The Big Burn Took Me Into A Fire and I Emerged Finding Myself
My hike began benignly, with a boardwalk leading over a wide, tumbling section of Placer Creek. The trail, designed by historian Dick Carron, gently meandered through tall spruce and fir trees. The AllTrails description listed it as a moderate, four-mile hike with a 744-foot elevation gain, and the simple description foretold a change in the story. I was here, in Wallace, Idaho, a town built on the bones of a mining boom and anchored in the story of a man I had only ever met in a book: "Big Ed" Pulaski. The trail ahead, they say, is the same path he and his fire crew fled down, a desperate race to escape the most catastrophic forest fire in American history, an inferno that earned the name, The Big Burn.
