none of this makes any sense. We didn't start any fires. We didn't even take care of the marijuana plants in this location. We pulled them and moved them.

• 29:24Danielle LaRock?

  Good call on the wood chipper, but it-

• 29:27Cassandra Yahnian?

  Everything else is wrong.

• 29:31Cassandra Yahnian?

  Oh, but instead of disproving this rumor, the absence of evidence of what they were talking about, people interpreted it still as a DEA cover up. There was actually someone who was so convinced that they were lying, that they called around to local wood chipper rental places and asked if anyone had rented a wood chipper within the last several days or whatever. And when the answer was no- That was like the evidence that they needed, that they were lying and that this was a DEA cover up.

• 30:06Danielle LaRock?

  Okay.

• 30:07Cassandra Yahnian?

  They're like, this is suspicious. But the marijuana theory wasn't the only explanation that was circulating. In the absence of an official account of what had happened on Jawbone Ridge, people began looking at who else might have been in that remote canyon on August 17th. And that led them to another group that regularly traveled through the national forest. And that was rafters and kayakers. The Tuolumne River is actually a major whitewater destination. Its wild and scenic stretch runs through a remote canyon west of Yosemite with rapids that attract commercial rafting trips and experienced private boaters. Because most of the surrounding country is difficult to reach by road,

• 30:50Cassandra Yahnian?

  boaters were among the relatively small number of people who regularly traveled through and camped in the canyon. On the night the rim fire began, there had been a large rafting group camping along the Tuolumne River. And that was enough for a whole other rumor to begin taking shape in the community. And that was that this group of rafters had caused the fire. But one person in the rafting community had a very different understanding of what had happened. Marty McDonald, who owned Sierra Mac River Trips, a local rafting company that had been operating trips in the Tuolumne for years, had a different view. His business was only about a quarter mile from where he could see the area around Jawbone

• 31:32Cassandra Yahnian?

  Ridge, putting him close to the fire from its very beginning. Marty was actually one of the first people who reported the fire. On the afternoon of August 17th, he spotted the first wisps of smoke rising from Jawbone Ridge and called it in. From where he was, he could watch the response begin and he saw a helicopter fly into the canyon and pick someone up. At the time, he didn't know who that person was or why he had been down there. However, not long afterwards, Marty said a friend who worked for the Forest Service called him and told him what had happened. According to Marty, his friend said that the person rescued by the helicopter was a hunter and that the hunter had started the fire.

• 32:16Cassandra Yahnian?

  Then that friend had called him back after reporting all this information to him. And this time, he told Marty not to repeat anything that he had heard. And this was information that was to stay between the two of them. According to Marty, information about how the fire had started was being kept quiet because officials were worried about what might happen if his identity became public while people were watching the rim fire destroy enormous amounts of forest around them. Marty later explained, quote, "The Forest Service was protecting the guy because they were worried if news got out of who had started it, then someone would just go kill him." Because people at this point were losing their homes, people are really upset, the

• 33:01Cassandra Yahnian?

  whole forest is on fire, there's evacuations and people in the community were really upset. So he said, "It was to protect this guy from locals trying to kill him." Whether or not everyone involved would characterize the decision that way, it helps explain this strange position that Marty found himself in after finding out this information. He knew what had happened. Meanwhile, outside of this small circle of people who knew, his whole community was trying to figure out, trying to figure it out. And with the lack of information, a lot of people were blaming other people within the community. And Marty's just sitting on this information while they're blaming illegal grows and now they're blaming the rafting community that he is part of as this.

• 33:45Cassandra Yahnian?

  And he's like, okay, I'm supposed to stay silent while all of this is happening. I kind of know what happened, but I'm supposed to stay silent while everyone's blaming rafting community? I don't.

• 33:56Danielle LaRock?

  It's like a witch hunt.

• 33:57Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yeah. Yeah. So he's in a really hard position. And the view of the locals around them and how they concluded that it had to be rafters was that there's no one who goes this far in the canyon. It's like I mentioned before, it's super remote. So the only people who are there are either rafters and kayakers or hunters. And because there had been a rafting group there at the time, it was just assumed people kind of didn't blame hunters. And part of that was because local hunters didn't believe that a hunter could be responsible for this. It was basically like hunters know the forest really well, they're respectful, they know this area, a hunter would never do that.

• 34:42Danielle LaRock?

  Mm hmm.

• 34:43Cassandra Yahnian?

  And Marty actually said that the attitude of the community was, no, it couldn't be a hunter, it had to be a tree hugger type. So it was like this weird rift between more of like hippie, like free loving people versus hunters. People are basically just trying to point fingers at the people who weren't them, essentially.

• 35:04Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah, like it can't be from my side of the street because

• 35:07Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yeah.

• 35:09Danielle LaRock?

  of X, Y, and Z, we would never. But I just, my first thought is, okay, but everybody is a human, I think, involved in this and people make mistakes, no matter what group you associate with. I have a feeling it wasn't a mistake. I don't know what's happening or about to happen, but if it was just the soup thing, like it, people make mistakes and it's awful and it sucks.

• 35:34Cassandra Yahnian?

  It's like, everyone makes mistakes. Everybody has.

• 35:37Danielle LaRock?

  Everyone has those days.

• 35:39Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yeah. What is that from?

• 35:41Danielle LaRock?

  Um, I don't know, because I'm also in my mind having, when you were, so you said rumors like a hundred times throughout this episode so far.

