Book Review: Matthew Wolfe’s ‘Fires in The Night’ Provides Fascinating Insight into the 1998 Vail Arson

On October 19, 1998, the sky over Vail Mountain glowed an unnatural orange. The most expensive act of environmental sabotage in the United States was unfolding. Fires ripped through the resort’s Two Elk Lodge, an asset recently acquired by New York investors who planned to bulldoze 2,200 acres of public land, including 700 acres of old-growth forest, to expand the resort.

The fires consumed the lodge, burned ski patrol facilities, and lift-operation buildings tied to four lifts. Flames were visible 20 miles away, singeing the tops of 150-foot pine trees. Firefighting efforts were complicated by having to shuttle water tanks up the narrow slopes. The fire caused $12 million in damage and triggered a nationwide media frenzy.

It would take waves of history, fractured lives, and a determined FBI agent to figure out who started the fire on Vail Mountain. Matthew Wolfe unravels that history in his masterful account Fires in the Night: The Earth Liberation Front, the FBI, and a Secret History of Eco-Sabotage (Viking, 2026).

The Early 1990s Were a Warning

I devoured the 300-page book in a day. It returned me to a time when ecological damage was brutally visible and ordinary politics already seemed to have failed. In 1994, I even worked for a small, student-run Greenpeace office in Kingston, Ontario, Alcan and DuPont territory. All I did was drive a bus full of canvassers as I was terrified of doing anything illegal. Wolfe captures the desperation of the time without mistaking it for innocence. 

The book opens with a young business professional detained and held in a Cuban prison. After days of isolation, he’s brought into an air-conditioned interrogation room where an officer says, “first, tell us about the fires.” Drawing on a rich archive of source material, including interviews with key Earth Liberation Front (ELF) players gathered for an a documentary, Wolfe gives the story a cinematic pace while keeping its grit and strangeness intact.

From Earth Day to Monkeywrenching

“Corporations owned the media and the political process and had brainwashed people into complacency.” Wolfe summarizes an entire history of activist despair with one skillful sentence. The first Earth Day was celebrated on April 22, 1970. By 1991, environmentalism was engrained in bipartisan mainstream culture. A Gallup poll found 78 percent of Americans identified as environmentalists. What radical activists felt was a disconnect between cultural currency and political gains, even with an ally like Al Gore in the White House.

The outgoing director of the Sierra Club explicitly noted his successor should be “strong in finance and budgets.” As mainstream groups grew, their ambitions shrank. Frustrated by “theatrical activism,” young radicals came to see illegality as a moral necessity. They turned to “monkeywrenching.” Tree-spiking, sugar in bulldozer gas tanks, and snipped grader wires became tactics in defense of the planet.

The Cascadia Free State, a year-long road blockade in Oregon’s Willamette National Forest, became an early frontline. It began because years of peaceful environmental protests failed. Devastating clear cut patches of ancient forest pushed activists to build a medieval-style fortress across a major logging road. Inside the camp, activist Kevin Tubbs occupied a precarious 20-foot-high bipod platform. Engineer Joseph Dibee supported the campaign by driving six hours from Seattle every weekend to deliver groceries. The intense occupation worked; in August 1996, the Clinton administration tightened national forest logging restrictions. However, wary of a trap, the occupiers delayed their exit until federal officials dragged them out and bulldozed the camp.

ELF Takes Shape

Following the teardown of the Oregon camp, the Earth First! Journal printed an anonymous letter that served as a call to arms. It commanded readers to physically destroy infrastructure contributing to the earth’s ruination. The movement was done with simply filing lawsuits. The Earth Liberation Front (ELF), originating overseas, had no formal membership. Anyone could be an Elf, provided they followed three core principles:

1. Inflict maximal economic damage on those profiting from ecological destruction.
2. Educate the public about environmental atrocities.
3. Take every precaution against injuring any living creature, human or otherwise.

Destruction of property was viewed as a fine levied against those desecrating nature. William Rodgers, known to the group as Avalon, regularly cited an old proverb that captured the group’s bias toward action: “Talk doesn’t cook rice.”

