Smokejumper

by Jason A. Ramos

  After 1910, fire became the enemy, to be fought by an army called the U.S. Forest Service. Congress poured money into the agency’s fire-suppression efforts—even today, more than half its budget goes toward fighting fires—just in time for a run of large fires in the 1930s.

  The Tillamook Burn, a series of four enormous fires between 1931 and 1951, destroyed over five hundred square miles of Oregon’s coastal forests. In 1933, in the midst of the Great Depression, a wildfire in Griffith Park in Los Angeles killed twenty-nine men from a road crew, called on—and in some cases forced—to fight the fire for forty cents an hour.

  The new head of the Forest Service, a survivor of the Big Burn named Gus Silcox, decreed that all forest fires should be controlled by 10 A.M. the day after they started. The problem was that wildfires usually started in such remote areas that they grew large before anyone could get in to fight them.

  In August 1937, a lightning strike in Wyoming’s Shoshone National Forest sparked a fire that went undetected for two days. By the time crews arrived, it had grown from two acres to two hundred. The Blackwater Fire eventually exploded into a firestorm that killed fifteen firefighters and injured thirty-eight more.

  There had to be a better way to get men on a small fire, no matter how remote it was, without making them slog for miles over mountain trails carrying heavy equipment.

  Although fixed-wing airplanes and modern parachutes were both barely more than thirty years old, World War I had spurred quick development in both. In the 1920s and 1930s, American foresters experimented with dropping water and chemicals on fires from airplanes, using everything from paper bags to beer kegs.

  The idea of parachuting men in to fight forest fires originally came in 1934 from T. V. Pearson, an intermountain regional forester in Ogden, Utah. A professional parachutist even made a successful demonstration jump. Still, the higher-ups weren’t convinced. This was the barnstorming era, and anything related to airplanes—let alone jumping out of them—was considered crackpot at best.

  One memo said the Forest Service had “no hankering to assume the responsibility for men risking their lives in any such undertaking,” since “all parachute jumpers are more or less crazy.”

  That didn’t discourage David P. Godwin, the assistant chief of USFS Division of Fire Control, who was heading up the Forest Service’s Aerial Fire Control Experimental Project. When the aerial bombing experiments didn’t work, Godwin decided to use the leftover funding to try firefighting by parachute. The project was moved to a small dirt airstrip outside of Winthrop, Washington, in 1939.

  The tiny lumber town in the Methow Valley of the North Cascades already had been a center for training fire personnel and had a variety of extremely rugged terrain nearby for testing. If parachute firefighting could work here, the thinking went, it could work anywhere.

  That October, a team of sixteen foresters and parachutists started experimenting with parachutes. The first drops from the plane used 150-pound test dummies strapped to thirty-foot silk canopies made by the Eagle Parachute Company of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. They used the first USFS aircraft, a Stinson SR-10 Reliant, for the experimental jumps.

  Then it was time for the volunteers. Seven of the eleven jumpers had never jumped before. A few had never even been up in a plane.

  The jumpers wore two-piece padded canvas suits and leather football helmets fitted with wire face masks to guard them from sharp tree branches. Wide leather belts and athletic supporters protected their spines and soft parts, respectively. They laced leather ankle braces over stout logger boots, and each man wore a twenty-seven-foot backup chute in a chest pack and carried a rope for rappelling out of trees.

  The team included the Derry brothers—Frank, Chet, and Virgil—and Francis Lufkin, a fire guard with the Forest Service who had originally been hired to help the parachutists get down out of trees. The other jumpers started razzing Lufkin—how could he climb a tree but not jump out of a plane? He took it as a dare, one thing led to another, and soon he was suited up to jump too.

  In six weeks in October and November, the crew made fifty-eight successful jumps into the Chelan (now Okanogan) National Forest, including the first jumps into timber. They jumped from two thousand to six thousand feet and landed in open meadows and on steep slopes littered with boulders.