• 35:50Cassandra Yahnian?

  Thinking Lindsay Lohan. I'm sick of being followed. I'm tired of people talking.

• 35:59Danielle LaRock?

  I pray that you set that song as the social media post, please. I'm begging you. But no, to answer your question, I don't know what that other, what was it again?

• 36:11Cassandra Yahnian?

  But you know the song I'm talking about. I have to look it up.

• 36:14Danielle LaRock?

  Say it again.

• 36:15Cassandra Yahnian?

  Everybody has those days, everyone makes mistakes, everybody has those days.

• 36:19Danielle LaRock?

  Is it Hilary Duff?

• 36:21Cassandra Yahnian?

  I feel like it is. It's Hannah Montana.

• 36:24Danielle LaRock?

  Oh.

• 36:24Cassandra Yahnian?

  Nobody.

• 36:27Cassandra Yahnian?

  Close enough.

• 36:28Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah. Oh goodness, okay, sorry. But yeah, so going back to that conversation, I, I understand having a lot of pride in your group of being responsible outdoorsmen and that the likelihood of something like that happening being very low. But to just be like, no, I speak for everybody in this group, in this community, and there's no way it could be us is

• 36:56Cassandra Yahnian?

  They would never.

• 36:57Danielle LaRock?

  A little farfetched, but yeah. I don't know if I'd have that confidence, that confidence to say that.

• 37:04Cassandra Yahnian?

  No, I, you know, I, I see like part of it because like, I don't know. If there was a wildfire and someone was blaming you or like my parents or, or like Al or something like that, I would be like, no, it would never. And then if it like turned out to be you, I would be shocked. You know, so like, I get it, but to like, say like a whole community of people, like I wouldn't be like, Vermonters would never, you know, like if someone in Vermont started a fire. Um, so I can kind of see it, but also I think people just don't want it to be their own community. They don't want it's, it makes you look bad.

• 37:42Danielle LaRock?

  Take the blame for that, you know, it's not a good look.

• 37:45Cassandra Yahnian?

  So it is not. But with all of this going on, soon people were approaching Marty and demanding to know who had been rafting on the river that day. Cause they, they wanted names, they were out for, they were basically, the community was kind of out for blood. They're like, the government isn't telling us what's going on. We know it was rafters. Give us the list of people who had been renting through your company or, or who had gone out on this guided trip. We need to know who was there and we need to know who started it. So wanting to stop the finger pointing in the wrong direction, he actually was like, I have to tell people what I know. And he told people that it was, yeah, he did. He was like, we're not pointing at people in my community when I know it wasn't.

• 38:29Cassandra Yahnian?

  So he told people that it was a hunter that started the fire, but no one believed him. They were like, that's, that can't be true.

• 38:38Danielle LaRock?

  So you're just saying that because you're trying to deflect.

• 38:41Cassandra Yahnian?

  From your community who did this. Essentially, yeah. So you can kind of see like how this is getting really confusing because, and a lot of this is lack of information from the government who has decided not to say anything. So now people are really pointing the pictures.

• 38:59Danielle LaRock?

  Just how it goes.

• 39:00Cassandra Yahnian?

  It sure is.

• 39:02Danielle LaRock?

  You know, with lack of information, you fill in the, our minds want answers, they fill in the blanks and it's just human nature to do that. And it's super dangerous. And that's why I think lack of communication is just one of the worst things. And I know there's a myriad of reasons of why sometimes details aren't given. But I think for by and large, it's just a super bad recipe for disaster because it can make things so much worse.

• 39:31Cassandra Yahnian?

  Totally. And now you have people out with pitchforks trying to figure out who did this because you have the one group that believes it was a marijuana operation that had started the fire. And then now you have this other group that thinks it's the rafters. But others were becoming convinced that the federal government knew exactly what had happened and they were deliberately hiding it. So now people are also getting very distrustful of the government.

• 39:58Danielle LaRock?

  In a different way.

• 40:00Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yeah, in a different way. And pieces of real information existed along with every version of the story, you know, that was happening, like where the fire was spreading, when it started, things like that. But without officials publicly explaining what the investigators already knew, those pieces were being rearranged into all these different versions. So while the actual fire continued burning across the Sierra Nevada, another kind of wildfire was spreading through the communities around it. And that was the rumors of who was responsible, why the truth was supposedly being hidden, and what else the government might not be telling them. And eventually, the rumors moved beyond the question of who had started

• 40:42Cassandra Yahnian?

  the Rim Fire, because people also wanted to know why, once it had started, the Forest Service hadn't been able to stop it. One explanation that began circulating was that firefighters had essentially been forced to fight with one hand tied behind their backs. The Tuolumne River had been designated a wild and scenic river in the 1980s, a federal protection intended to preserve certain free flowing rivers and their surrounding environments. Some people in the area had opposed those protections for years, believing federal regulations placed too many restrictions on how the surrounding land could be used and managed. Now, as the Rim Fire burned through the canyon, an old frustration became

• 41:24Cassandra Yahnian?

  attached to a new rumor. And that was that the Forest Service hadn't been allowed to drop fire retardant near the Tuolumne because of its wild and scenic designation. So again, information's not getting passed to these people. People are assuming things because that was not true at all. Aircrafts were heavily involved in fighting the Rim Fire. By September 1, roughly two weeks into the incident, crews had already dropped about 1.7 million gallons of fire retardant and another 1.4 million gallons of water. Just a few days later, the amount of retardant dropped had climbed to approximately 2.3 million gallons. Air tankers, including

