What is the Dude Fire Firefighter Memorial?
Walk Moore Canyon is a shallow, brushy draw running north from the Control Road toward the base of the Mogollon Rim, about ten miles northeast of Payson at about 5,600 feet. On June 26, 1990, it was full of dense ponderosa with manzanita underneath, a dozer had just bladed the jeep trail in its bottom into a fireline, and the Perryville crew, twenty inmate firefighters and their supervisors from the state prison west of Phoenix, were working down it toward the road. The Dude Fire had started by lightning the day before, during a drought and the hottest June Arizona had recorded. Around two in the afternoon the thunderstorm that had built over the fire’s own column collapsed, and the downburst winds drove fire down and across the canyon. Eleven crew members were trapped. Six died: Sandra Bachman, Joseph Chacon, Alex Contreras, James Denney, James Ellis and Curtis Springfield.
The fire burned 24,174 acres, destroyed 63 homes in Bonita Creek Estates and elsewhere along with Zane Grey’s cabin, and changed how the country fights wildfire; the “Look Up, Look Down, Look Around” checklist and the LCES system of lookouts, communications, escape routes and safety zones both came out of its investigation. Today six white crosses stand where the six fell, spread along the canyon bottom about two-thirds of a mile up the old jeep trail. A short drive east, the residents of Bonita Creek Estates built their own memorial, and a newer one stands across from the fire substation where the Forest Service and the state hold the remembrance every June 26.
It is for anyone who has watched smoke rise off the Rim from a Scottsdale patio and wondered what it costs. What you get is a flat, short walk, a posted account of the day, and a place that asks for an hour of quiet. What you do not get is a toilet, water, shade, a fee station, or a hike in any athletic sense.
How to visit the Dude Fire Memorial right
There is nothing to pay and nothing provided. No pass, no toilet, no water, no trash can. Payson is the last of all three. A trail register and an information board stand at the start of the walk.
Get there. Loop 101 north to SR 87, the Beeline, to Payson. A mile north of the SR 260 junction turn right on Houston Mesa Road (FR 199) and follow it about 12 miles past Water Wheel and the East Verde crossings to Whispering Pines, where it meets the Control Road (FR 64). Turn right (east) onto graded dirt and go about 3.5 miles to the mouth of Walk Moore Canyon, where an undeveloped gravel pit on the road is the parking; the Forest Service uses the same spot for its staff rides. Figure about 130 minutes from Old Town. The other approach, west on the Control Road from SR 260 near Kohls Ranch, is roughly 8 miles, paved only at the start.
Pick the day. Any dry day from April through November. The Control Road turns to mud after rain and can be snowbound from December into March; in July 2026 the Gila County Sheriff pulled cars out of FR 64 and FR 198 after a mapping app routed them there. In July and August be done by early afternoon: this canyon faces the Rim, and the Rim builds storms by two o’clock exactly as it did in 1990. Our monsoon field manual explains why.
Read first, then walk. The canyon makes no sense without the timeline posted at the trailhead: a 20-person crew building line down a bladed jeep trail, a storm collapsing over the fire, downburst winds driving flame uphill through forest that is gone now. The walk is 1.3 to 1.4 miles round trip on the old road, with a little over 100 feet of gain. The crosses are spread along the canyon bottom, not grouped; the one for James Ellis was moved up the bank to spare it from erosion. Leave the crosses and anything placed at them alone. Plan an hour.
Then drive to Bonita Creek. Continue east on the Control Road and turn into Bonita Creek Estates for the residents’ memorial and the newer one across from the fire substation, where the June 26 remembrance is held. Parking is about one vehicle’s worth. It is a lived-in subdivision whose residents lost homes here and maintain the memorial: park where you fit, keep voices down, and do not block the fire station.
Dogs. Allowed on leash. There is no shade at the start and the brush is thick with foxtails in early summer.
Take the children. The trail is easy and the story is the most honest lesson about fire season a Rim visitor will get. Pair it with a swim at Water Wheel or the geodes at Geode Hill a few miles west on the same road, or with Horton Creek if you came in from the Kohls Ranch side, so the day ends somewhere green.
