Russian River Fire and Mark Westover

This bronze plaque on a boulder remembers a young man who died fighting fire here. In the summer of nineteen sixty-nine, a wildfire broke out along the Russian River near Cooper Landing, in the Chugach National Forest.

Mark Westover was just eighteen years old, a Forest Service firefighter on the line. On the twenty-ninth of June, he was killed while battling the flames in this rugged country where the Russian River meets the Kenai.

Fire crews in Alaska work in some of the most remote terrain in North America, hauled in by helicopter to ground that no road ever reached. Westover's name is carried on the Alaska Fallen Firefighter Memorial. This quiet marker, set among the spruce and the rushing water, asks the thousands of anglers and hikers who pass each year to remember one teenager who did not come home.