• 42:07Cassandra Yahnian?

  massive DC10s, were being used to lay retardant ahead of the fire's path. So if regulations weren't preventing firefighters from attacking the fire, why couldn't thousands of firefighters, engines, bulldozers, helicopters, and air tankers put it out? The answer had much more to do with the forest, the fire was burning through, and the conditions that existed there long before August 17. For more than a century, the United States had largely approached wildfires as something that needed to be extinguished. The policy protected communities and valuable timber in the short term, but in many forests that had historically experienced frequent

• 42:48Cassandra Yahnian?

  lower intensity fires, it also interrupted a natural process. Smaller fires that once burned through grasses, brush, fallen branches, and young trees were repeatedly suppressed. Over time, in some areas, that allowed vegetation and dead material to accumulate and forests to become denser. Then, of course, came the drought. The winter of 2012 into 2013 was amongst the driest California had experienced, and the Rim Fire begun during the second consecutive year of a significant drought in the Sierra Nevada. When the fire reached those extremely dry fuels, it was capable of producing the kind of extreme fire behavior

• 43:31Cassandra Yahnian?

  that made direct suppression extraordinarily difficult. And there is an important piece of evidence from the Rim Fire that shows how much previous forest management could matter. When the fire eventually crossed into portions of Yosemite that had undergone years of prescribed burning and fuel reduction, researchers found that those previously treated forests generally experienced less severe fire effects. Around Hodgston Meadow, the National Park Service reported that the Rim Fire actually moved around some previously treated areas where surface fuels had been reduced and the forest canopy was more open. So the argument over forest management wasn't entirely invented by conspiracy theorists.

• 44:15Cassandra Yahnian?

  There was, and still is, a legitimate debate over how forests like this one should be managed and how prescribed fire, thinning, logging, and other treatments should be used. So it's like essentially, they have a real life example of Yosemite that's being managed, and it burned way less and was way more manageable versus this one that is in the national forest that is just absolutely out of control.

• 44:42Cassandra Yahnian?

  Because by the time the Rim Fire made its major run, firefighters were confronting an enormous amount of dry fuel, extreme terrain, and weather capable of pushing fire faster than crews could safely build containment lines. Incident reports described both the growth potential and terrain difficulty as extreme, and warned that embers could travel far enough ahead of the main fire to ignite new fires beyond the retardant lines. At its height, more than 5,000 firefighters were working the incident. Ultimately, the fire burned 257,314 acres, more than 402 square miles of the Sierra Nevada. It destroyed 11

• 45:24Cassandra Yahnian?

  homes, three commercial buildings, and 98 other structures, injured 10 people, and cost more than 127 million just to suppress it. The losses to ranchers, businesses, watersheds, and the surrounding communities went far beyond that number. Sean Crook's family ranch was among the properties caught in the fire. More than 500 acres of that ranch burned, along with fencing, grazing land, and around 100 cattle. The losses ran into the millions, but for Sean, the damage wasn't only financial. This was land he had grown up on. After the fire, looking across hundreds of acres that had been transformed in a matter of hours,

• 46:07Cassandra Yahnian?

  he realized that his children would never know the ranch exactly as he had known it. Still, Sean didn't primarily blame Keith Emerald for what had happened. He blamed the federal government. In his view, decades of restrictions on logging and grazing had allowed the national forest to become dangerously overgrown, creating the fuel that turned a small fire into a catastrophe. His position was summed up by the green baseball cap he wore, bearing the words, "Log it, graze it, or watch it burn."

• 46:38Danielle LaRock?

  Or just, we could just rake up everything.

• 46:41Cassandra Yahnian?

  Just sweep the floor.

• 46:42Danielle LaRock?

  Just rake the forests and we're good.

• 46:45Cassandra Yahnian?

  Easy.

• 46:46Danielle LaRock?

  Obviously, yeah.

• 46:47Cassandra Yahnian?

  Obviously. Vacuum.

• 46:53Cassandra Yahnian?

  And there was another reason that Sean had difficulty accepting the government's version of events. And at this point, the government does eventually come out and give Keith's name, especially as it started circulating through the community. So his name does get released. But for Sean, who had just lost his whole ranch, he had a hard time accepting the government saying this because he actually knew Keith. Keith had grown up in the area, his family had been there for generations, and Sean had grown up around him. Keith was the same age as Sean's brother. And to Sean, the idea that someone who knew these mountains and understood how dry they became in August would build a fire out there didn't make

• 47:34Cassandra Yahnian?

  sense. And he basically said Keith would have known better. He didn't do this. Or he couldn't do this. So even when authorities did eventually name Keith as the man responsible, he remained skeptical. Maybe Keith had been framed, maybe the government needed someone to blame. And even if Keith really had started it, Sean believed that only explained the spark. It didn't explain why that spark had been able to consume more than a quarter million acres. To him, that responsibility still belonged to the Forest Service. And by this point, the anger surrounding the Rim Fire wasn't difficult to understand. For

• 48:15Cassandra Yahnian?