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The Cell Comes into Focus

In the 1990s, Eugene, Oregon was a magnet for radical counterculture, drawing activists from across the country into an underground scene of punks, animal-rights veterans, and anarchists. In the book, Wolfe’s strength is showing how this decentralized network – connected by phone booth calls, photocopied road atlases, and underground zines – became a functional ELF cell. Long before the FBI unofficially labeled them “the Family,” the group moved up and down the West Coast, setting fire to car lots, lumber yards, and animal rendering plants—anything perceived as harming the planet. Their goal was property damage. They took every precaution to ensure no living creature was harmed. As the years rolled on, they kept their operational security tight, occasionally congregating for “book clubs” that always met in a different location.

At the center of this movement was an unlikely alliance. Kevin Tubbs was from Nebraska and came to Eugene via southern California. He was a vegan motivated by animal rescue. Jacob Ferguson, a Eugene local, was a reckless, anti-authoritarian crust punk who looked like a pirate. Tubbs studied police operations, and Ferguson knew how to break into buildings and forge the fake identities that kept the group mobile and anonymous. Together with Ferguson’s sometimes-girlfriend, Josephine Overaker—who remains one of the book’s unresolved hauntings—they anchored a rotating cast of recruits. Younger members like Chelsea Gerlach and her boyfriend, Stan Meyerhoff entered, the underground early with awe. The circle widened as their tactics and targets intensified.

William Rodgers, Code-Named Avalon

The cell’s volatility centered on the actions of William Rodgers, code-named Avalon. He was an Arizona native who floated around the Pacific Northwest throughout the ’90s as the ELF’s de facto technical guru. After an initial botched and abandoned attempt, Rodgers was the sole arsonist who hiked up into the freezing snow to burn down the Vail Resort. Young Gerlach was the driver and lookout. On the mountain, Rodgers showed a single flash of mercy by sparing a free-standing restroom facility after finding a lone hunter sleeping inside.

In his portrayal of Rodgers, Wolfe avoids martyrdom. The insurrectionist rhetoric Rodgers pushed—to speed up the collapse of industry, scare the rich, and undermine the foundations of the state—along with conversations about escalating to assassinations, became the cell’s literal death knell. Following Rodgers’s 2005 jail-cell suicide during the FBI sweep, agents uncovered a hidden file of child pornography on his hard drives. You cannot unburn a building, and you cannot unsee the darkness in a leader.

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The FBI’s Cinematic Hunt

Wolfe’s skill for depicting real-life characters continues through his portrayal of federal investigators. Leading the investigation of the Vail fire was FBI investigator John Ferreira, a gregarious figure in a Hawaiian shirt with an affable black mustache. Behind the upbeat energy was an elite investigator who had tracked the Bonanno crime family in Brooklyn, investigated the Aum Shinrikyo cult’s sarin gas attack in Tokyo, and secured the bureau’s first-ever arrest of a high-ranking Yakuza boss.

Ferreira partnered with veteran Forest Service investigator Carla Jones. She knew the Warner Creek protesters. While certain agents on the task force thought little of a female Forest Service investigator, it was Jones’s instinct that flagged a critical lead when Jonathan Paul’s name mysteriously appeared inside a notebook left behind by now fugitive, Overaker.

The breakthrough came down to forensics and betrayal. Fire investigator Mike Comery discovered unexploded fuel jugs on federal station roofs, noting that the devices were strictly incendiary, designed to combust without causing human casualties. The cell had gotten unlucky when an incense stick timer was snuffed out by morning dew.

Investigators chose Jake Ferguson as their best entry point into the Eugene scene. For nearly a year, they tracked him with an omnipresent surveillance van. Realizing the statute of limitations on the cell’s earliest arsons would run out soon, investigators bluffed. Still lacking evidence, they threatened Ferguson with maximum sentences for lying to a federal officer about Overaker living with him, while reminding him of his responsibilities to his young son.

Ferguson broke. Stunned he was suspect number one, he turned to an intense, recorded Tarot card reading that allegedly led him to rat out his colleagues. That pressure led to a high-stakes plea bargain: in the summer of 2004, Ferguson secured full immunity from prosecution in exchange for full cooperation. He never served time, but his choice guaranteed he would always be a villain in some version of the story.