  When they pulled their rip cords, the chutes opened with a bang that could be heard five miles away. But there were only minor injuries—a twisted knee, a branch-scraped face—and every jumper walked away from the landing ready to fight a fire.

  The next step was to find one. For the 1940 fire season, thirteen jumpers from Winthrop and Seeley Lake, Montana, were stationed at Moose Creek, Idaho. They all had to be men with wildland firefighting experience, between twenty-one and twenty-five years old. They received ten days of classroom and physical training and a salary of $193 per month, with no overtime or hazard pay. Johnson’s Flying Service, a private contractor based in Missoula, supplied the planes and pilots.

  On July 12, 1940, just thirty-seven years after the Wright Brothers invented the airplane, Earl Cooley and Rufus Robinson made the first fire jump in U.S. history.

  It was a small lightning fire in the Nez Perce National Forest. The winds were so high they probably shouldn’t have jumped. Cooley’s chute came out of his pack tangled. It barely opened in time to deposit him in a spruce tree, ninety feet up.

  Then the spotter almost fell out when the plane hit an air pocket.

  Nevertheless, Cooley and Robinson made it to the ground safely and had the fire under control by the following morning. The next fire jump came two weeks later, and then Francis Lufkin and Glenn Smith made the first fire jumps in Winthrop that August. By the end of the season, smokejumpers had put out nine fires in Washington, Idaho, and Montana, saving an estimated $30,000.

  Since the program’s entire budget was $9,047, that qualified it as a major success.

  Two jump bases were in operation by the end of 1940. One was at the Ninemile Training Camp in Missoula. The other was in the Methow Valley in Washington’s North Cascades: the Winthrop base which would later be named the North Cascades Smokejumper Base (NCSB). In 1941, jumpers put out nine fires and the program seemed primed for expansion.

  That December the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

  World War II could easily have spelled the end of smokejumping. Everything the program required, the armed forces needed more urgently: young men, aircraft, funding, even silk parachutes.

  So many jumpers entered the military that the only way to keep the program afloat was to train conscientious objectors, many of them Mennonites and Quakers.

  Luckily for us, the enemy turned forest fires into a matter of national security.

  Over a period of six months in 1944 and 1945, roughly ninety-three hundred fûsen bakudan, or “balloon bombs,” lifted off from a beach on Honshu, Japan. Each balloon was thirty-three feet in diameter, made of laminated mulberry paper filled with hydrogen, and carried up to a thousand pounds of incendiary devices or explosives suspended underneath.

  They were designed to ride the high-altitude jet stream across the Pacific, with automatic altitude controls. After three days, when they would likely be over the United States, a timer dropped the bomb to spread fear and fire. In the war effort, wood went to everything from packing crates to gunstocks, making our forests huge strategic natural reserves.

  The balloons may have been the first intercontinental weapons ever used, the warfare equivalent of a Hail Mary pass. About three hundred of them turned up from Alaska to Mexico and as far east as Michigan. The government tried to keep them out of the news, to avoid panic and to keep the Japanese from knowing whether they were effective or not.

  Only one actually started a fire. Another got tangled in the power lines of the Hanford Engineer Works in Washington, which produced the plutonium for the atomic bomb used at Nagasaki. It caused a power outage but didn’t explode.

  To counter the threat, the army turned to the all-blac
k 555th Parachute Infantry Battalion, otherwise known as the Triple Nickles. These three hundred brave African American men went through parajumper training and were sent all the way to Europe—where they weren’t allowed to fight because of their race.

  Instead, the Triple Nickles were sent back home and retrained as smokejumpers, with a focus on finding and disposing of the balloon bombs. The same day they boarded the train to Oregon for training, a third balloon bomb exploded in southern Oregon, killing a pregnant woman and five children on a Sunday school outing. They were the only fatalities caused by the enemy in the continental United States during the entire war.

  As part of the Firefly Project, the Triple Nickles made more than twelve hundred fire jumps and worked on thirty-six forest fires in the Pacific Northwest. They found a few bombs, too. Private First Class Malvin L. Brown, who died after a fall during a tree letdown, was the first smokejumper fatality.