  the people living in Tuolumne County, it had burned through ranches and private timberland, destroyed those 11 homes, three commercial buildings, and dozens of other structures, and left ranchers trying to account for cattle that had been killed or scattered across thousands of burned acres. Miles of fencing were damaged, grazing lands were gone, timber had burned, and buildings and equipment that families depended on for their livelihoods had been destroyed. The losses to the local ranching community alone were expected to reach into the millions. And even for the people whose houses were still standing, the landscape around them had been completely transformed. Families who had lived and worked on the

• 48:56Cassandra Yahnian?

  same land for generations were looking out at blackened pastures, dead livestock, and forests that would take decades to resemble what it had been before. So as rumors continued circulating about who had started the fire, the question of responsibility became deeply personal. One Tuolumne County rancher, who didn't give his name publicly, admitted that he didn't want to believe someone local could have done something so careless. But after everything he and his neighbors had lost, he also couldn't ignore how angry he had become. Speaking about whoever was responsible for starting the fire, he admitted, quote, "The loss and hurt is so big, I'd shoot that sucker."

• 49:40Danielle LaRock?

  I mean, when you lose everything, or witness your entire community lose, you know, their livelihoods and everything they've worked for, and their futures, or at least the foreseeable future, it's hard to grapple with.

• 49:58Cassandra Yahnian?

  And over something so silly and preventable.

• 50:01Danielle LaRock?

  Violence is never the answer. But I can understand the frustration. I mean, I've said a lot of things in frustration.

• 50:08Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yeah.

• 50:13Cassandra Yahnian?

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• 50:57Cassandra Yahnian?

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• 51:39Cassandra Yahnian?

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• 52:23Cassandra Yahnian?

  After you purchase, they will ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them our show sent you. Yeah. Well, this, these kinds of comments, like I'd shoot him and stuff, was exactly the kind of anger that Keith was afraid of, of course, with his name being out there. He's like, my life is kind of on the line here. Six days after the rim fire began, federal investigators interviewed him about what had happened on Jawbone Ridge. But instead of telling them the same story he had apparently told his friend Tandon immediately after his rescue, Keith gave them a very different explanation. He said that while moving across the steep hillside, he had slipped and caused a rock slide.

• 53:08Cassandra Yahnian?

  According to Keith, a large boulder rolled downhill, striking other rocks as it went, and he believed those collisions had somehow created a spark that ignited the dry vegetation. He told investigators that several minutes later, he smelled smoke. Investigators went back to the area where the rim fire had started to see whether that explanation was actually possible. They examined the origin and looked at the rocks and conditions there, but what they found didn't support Keith's story. Investigators concluded that the specific conditions necessary for rocks to create the kind of spark capable of igniting the vegetation weren't present, and they found no evidence that a rock slide had started the fire.

• 53:51Cassandra Yahnian?

  So when they came back and asked Keith about it again, his explanation changed. As rumors about illegal marijuana operations circled through the community, and Keith had heard these rumors, Keith suggested that perhaps marijuana growers had been responsible. He told investigators that grow operations existed in the area and wondered whether growers might have seen him moving through the forest in camouflage, mistaken him for law enforcement, and started a fire near their crop. But investigators couldn't find evidence supporting that explanation either. There was no marijuana grow at the fire's point of origin, and now Keith had offered investigators two different explanations for a fire he had initially told his friend,

• 54:36Cassandra Yahnian?

  and he did tell the investigators that he had started himself. The changing stories made investigators increasingly suspicious. They told Keith that what they were finding didn't match what he was telling them, but they also made an important distinction. If this had genuinely been an accident, they told him that criminal charges or severe civil penalties were unlikely. What concerned them was the possibility that he was continuing to lie about what had happened. So they're like, hey, if this was truly an accident, we're just doing an investigation here. You're not going to be persecuted for this, but we really, we need to know what, what happened here. But Keith's fear wasn't necessarily limited to what might happen in a courtroom.

• 55:21Cassandra Yahnian?

  He knew the people who lived there. He had grown up among them, and hearing these same rumors and how angry people were and how desperate they were to identify someone responsible, he was really worried to point to himself. But eventually Keith told investigators his concerns, that he was worried about retaliation, and he eventually signed a written statement admitting that his campfire had started the rim fire. He reportedly asked investigators whether they could keep his name out of the media until the snow fell or the winter, when the immediate danger and anger surrounding the fire might have subsided. So he was like, hey, I did do it, but please don't tell anyone until the fire's out and people kind of cool off a little bit.

• 56:05Cassandra Yahnian?

  Eventually, he confessed. In a statement given under oath and on video, he returned to the story he had apparently told immediately after the fire had began. He said he had built a small fire using pine needles so he could heat up his lunch, and afterwards had put his soup can and some trash into the fire pit. According to Keith, hot embers escaped, blew uphill into the dry vegetation, and started a fire that he couldn't get back under control. But by then, investigators had also documented all of the other explanations that Keith had given them. In August 2014, almost exactly a year after the rim fire began, a federal grand jury

• 56:47Cassandra Yahnian?

  indicted him on four counts related to starting the fire and allegedly lying to investigators. Keith pleaded not guilty in US District Court in Fresno and was released on a $60,000 bond while he waited for his case to go to trial. If convicted, Keith faced years in federal prison and hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines. His defense attorneys were also challenging one of the most important pieces of evidence against him, and that was his confession. They argued that investigators had coerced him into it and wanted to have it thrown out. That made the other witnesses in the case incredibly important. Two men in particular could place Keith at the center of what was happening during those

• 57:32Cassandra Yahnian?

  first hours of the rim fire. One was his friend Tandon Olson, the man who had driven Keith back to his truck after his helicopter rescue, and who investigators said could testify about his interactions with Keith immediately afterwards. The other was Gerald Jerry Bonner, the helicopter pilot involved in Keith's rescue near the fire's point of origin, who prosecutors expected to testify about the discovery of the fire, the rescue, and the communication surrounding those first critical moments. Both men were expected to become important witnesses when Keith's case went before a jury. Neither one of them would live long enough to testify against him.