To map the evidence, federal agents drove Ferguson across Oregon, Washington, Colorado, and Wyoming to unearth old staging grounds. They used backhoes to dig up buried bolt cutters, while Carla Jones was given the task of trudging Highway 20 searching for a stray nut that Overaker had thrown from a window.

Major Case 220: The Trap Snaps

In fall 2004, the investigation was upgraded to Major Case 220. The designation granted investigators unlimited resources and greased the skids of federal bureaucracy. FBI Director Robert Mueller emailed field offices ordering unquestioned compliance with Backfire investigators. President George W. Bush received weekly briefings on the case.

Ferreira deployed Ferguson as a spy, sending him across the country wearing a wire to record his accomplices. It was a gamble; if Ferguson were caught, the remaining Elves would flee. Ferguson caught Tubbs, long removed from active sabotage, unaware. Tubbs admitted to Ferguson that he had recently discovered photocopied incendiary manuals in his attic after a deep clean. He slipped into their old code words, praising recent actions, but noting that a recent cell in Maryland had left behind an unignited device (referred to as “uneaten hamburgers”), at the scene. This and other recordings secured the evidence needed to dismantle the network.

The structural fallout spread instantly. Gerlach was living a chaotic existence as a drug runner, waiting for the end of the world. Craig Rosebraugh, the cell’s former public spokesperson, promptly canceled an unrelated book deal, returned his advance, and bought a 12-gauge shotgun for self-defense. Ferguson’s betrayal proved the cynical adage of the crackdown: “First one on the bus gets the best seat.”

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The Flawed Strategy and the Post-9/11 Trap

The tactical realities of ELF’s campaigns are a stark lesson in futility. Apart from the 1997 arson of the Cavel West horse rendering plant in Redmond, which closed down, every single target recovered. Car dealerships were rebuilt, timber offices reopened, and Vail built back bigger than before.

The severity of the cell’s downfall was dictated by a shift in global geopolitics. The word “ecoterrorism” was vigorously promoted and weaponized by right-wing figures plotting the environmental movement’s destruction. If the shakedown had happened before Sept. 11, 2001, they would likely have been prosecuted for vandalism. The post-9/11 domestic lockdown put the ELF on top of the FBI’s domestic terrorism list. The political right compared them to Osama bin Laden, and The New York Times Magazine quoted criminologists fretting, without evidence, that the ELF might turn to assassinations.

Former FBI special agent Michael German noted that major white supremacist cases were excluded from national threat assessments just to keep the ELF at the top of the threat matrix. In 2003, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) drafted a sweeping corporate statute targeting environmental activists. Passed by Congress in 2006 on a six-person voice vote, the law stated that simple vandalism could fetch a decade in prison, and property damage could net two decades.

Thirty states passed parallel “Green Scare” laws, codifying even a single broken window as an act of terrorism. The legal system utilized a controversial “terrorism enhancement” during sentencing. Despite only destroying property, in a staggering display of asymmetry, the young activists were sent to prison as terrorists.

About Fire

Fires in the Night explores the fires set by the ELF across the Pacific Northwest, the combustive politics of the 1990s timber wars, and the moral heat of ecological despair. It lays bare the self-immolating logic of clandestine movements that mistake reactionary destruction for long-term political strategy, all while introducing a rapidly warming modern world that makes these old arguments feel far less settled than they ought to be.

The abundance of detail and historical compression asks a lot of the reader’s forward momentum. It is also what makes Wolfe’s book invaluable. It opens a Pandora’s box that leads to a fascinating online archive of national and local media accounts of the time. Fires in the Night is a serious, propulsive book that deserves attention from anyone interested in the human stories behind the smoke and flames.

Wolfe leaves us with a quiet emotional anchor in his final pages. We see Kevin Tubbs, years after his 2013 release from federal custody. The radical activist who once faced life in prison for domestic terrorism is quietly sheltering and feeding stray cats in a frozen parking lot. It calls back to his original, pure code: “it must just be so difficult to be a tiny creature, out there in all that big, unfeeling nothing.”