PRESCOTT, Ariz. — Judy Toth will never forget the pictures she took in the summer of 2013. Back then it was the depths of fire season, and everyone wanted to get rid of the brush around their home. In Prescott, there was one crew always ready to help.
"The hotshots would always help with clearing property and getting rid of all the slash that we used to pull up," Toth said.
Not just any hotshots, but Prescott's hot shot crew: Granite Mountain. And though she didn't realize it at the time, Toth was taking some of the last surviving pictures of the crew.
"I only kept three," she told us.
Just weeks before the photos, the Granite Mountain Hotshots successfully fought the Doce Fire on Granite Mountain, and helped save one of the most famous trees in Arizona: An ancient Alligator Juniper, roughly 1,400 years old.
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Now they were in front of Toth's house, helping with yard work.
"I see the buggy and it's like 'oh what's going on?' So I went out there and got a picture of the buggy, and I was talking to the guy inside and he said, 'Oh yeah, we do this while we're waiting for fires to happen,'" Toth said.
She snapped a few more photos and went inside. The hotshots finished their work and left. Days later, the 20 of them were sent to Yarnell for a new fire south of the town.
19 of them never returned.
Granite Mountain wasn't just a firefighting crew. They were Prescott's crew. Almost everyone had seen them around the city, even if they didn't know them personally. After their deaths, the town stood still.
The fence outside their fire station quickly became a memorial, wreathed with mementos, messages, and photographs.
"It was incredibly touching in with hundreds and hundreds of people around it," Toth said of her visit. "You could have heard a pin drop.
"A lot of times tragedies happen, and people... You know, they're upset for a little while and then they move on. Nobody has moved on from the firefighters."
That's why Toth still has those three photos to this day, a decade later.
"I still look at them," she said. "These guys spent their lives trying to keep everyone else safe."
Granite Mountain's memory hasn't faded, and neither has Toth's.
"They gave their lives doing what they loved: Keeping people safe and saving lives."
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