• 58:15Cassandra Yahnian?

  On February 2nd, 2015, 34-year-old Tandon Olson was at work on a construction project near Tiger Creek in Amador County, California. He worked for Sierra Mountain Construction, which was doing work connected to the Amador Water Agency's gravity supply line project. That day, Tandon was operating a man lift along a gravel access road when something went terribly wrong. Tandon was working alone when the machinery apparently got too close to the edge of the road and went over a steep embankment. The lift and Tandon tumbled roughly 60 feet down the slope and into a water canal below. Because he was alone, no one saw it happen.

• 58:57Cassandra Yahnian?

  About an hour passed before his coworkers realized he was missing and went looking for him. When they found him, rescuers faced the added problem of reaching him inside the canal. Water flow had been reduced so crews could safely get down to Tandon and pull him out. He was alive, but badly injured. Tandon was airlifted to Sutter Roseville Medical Center where he remained for more than two weeks. He never recovered from his injuries. On February 18th, 16 days after the incident, Tandon died. He was just 34 years old. His death was attributed to cardiopulmonary arrest caused by blunt force trauma he had suffered in the fall, and authorities said there was no evidence of foul play.

• 59:40Cassandra Yahnian?

  For prosecutors preparing their case against Keith, they had suddenly lost one of the people who could tell a jury what Keith had said and done immediately after the rim fire began. Then, just over two weeks later, another tragedy devastated their case. Jerry Bonner was 72 years old, but he was still working as a helicopter pilot. On March 6, 2015, Jerry was on duty at Alma Helatac Base in Santa Clara County. At around 9:00 that morning, he was found unresponsive inside his barracks. Jerry had suffered a heart attack and died there at the base. His death was officially classified as a cardiac-related on-duty fatality.

• 1:00:23Cassandra Yahnian?

  Within the span of just 16 days, two men connected to the earliest moments of the rimfire had died in completely unrelated deaths. Prosecutors needed to take them to stand and tell a jury what they personally knew. Keith had the right to have his attorneys question the witnesses against him, and with both men dead before trial, that could no longer happen. Prosecutors later acknowledged that statements from the two men were now inadmissible hearsay and couldn't be read to the jury in their absence. Because of this, in May of 2015, the case was dismissed without prejudice, meaning the government technically retained the ability to charge Keith again, but for the time

• 1:01:06Cassandra Yahnian?

  being, the criminal case against the man accused of starting one of the largest wildfires in California's history was over. And around Tooluma County, you can probably imagine what happened next. After nearly two years of rumors about marijuana growers, rafters, government cover-ups, and whether Keith had been framed, two important witnesses had died unexpectedly within weeks of another, and then the government dropped the charges. There was no evidence that either death was anything other than tragic events, but for the people who already distrusted the official story, the timing gave them one more coincidence to pick apart. It's like, all of this happened, we're suspicious, and now the two only witnesses died right before the trial?

• 1:01:51Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah, it's not great. It's not a great look. And it could have been, I mean, accidents happen, medical emergencies happen, it's not out of the realm of possibility, but it's just such suspicious timing.

• 1:02:06Cassandra Yahnian?

  For two people who don't believe in coincidences, it's quite the coincidence that this happened. And there is a book about this, and BJ Hanson, who is the author, he later wrote California's Rimfire Behind the Headlines. He offered another theory about why the deaths may have made dropping the case attractive to the federal government. Hanson anonymously interviewed members of Keith's defense team and learned that if the case had gone to trial, they intended to put the Forest Service management of the National Forest on trial right alongside Keith. They planned to argue that whatever happened on Jawbone Ridge was only the ignition, and

• 1:02:47Cassandra Yahnian?

  that decades of federal forest management decisions had created the conditions that allowed one small fire to become a quarter million acre disaster.

• 1:02:57Danielle LaRock?

  I see.

• 1:02:58Cassandra Yahnian?

  The defense intended to raise questions about fuel accumulation, fire suppression, logging restrictions, and the Forest Service's initial response to the rimfire. According to the theory presented in Hanson's book, the death of Tandon and Jerry gave prosecutors a legitimate reason to abandon the case that could have otherwise forced those questions in open court. So it was kind of like, for the government, it was a win?

• 1:03:25Danielle LaRock?

  Cause... Yeah, cause they're like, we're off the hot seat here.

• 1:03:28Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yeah. We would have been under fire in this prosecution.

• 1:03:32Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah, totally.

• 1:03:33Cassandra Yahnian?

  Still, the rimfire had raised a question that California would be forced to confront again and again in the years that followed. How could one small ignition become a fire this enormous? At more than 257,000 acres, the rimfire was the third largest wildfire in recorded California history at the time. But only seven years later, it would be dwarfed by the August complex. In 2020, dozens of fires sparked by lightning across Northern California eventually emerged and burned more than 1 million acres, becoming the first recorded California wildfire to cross that threshold. And unlike the rimfire, there was no person to blame for starting it. Lightning had provided the spark.