  Their efforts made smokejumping one of the first racially integrated jobs in America. Still, the men of the 555th weren’t allowed in many bars, hotels, or restaurants. They were denied live ammo for rifle training and forbidden from mingling with white soldiers, which even enemy POWs could do.

  The battalion was eventually absorbed into the 82nd Airborne shortly before President Harry Truman ordered the U.S. military desegregated in 1948. The Triple Nickles served in more airborne units, in peace and war, than any other parachute group in history.

  THE WAR YEARS SPURRED improvements in jump gear. Chet Derry, one of the first jumpers, worked with his brother Frank to invent a better chute. In 1941, with the increasing shortage of Asian silk due to the Japanese invasion of Asia, the Forest Service turned to procuring nylon parachutes from the military—rejects that did not meet military contract specs. Chet and Frank modified the flat circular parachute by creating two slots (openings) which provided improved performance and steerability. The Derry slotted chute was easier to control and opened more gently, better for both canopy and jumper.

  A static line system, where parachutes are deployed automatically by a line attached inside the plane, was developed so jumpers wouldn’t have to worry about rip cords. (The first smokejumper static line was a fifteen-foot mule halter rope Earl Cooley found in a corral.)

  A somewhat more refined version was in heavy use on the night of June 5, 1944, over northern France. The first part of the Normandy invasion consisted of a wave of paratroopers from the U.S. 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions, over thirteen thousand men, who parachuted behind German lines the night before the beach landings.

  Four years earlier, Major William C. Lee had visited the jumper training camp at Seeley Lake, Montana. He was impressed and used much of what he saw when he created the 101st Airborne Division in 1942 and commanded it as a major general.

  Together with the 82nd Airborne, the 101st played a critical role in the success of D-day. Medical issues kept Lee from making the jump over Normandy himself, but some of his troops yelled his name when they jumped: “Bill Lee!”

  Jumpers still do occasionally, out of respect.

  By the end of the war, 220 trained jumpers were stationed in Oregon, Idaho, and Montana. The age range was expanded to be eighteen to thirty-five and included many former World War II paratroopers.

  The jump program had survived the war and was starting to gain national attention. Four Missoula jumpers flew to Washington, D.C., to make a demonstration jump on the White House lawn, a stunt to signal the launch of a new forest fire prevention campaign. Things were looking up.

  Then on August 5, 1949, disaster struck in a remote Montana canyon whose name would become part of firefighting history: Mann Gulch.

  CHAPTER 5

  THE MANN GULCH FIRE started on August 5, 1949, when lightning sparked a wildfire along the Missouri River near Helena, Montana. A planeload of fifteen smokejumpers led by foreman Wagner Dodge was dispatched from Missoula. Thirteen of the jumpers were between seventeen and twenty-three years old.

  They found a relatively small blaze burning on the south side of the canyon mouth. At 3:10 P.M. the crew landed about half a mile up canyon from the fire. (First-generation jumper Earl Cooley was the spotter.) They were joined by James Harrison, a fire guard from a nearby campground.

  Dodge didn’t like the look of the fire and directed the crew down the canyon toward the river, away from the visible flames.

  They thought the route would put them in a position to attack the fire with the river at their backs. But as they hiked, their view below was obscured by ridges. When they got about halfway down they were shocked to suddenly discover the fire burning below them on both sides of the canyon. Somehow—and it is still debated today how the fire got there—a combination of high winds and embers had spread flames across the canyon’s mouth, cutting off the route to the river.

  Dodge knew instantly what to do: he ordered the men to turn around and hike back up the gulch as fast as possible. They stumbled up the rocky hillside to what they hoped was safety on the bare rocks on the ridge top. The slope grew steeper, slowing their progress but speeding up the fire. Twenty-foot flames tore up the hillside at almost eight miles an hour behind them.

  The crew dropped their tools when the fire was about a hundred yards back. In desperation, Dodge stopped and pulled a pack of matches from his pocket. The men thought the boss had gone crazy as he knelt and lit the grass at his feet on fire.