The afternoon the storm fell on the fire
The country under the Rim between the East Verde and Tonto Creek was Tonto Apache land until the Army campaigns of the 1870s, and the tribe’s small reservation beside Payson is what the removals left of it. The forest came under federal management with the Tonto National Forest in 1905, and the Control Road, a fire-control and ranch access route along the base of the escarpment, was the only road through these canyons for most of the century. The one landmark was a writer’s: Zane Grey built a hunting cabin under the Rim above Tonto Creek in the 1920s, a few miles east of Walk Moore Canyon, and used the country around it as the setting for a dozen Westerns. A Phoenix businessman, William Goettl, restored the cabin in the late 1960s and opened it to visitors. Around it, subdivisions like Bonita Creek Estates filled in through the 1970s and 1980s with summer homes in dense, unthinned ponderosa, exactly the arrangement that wildland fire planners now call the wildland-urban interface.
June 1990 was the third year of a drought and the hottest June Arizona had ever measured. On the 25th Payson reached 106 and Phoenix 122, still the city’s record. At 12:30 that afternoon dry lightning started a fire on a steep slope under the Rim, named for the nearby Dude Creek, and by the next morning it was 1,900 acres and running toward the homes. The attack was large and fast: hotshot crews, engines, air tankers, and among them the Perryville crew, twenty inmates from the state prison west of Phoenix with Department of Corrections supervisors, one of the inmate crews Arizona has fielded on wildfires for decades. On the morning of June 26 they were assigned to Walk Moore Canyon, where a dozer had bladed the old jeep trail in the canyon bottom into a fireline, and set to work improving it downhill toward the Control Road.
What happened next is now a case study in every wildland fire academy. The fire’s own heat built a thunderstorm over the column during the morning. Around two in the afternoon the storm collapsed, and the downburst, a wall of cold air falling out of the cloud, hit the fire and drove it downslope and across the canyon at a speed that no one on the line had anticipated. The crew’s escape route ran up the same bladed trail the fire was now crossing. Eleven were trapped; five were injured and survived; six died: Sandra Bachman, Joseph Chacon, Alex Contreras, James Denney, James Ellis and Curtis Springfield. Bachman was the first woman wildland firefighter killed in Arizona. The fire was controlled on July 1 at 24,174 acres, with 63 homes gone, among them the Zane Grey cabin.
The investigation changed the profession. It found that nobody on the line had been assigned to watch the weather overhead, that the crew had no established safety zone and an escape route that depended on outrunning the fire, and that the storm’s collapse, while rare, had been foreseeable. Out of those findings came LCES, the rule that Lookouts, Communications, Escape routes and Safety zones must be in place before any crew engages a fire; the Look Up, Look Down, Look Around checklist of fire-behavior and weather cues that every firefighter now carries; and the addition of the Haines Index, a measure of atmospheric instability over a fire, to daily fire weather forecasts. Thirty-five years later, every briefing on every wildfire in the country still runs through them.
The memorials came in layers. Six crosses went up where the six fell, placed by colleagues and family, and the Forest Service began walking new crews through the canyon on staff rides that stop at each one. The residents of Bonita Creek Estates, the people the crew had been defending, built their own memorial in the subdivision, and a newer one stands across from the fire substation. The Rim Country Museum in Payson raised a replica of the Zane Grey cabin and keeps the fire’s history. On June 26, 2025, the 35th anniversary was marked at Bonita Creek with survivor Geoff Hatch among the speakers. The canyon itself has grown back as brush and young pine, nothing like the forest that burned, which is the last lesson it teaches: the Rim’s fire regime has changed, and the Dude was the first of the big ones, followed by the Rodeo-Chediski in 2002, the Wallow in 2011 and the fires the Valley now watches every June.
Why it matters
The Dude Fire is the hinge in Arizona’s fire history: the moment the state’s hottest day, a drought, an overgrown forest and a subdivision in the pines came together and killed six people who were trying to hold the line between them. Everything that happened afterward, the safety rules, the thinning programs, the evacuation plans the Rim towns now rehearse, starts in this canyon. For a Scottsdale visitor it is also a corrective. The smoke you see on the northern horizon in June is not weather; it is a place like this one, and the people walking into it are using rules written here. Go in the morning, read the board, walk to the crosses, and be back at the car before the clouds build.