Shirley's presentation, a hard hitting one, explored the abiotic and topographic influences on wildfires. Shirley also described the tragic deaths of 6 firefighters in 2010 in her region of training. To begin her presentation Shirley defined wildfires and immediately displayed pictures of succession after a wildfire.  For photo on the left she said this, "This is your happy succession. Your roots aren't completely scorched into the ground, this is (the purple flower) Fireweed." We learned a common outcome after wildfires is moonscapes. This is where the roots are completely burned and no life will return to this patch for many years as Shirley said.  The next area of Shirley's presentation is the way we fight fires. She went through and listed all the different crews and their equipment, examples being, hand crews, shot crews, Helitack crews, smokejumpers, engine crews, fuel crews, and the flying and dozing crews. Shirley broke down the certain tasks of these highly skilled crews, and even their level of "radness". 

Diving deep into the stories of the 6 unfortunate deaths that occurred during the fight of the Dude Fire, we learned about the weather and conditions during this battle. June of 1990 was one of the hottest months in Arizona history, for a normal high of 76 degrees to change to a high 106 degrees in Payson is notable. On June 25th, a thunderstorms occurred mid day. Quickly, a fire was burning 800 hectares or 2000 acres. Strong direct, down-sloped wind fueled the fire even more. A topographic rim was causing heat and moisture to be pushed upwards along the wall of the rim and canyon during the day. An important fact to recall is the fire began producing its own thermal energy, which is a harrowing sign. The convection column hit the atmosphere, and because the atmosphere is colder, it pushed the smoke back towards the ground; this is called "iced out". The affect of this phenomena is explained by Shirley, "when it collapses (the convection column) it creates super high winds, going in basically every direction. In this case, it couldn't go past the rim, so it ended up going right down into Walk Moore which is where the Perryville crew was." Through these awful conditions and bad communication, a crew was forced into their fire shelters and 6 sadly perished in the canyon.