The Cedar Creek Fire Transcripts
A 1970s National Park Investigation

About this book:

In August 1974, a routine smoke report in Black Ridge National Park spirals into a catastrophe that burns 14,000 acres and buries a crime the government tried to erase. *The Cedar Creek Fire Transcripts* reconstructs the disaster entirely through the raw, unvarnished paper trail: dispatcher logs typed on a sticky Underwood, lookout tower audio reels crackling with static and dread, hotshot crew interrogations, redacted depositions, and the charred contents of Evidence Box 19. What begins as a dry lightning strike reveals itself as something far darker—a missing ranger, a primer-gray truck cutting locks at the park boundary, a jerry can in a dry creek bed, and a body that isn't where it should be.

As the fire crowns and jumps containment lines, the documents expose a second, quieter combustion: a cover-up smoldering inside the Park Service itself. Ballistics in the ash. A cut fence at the perimeter. A superintendent's hearing where the testimony doesn't match the radio traffic. Told without a single line of traditional narration, this is a forensic puzzle where every marginal notation, crossed-out timestamp, and static-garbled transmission pulls you deeper into the canyon. You aren't reading about the investigation. You're holding the case file—singed edges and all—waiting for the final distress call to explain what really happened on Deadman's Ridge.