• 1:04:17Cassandra Yahnian?

  But interestingly, that's not how most wildfires in the United States begin. Around 85% of wildfires nationwide are caused by people. Most are accidents or the result of human activity, campfires that aren't completely extinguished, debris burns that escape, sparks from vehicles and equipment, disregarded cigarettes, fireworks, power lines, and other everyday activities that introduce a spark into dry vegetation. Arson accounts for some human-caused fires as well. One analysis of more than 1.5 million wildfires found that humans were responsible for 84% of fires, but those fires accounted for only 44% of the total acreage burned.

• 1:05:01Cassandra Yahnian?

  Lightning fires, while far less common, can become enormous because they often ignite in remote places where they aren't immediately detected or easily reached by firefighters. That doesn't mean there aren't human decisions that influence how destructive a wildfire can ultimately become. Questions about forest management, prescribed burning, development in fire-prone areas, and a hotter, drier climate have only become more urgent since 2013. But those questions are much harder to answer than identifying who lit the first flame. After the case against Keith ended, he eventually left Tooluma County, but he didn't stop talking about the rimfire.

• 1:05:42Cassandra Yahnian?

  In an interview with Rolling Stone, he offered yet another version of what had happened and argued that the federal government had made him a scapegoat. Keith maintained that investigators had coerced him into confessing, something his defense attorneys had also argued in court. They claimed federal investigators had threatened him with more serious charges while promising that if he admitted the fire had been an accident, he wouldn't be prosecuted. Keith now insisted that his confession about heating the soup wasn't the truth at all. He also claimed that he had taken a photograph showing rafters camping near the fire's point of origin, and said the government dropped its case after he finally produced it.

• 1:06:24Cassandra Yahnian?

  According to Keith, he had deliberately withheld the photograph because he wanted to expose what he believed was corruption within the investigation. He accused the Forest Service of knowing that the area had been poorly managed and needed someone else to take the responsibility when it burned. And despite everything we heard about his fear of how his community would react, Keith was now, in this interview, publicly defiant, saying, quote, "If a bunch of hippies think I started it, I couldn't care less." But Keith's later account didn't erase everything investigators had collected against him. There was his signed confession, the changing explanations he'd given investigators, his

• 1:07:06Cassandra Yahnian?

  presence near the point of origin, and the fact that he had been rescued from the canyon shortly after the fire began. Federal prosecutors had maintained that they dropped the charges because of the unexpected deaths of Tandon Olson and Jerry Bonner left them unable to prove the case beyond reasonable doubt, not because Keith had produced evidence clearing himself. And Keith continued trying to clear his name. In 2017, he went back to court seeking to have the remaining record of the case cleared, but his request was denied after the Forest Service submitted more than 100 pages of material from its investigation. So legally, the story of the rimfire ended without a verdict.

• 1:07:47Cassandra Yahnian?

  And maybe that's part of the rimfire that extends beyond Keith Emerald. After a catastrophe this enormous, people understandably want an explanation, and often they want someone to hold responsible. But grief doesn't always come with one satisfying person to blame. Eventually, the work of rebuilding had to begin. In Tooluma County, roads, bridges, and culverts damaged or threatened by the fire were inspected and repaired, while property owners faced the much more personal work of rebuilding homes, replacing fences, restoring grazing lands, and figuring out what could be salvaged from properties that had been in their families for generations. There was also a new threat to prepare for.

• 1:08:30Cassandra Yahnian?

  With so much vegetation gone, winter rains could send mud, debris, and ash running down the burned hillsides. The forest required an enormous recovery effort. The Forest Service repaired drainage systems and hundreds of miles of road, removed dangerous burned trees along nearly 200 miles of roads and recreation areas, rebuilt more than 30 miles of grazing fences, and replaced livestock water truffs destroyed in the fire. Crews spread mulch across thousands of acres of severely burned ground to protect exposed soil from erosion, while longer-term recovery plans included reforestation and reducing the huge amount of dead fuel the fire had left behind.

• 1:09:11Cassandra Yahnian?

  But the rimfire also gave fire managers an opportunity to see on an enormous scale what had worked before the fire arrived. As I mentioned before, in Yosemite, they were doing prescribed burning. The flames that had reached Hodgson Meadow, an area where managers had spent years thinning vegetation and deliberately setting prescribed fires to reduce fuel. When the rimfire reached those treated forests, it generally burned less severely and even moved around some of them. Despite the enormous fire surrounding it, no structures were lost at Hodgson Meadow. It reinforced something fire managers had already began to understand. In forests that evolved with frequent fire, eliminating fire entirely could create its

• 1:09:56Cassandra Yahnian?

  own problems. Today, Yosemite uses a combination of prescribed burns, mechanical thinning, and, under the right conditions, allowing some naturally ignited fires to burn for the benefit of the landscape. The park has continued expanding that work, using fire not as something to fight, but as a tool for creating forests that have a better chance of surviving the next big one. And there will be a next one. The Sierra Nevada is a landscape shaped by fire, and the rimfire has now become part of that landscape's history. Trees are growing again, vegetation has returned to burned hillsides, and areas that burned in 2013 may actually help slow future fires because they no longer contain the same continuous

• 1:10:41Cassandra Yahnian?

  fuels they once did. Yosemite has even incorporated the rim's fire footprint into later fire management planning, recognizing that recently burned areas can help create a more resilient landscape. For the people of Tooluma County, the fire eventually went out, but the arguments over who was responsible for everything the rimfire took from them never really did. And that is my story of the rimfire.