  The flames were now fifty yards behind them, less than a minute away.

  Dodge’s fire swept ahead through the dry grass, clearing a patch the size of a small room. He told his men to get inside the burned area, that it was their only hope. But the roar of the fire drowned out his voice, the idea of an escape fire was counterintuitive, and they were too frightened to think straight.

  “To hell with that, I’m getting out of here!” someone shouted. Dodge lay in the burned grass just as the flames arrived.

  Dodge’s quick thinking saved his life. The other men continued sprinting up the slope, where they met a twelve-foot-high band of rock guarding the top of the ridge.

  Walter Rumsey and Robert Sallee scrambled through a crevice in the rimrock and found shelter in a rock slide on the far side. They and Dodge were the only ones out of the sixteen on-site who lived.

  Two more jumpers also made it to safety, but were so badly burned they died of their wounds.

  The blaze raged for another five days and took 450 men to put out. It cost thirteen lives, including James Harrison, the fire guard who had quit smokejumping the year before because it was too dangerous. One body was so badly charred that rescuers at first mistook it for a tree stump.

  The story of the twelve jumpers, the first to ever die on a fire, made national news. A feature in Life magazine portrayed them as young, brave, and doomed, like so many men in the war that had just ended. Hollywood had Red Skies of Montana, still the only decent movie about smokejumpers, in theaters by 1952.

  Two years later, President Eisenhower personally opened the new aerial fire depot in Missoula. Even though it took a tragedy, the government was now committed to smokejumping for the long term. The Forest Service improved jumper training in weather, safety, and communications. It also poured money into the scientific study of fire behavior, leading to the creation of the Interagency Fire Science Laboratory in Missoula.

  Francis Lufkin had become base manager at NCSB, a position he held for three decades. He made fifty-seven jumps and saw two of his sons go on to become jumpers before he died in 1998. He received a Presidential Award from Lyndon B. Johnson—not for fire fighting, but for the economy. As his son tells it, he saved the United States of America something like a million dollars in firefighting costs. It’s safe to say there wouldn’t be an American smokejumper program without him.

  The Bureau of Land Management started its own smokejumping program in Alaska in 1959. As always, the BLM had a lot of land to cover; initially seventeen jumpers were responsible for an area the size of Texas. California was the next state to get a Forest
Service jump base. Today there are seven Forest Service bases in California, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and Washington, and two BLM bases in Boise and Fairbanks.

  By the 1960s, the smokejumper program counted four hundred jumpers. This was a decade of change, including in the world of fighting wildfire.

  In 1963, the deployment bag (“D-bag”; and, yes, you read that right) chute system was officially adopted. Before, the sudden shock of the parachute opening could pop your helmet off or even knock you unconscious, especially if you were in the wrong position.

  With the D-bag, the chute comes out of the backpack still packed inside a small bag. This leaves time for the parachute lines and risers—the nylon straps that attach the lines to the harness—to straighten out before the chute inflates. It’s a much softer opening, and less prone to malfunctions.

  That same year, a jumper made it to the top of the world. On May 22, Willi Unsoeld, an alumnus of the base at Cave Junction, Oregon, climbed Mount Everest’s West Ridge with Tom Hornbein. They weren’t the first Americans on the summit—Jim Whittaker had made it by the standard South Col route three weeks earlier—but they did pioneer a much more difficult route. By descending via the South Col, Unsoeld and Hornbein also made the first traverse of the mountain. In the process they had to spend the night at twenty-eight thousand feet without sleeping bags or tents, which cost Unsoeld nine toes.

  Another Cave Junction jumper eventually upped the ante even further. In 1971, Stuart Roosa, the command module pilot for Apollo 14, became one of only twenty-four people ever to travel to the moon.

  By now the Forest Service had been operating under a policy of total fire suppression for more than half a century. The public mostly agreed, thanks to characters like Smokey Bear and Bambi, whose nightmare-inducing forest fire scene traumatized a generation.