One of three firefighters who died while responding to the Knowles Fire in western Colorado was from Arizona.
Authorities said Nick Hutcherson, 27, of Glendale and two others were killed when they were overcome Saturday by flames after deploying emergency shelters to shield themselves from fast-moving fires.
Hutcherson was assigned to the U.S. Forest Service Kaibab National Forest.
Hutcherson was killed along with Emily Barker, 38, of Clinton Township, Michigan and Sydney Watson, 26, of Warrior, Alabama, according to a news release from the U.S. Department of the Interior.
Wildfires have erupted over the past week across the West, fueled by months of dry weather and a record lack of snow this past winter in some places. Wildfire experts have been warning for months that extreme fire dangers are likely this summer.
With more than two dozen large fires burning across the U.S., almost 8,000 wildland firefighters and dozens of firefighting helicopters have been deployed. About half of the largest blazes are in Alaska while the rest are mostly in Western states.
So far this year, wildfires have burned more than 4,600 square miles — the most since 2022.
They were assigned to a Helitack crew that can be dropped into remote areas by helicopters and whose mission is to prevent new fires from growing into out-of-control blazes. But it can be extremely dangerous, often taking place in areas where fires are rapidly expanding.
The weekend deaths came almost exactly 13 years after a crew of 19 wildland firefighters were killed when they were trapped in a brush-choked box canyon near Yarnell, Arizona.
Like Saturday's victims, the men killed in Arizona in June 2013 were members of a specialized firefighting crew who had tried to deploy emergency shelters meant to shield them from flames and heat.