• 1:11:08Danielle LaRock?

  Wow. Well done.

• 1:11:11Cassandra Yahnian?

  Thank you.

• 1:11:12Danielle LaRock?

  I can understand what you were trying to explain in the beginning, that it's very complex and lots of pointing fingers, but yeah, like no resolution, right?

• 1:11:24Cassandra Yahnian?

  Mm hmm. It just kind of, it is what it is. No one, no one was really held accountable. And I think some big lessons that can just come from this one is that people who are living in fire areas and who are having their backyards and their homes and things destroyed by fires deserve communication and to know what happens and to just tell, to be honest with what's happening. I mean, these are people's lives who are affected and not to like, not to say you have to point fingers at people, but for this in particular, there were so much unnecessary rumors and stress and anxiety surrounding the whole community because the government wasn't honest.

• 1:12:08Danielle LaRock?

  Well, not only to have answers, but to better prepare for the future. How are you supposed to do better if you don't know what happened? You know, you need that information. So that's a big chunk of it. And also I couldn't help but be thinking this whole time you're talking about fire and management and all of that. But I don't know if this is from an episode you did on the podcast, a bonus episode you did, the talk we were at, at the Granite Park Chalet, or just a personal conversation.

• 1:12:42Cassandra Yahnian?

  We talked about fire a lot.

• 1:12:43Danielle LaRock?

  Many of those places. But just the history of indigenous fire management and practices and how they just need to be more integrated into fire management in the present and how, you know, we kind of messed up a lot by seeing what the indigenous cultures were doing and pivoting completely and saying, no, we're not doing that. We're going to do something completely different. I'm pretty sure, wasn't it, who was the, he was the guy who was doing the talk at the Chalet, because he was talking about the Trapper Fire. I could have sworn he was talking about.

• 1:13:23Cassandra Yahnian?

  Maybe I might have mentioned it in the episode two, but historically speaking, indigenous communities have always done prescribed burns and they've always managed forests. And when there's this misconception that when settlers got here, they saw this pristine, amazing landscape that they were like, wow.

• 1:13:45Danielle LaRock?

  Untouched.

• 1:13:45Cassandra Yahnian?

  Untouched, but that's so untrue because they were being cared for and stewarded by indigenous communities. And when settlers realized that indigenous communities were using fire practices, they were appalled. They basically said, oh my God, why would you burn this? This, that's horrible. We can't have fires. This is beautiful landscape. And they shut it all down and they said, no. And then over the years, as I kind of mentioned in this episode, without that fire suppress, there was so much fire suppression that all of this kindling basically just grew.

• 1:14:21Danielle LaRock?

  Piled up.

• 1:14:22Cassandra Yahnian?

  Piled up. And you have all these saplings and all these things that are really prone to fire that weren't there before because the forests were being taken care of better. And now some of these fires, I mean, there's a lot of reasons we're seeing these really big fires right now. But in part it is because it's, there's been so much fire suppression. But of course now we're seeing extreme droughts and temperatures are rising. And I mean, the West is just absolutely on fire this year. And it's, it's pretty scary.

• 1:14:55Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah, it's just awful because I feel like over the last, gosh, at least over the last five years, I want to say, every single summer, it's been like that.

• 1:15:06Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:07Danielle LaRock?

  You know, and I know some summers are worse than others, but just, and maybe it's like, I know it's, the trend is worsening, but just as a personal experience, being an East Coaster for most of my life, I didn't get a taste of that until I moved out west after college, you know, in my twenties, I didn't know, you know, but since then, since 2014, when I first got personal experience, living in the West, from then to now, even in my very short amount of personal experience, just witnessing it get so much worse.

• 1:15:47Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yeah. Yeah. Even on the East Coast, I mean, we never grew up with fire smoke. I cannot remember a single time in my childhood where there was ever smoke in the skies here. And now every single summer, I would say for the past at least four years, we have, and I mean, this is nothing in comparison to the West still. However, every single year, we now have a fire smoke and we have like the fire sunsets and things that have never been a thing here. And it happens for, I would say probably about a week every summer.

• 1:16:21Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:22Cassandra Yahnian?

  Which is very, very different. And when I was spending time out West this summer, I mean, I, I saw a lot of fire and Al, of course, has been working in fire for over a decade. And he is saying how bad this year is and, and how different it is. I mean, he's always been on the front lines of fires and it just feels a lot different this year.

• 1:16:47Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah. Well, rim fire, no accountability, but it's like, yeah, I wonder, not that it really, I mean, just for pure curiosity, what do you think transpired that day?

• 1:17:03Cassandra Yahnian?

  I mean, my thought is that he did have this fire that was there. It was the first thing he said. It was the first thing he told someone. My thought is that he did, he saw an old fire pit and he was like, sure, it's a fire pit. It's safe. He heated up his soup, thought it would be fine and it wasn't fine. And then it got out of control and it feels like, it feels like to me that he was feeding off of the rumors because everything he said later, all of the stories he accounted for later and excuses later, were all things that the towns were talking about.

