Rachelle "Rocky" Gibbons was born in Price, Utah and grew up along the San Pedro River in southern Arizona, where she attended San Manuel High School and the University of Arizona. She worked as an advertising copywriter and media buyer in Salt Lake City and Los Angeles for many years.
She is the author of “The Big Buckaroo” series of children’s books, with the title character based on her cousin, Robbers Roost rancher and rodeo star AC Ekker. Two of the books in the series, Big Buckaroo and Moose the Cow Dog and Big Buckaroo Goes to the Special Olympics, have earned coveted Western Writers of America Spur Award finalist honors. Her latest project is co-editing and contributing to an anthology of short nonfiction stories for juvenile readers titled Why Cows Need Cowboys and other Seldom-Told Tales from the American West (scheduled for release Spring 2021 by TwoDot/Rowman and Littlefield.) The story contributed to this collection is “Fire and Tragedy: Joe Thurston and the Granite Mountain Hotshots,” which is about a Cedar City native who perished while fighting the Yarnell Hill Fire in Arizona in 2013.
Rocky presently serves on the Board of Directors and as the Membership Coordinator for the Western Writers of America organization.
She is enjoying retirement in southern Utah with her husband and two dogs.
Work
Synopsis of Fire and Tragedy: Joe Thurston and the Granite Mountain Hotshots
CRASH! A bolt of lightning lit up the sky and ignited a hilltop near the small town of Yarnell, Arizona on June 28, 2013, starting a chain of events unprecedented in history.
Two days after the fire sparked, an elite group of twenty highly trained wildland firefighters known as the Granite Mountain Hotshots were called in to do what they did best – establish a “fire line” to starve the fire of the vegetation feeding it.
It was expected to be routine duty, but turned out to be anything but, since the wind direction freakishly turned the fire 180 degrees, cutting off the Hotshots’ safety zone and forcing them to deploy survival shelters. By 5:00 that evening, nineteen of the twenty were dead, victims of the raging inferno which overtook them at a rate far faster than the weighted down firefighters could escape. The sole survivor was the crew’s lookout man, Brendan McDonough, positioned a mile away to track the fire.
One of those valiant firefighters who lost his life was my cousin, Joe Thurston, a family man with a loving wife, two young sons, and truly Western roots.
This is Joe’s story, and the stories of his brave band of brothers known as the Granite Mountain Hotshots. We must never forget their sacrifice…
Bibliography
Why Cows Need Cowboys and other Seldom-Told Tales from the American West
(Spring 2021, TwoDot, an imprint of Rowman and Littlefield)
Contributed story: “Fire and Tragedy: Joe Thurston and the Granite Mountain Hotshots”
Big Buckaroo Goes to the Special Olympics
(2016, Tate Publishing & Enterprises)
2017 Western Writers of America Spur Award Finalist – Storyteller category
Big Buckaroo and Moose the Cow Dog
(2012, Tate Publishing & Enterprises)
2013 Western Writers of America Spur Award Finalist – Storyteller category
Big Buckaroo’s Little Sister
(2009, Tate Publishing & Enterprises)
