Chasing The Light
Every February the Western Pyrotechnic Association holds the Western Winter Blast in the Arizona desert. The 34th edition of the event attracted the full spectrum of firebugs, everyone from the technicians responsible for Super Bowl displays and Hollywood special effects, to mom-and-pop retailers and retirees who arrived by RV to grill and watch the show.
With increasing environmental regulations stifling fireworks use nationwide, Western Winter Blast is a uniquely free setting for WPA members to launch fireworks of any size, many being homemade or otherwise illegal.
Story pitch, photography, and reporting by Brandon Tauszik.
Published in the Science History Institute.
The reverence for blowing stuff up goes back millennia, to the alchemists of China’s Tang dynasty. The history of alchemy is full of men who searched for eternal life and instead found new and innovative agents of death.
Poisons, such as arsenic trioxide, were often the yield, but Wei Boyang, created something decidedly different when he combined charcoal, nitrates, and sulfur to make a strange, dark substance that would “fly and dance” through the air in violent convulsions, as he wrote in 142 BCE.
“I used to shoot fireworks, but my knees got bad. Now I shoot fireworks with the camera. Pyro brings people together from diametrically opposite ends of the scale on religion and politics and philosophy. But we all have this singular love for pyro and it's what brings us all together.”
– Tom Calderwood of Piney Flats, Tennessee
Pyrotechnics Photographer
Inherent danger did not impede fireworks’ popularity. As they spread out of China, pyrotechnic schools popped up across the European continent. Italian manufacturers began experimenting with adding traces of metals to transform the standard orange flames into spectacular colors—strontium created red flames; barium made them green; and copper produced a blast of blue.
“It was strange to believe that so fierce and ungovernable an element as fire could be rendered so delicately obedient to the will of men,” wrote an awestruck Henry Tyrell in 1856 as he watched a London display celebrating the end of the Crimean War.
“If you go around here you notice how old the people are, it’s an older generation. We’re desperate! If there’s any issue it’s that there’s not enough young people who are interested to labor like this to make something happen. It’s not a virtual reality!”
– Connie Whitman of Newtown, Connecticut
Member of the all-female Cherry Bomb Crew
“When you walk into a fireworks stand, what fireworks grab your attention? Something with a catchy name and a fancy cover. Politics get tied into everything.”
– Susan Byington of Preston, Idaho
Acme Discount Fireworks
“These mortars will go up around 500 feet. The firing of the charge lights the fuse inside and three seconds later it gets to the center of the shell and boom, it throws all the stars out into the sky. A little bit of paper, glue, chemicals, and you get all kinds of memories.”
– Andy Campbell of Seattle, Washington
Shell-Building Instructor
Fireworks shows have since become commonplace; elaborate, highly choreographed, and expensive affairs. (The bill for the District of Columbia’s 2019 Fourth of July celebration reached a whopping $13 million.) And, of course, bigger is better. Cities around the world vie to have the longest show or most shells shot off per minute. The world’s largest firework, weighing more than a ton, was set off in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, in 2020.
“Anybody can make something go boom, it doesn’t really take a whole heck of a lot of work or a lot of skill; it takes more of a willingness to just kind of skirt the legal system. Whereas building fireworks that go high and burst in different colors or rockets that can lift heavy payloads—it takes a lot of skill.”
– Ben Smith of Breckenridge, Colorado
Owner of Fire Smith Manufacturing
As one might expect, there’s an environmental cost to blowing up thousands of pounds of indeterminate material. Environmentalists have called for more eco-friendly alternatives, such as replacing traditional fireworks with light-up drone displays.
It’s a compelling argument, but it’ll be a tough sell with the pyrotechnic crowd, who insist that drones lack the emotional impact of old-fashioned explosions. Even today, there is a lawless, DIY ethos among fireworks most fervent enthusiasts.
“I’ve always loved fireworks, but I just happened to go blind in the meantime, which is totally inconvenient.
At tonight’s show I missed a lot, but I had someone next to me and she was tracing out the patterns of the shell breaks on my back with her fingertips.”
– Collin van Uchelen of Vancouver, BC, Canada
Blind fireworks enthusiast