• 1:17:39Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah, it's kind of like, yeah, he was like, oh yeah, I messed up. But there's all these other really good thoughts of like, oh, this could have happened. This could fit.

• 1:17:53Cassandra Yahnian?

  Planning some doubt in, in his responsibility. And I think at the end of the day, there was, I mean, they did have, it wasn't a full on fire ban, but they were saying you can only have fires in established campgrounds, in established fire pits. And he was way out in the backcountry. He was not in an established area and he shouldn't have, he shouldn't have had a fire at all. And because of that, people lost their homes, people lost businesses, people lost their livelihoods. And I think that because of that, someone needs to be held accountable in some way. But I do think on the other end of that, I think that he needs to have some accountability. But I also think that there's a really valid

• 1:18:35Cassandra Yahnian?

  argument for the National Forest Service relooking at how they're treating their fire management and why, and relooking at why this was able to get out of control. And I think that that was a perfectly valid argument for people to, I don't think there was like one specific person to blame. I think that it was a combination and everyone had kind of fair points here. And it's something where it doesn't have to be like, point the finger, blame someone. It's more of kind of what you said earlier of how are we going to do better if we don't learn the truth of what's happening and move forward from it? And how do we prevent this from happening again in the future?

• 1:19:15Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah, you know, it's awful. It had to happen, but it's the perfect time to reevaluate our current practices and maybe make some adjustments and modifications. So we don't have to deal with something like this in the future. And it's just, it's really disheartening that that opportunity isn't taken advantage of because people are so caught up and worried about getting the blame. In the present moment, they're like, no, no, no, let's just, you know, I don't, don't put the spotlight on me. I don't want to do this, whatever. And it's like, just take some responsibility and let's move forward. Like it's a fuck up. It's a mess up. Clearly this isn't working. We need to reevaluate some things and go forward. It's like, I know it sucks and it's awful and no one wants to be in the wrong and, but to double down

• 1:19:59Danielle LaRock?

  and to just shun things and I don't know. I'm, it's, I'm talking in circles at this point, but yeah, it's just unfortunate because it happens all the time in different arenas too. It's not just with fire. It's just like, pick a problem and it feels like this cycle is so applicable to that.

• 1:20:20Cassandra Yahnian?

  For sure. Yeah.

• 1:20:22Danielle LaRock?

  But anyhow, well, if you want more fire episodes.

• 1:20:25Cassandra Yahnian?

  We have so many.

• 1:20:26Danielle LaRock?

  Cassie, just off the top of my head, just as like maybe a little bit of a, not a palate cleanser, but just like to, you know, lighten the mood a little bit. But Cassie is done. Let me see if I can get them all. Smokey, origin story. Smokey the Bear.

• 1:20:41Cassandra Yahnian?

  That was fun.

• 1:20:43Danielle LaRock?

  The Pulaski.

• 1:20:45Cassandra Yahnian?

  Oh yeah. In Idaho. That's a crazy story.

• 1:20:48Danielle LaRock?

  Idaho Panhandle National Forest? Question mark? Sounds familiar. Or maybe I made that up, but it's definitely the Pulaski story. The Trapper Fire, which is a Patreon episode.

• 1:21:01Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yep.

• 1:21:02Danielle LaRock?

  Glacier National Park.

• 1:21:03Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yep. Granite Park Chalet almost burned down.

• 1:21:07Danielle LaRock?

  The one recently about the incarcerated women fighting fires.

• 1:21:13Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yep.

• 1:21:15Danielle LaRock?

  Uh, that's four. I feel like there's more, but.

• 1:21:19Cassandra Yahnian?

  I feel like there's more too, but I'm also blanking on them.

• 1:21:22Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:23Cassandra Yahnian?

  I've done a lot of fire episodes.

• 1:21:25Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah. It's just kind of, well, the one of Smokey Bear was cool, not only because, or was it the Pulaski one? I don't know. When Al came on.

• 1:21:33Cassandra Yahnian?

  That was the Smokey Bear one.

• 1:21:35Danielle LaRock?

  Okay. Yeah. Al came on at the last like 20 minutes or so to talk about fire from his perspective. And that was fun.

• 1:21:42Cassandra Yahnian?

  That was fun. Yeah. He asked to come on this one too.

• 1:21:45Danielle LaRock?

  Oh, why is it? Oh, because he's working.

• 1:21:49Cassandra Yahnian?

  He's not even here. He's not even here. I'm like, where are you going to record with me? But he's like, can I come on that one? I was like, huh, maybe another time.

• 1:21:57Danielle LaRock?

  Next fire one. There will be one.

• 1:21:59Cassandra Yahnian?

  There will be another fire one for sure.

• 1:22:02Danielle LaRock?

  Okay. Well, thank you everyone for listening. We will see you next week. In the meantime, enjoy the view.

• 1:22:08Cassandra Yahnian?

  Go watch your back.

• 1:22:10Danielle LaRock?

  Bye.

• 1:22:11Cassandra Yahnian?

  Bye.

• 1:22:14Danielle LaRock?

  Thanks for joining us for another episode. We hope you learned something new and have another location to put on your list. If you want more NPAD content, make sure to follow along with our adventures on all socials at National Park After Dark. For more stories just like this one, with the added bonus of exclusive content, you can join us on Patreon or Apple subscriptions. If you prefer to watch our episodes, head over to our YouTube channel. And if you're enjoying the show, please take a moment to rate, review, and subscribe on your favorite listening platform.

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