Flames race across Idaho, firefighters dig in, and it's time for Jarrett, Lizbeth, and Seth to make a stand

THE BIG BURN

Chapter 1

The fires had been burning for weeks.

They'd been born of sparks thrown form stream-driven trains and from the machinery of backcountry logging. They'd started in the working fires of homesteaders and miners and in the campfires of hoboes and in the trash-burning fires of construction camps and saloon towns. They'd begun when lightning had coursed down from an uneasy summer sky to ignite the towering snags of dry forests.

The wildfires lay behind a brown haze that was beginning to shroud mountaintops and drift like dirty fog through the forests of the Idaho panhandle. Though no one then knew it, they were fires that would join ranks and run in a vast wall of flame.

When they did, it would be called the big blowup, the great burn, the Big Burn. . .

Once the dead had been counted, and once the awfulness was far enough behind that people could put pretty words to what had happened, August 20, 1910, would be remembered as the day the mountains roared.

But in mid-July that year, though fire conditions were worrisome, that orange hell was still mostly unimagined as folks went about their lives.

A ranger guided a botany professor on a field trip. A peacetime soldier assembled his rifle for a training exercise. An aunt and her niece on a wilderness homestead argued about the money its timber might bring in.

And a young man went after a fire, believing fire was something he could stop.

Join Jarrett, Lizbeth, and Seth as they fight for the forests, for the mountains, for their lives

THE BIG BURN by Jeanette Ingold

A novel for teen readers - Historical fiction at its best