The Smokejumpers

The idea of parachuting firefighters into burning forests was first proposed in nineteen thirty-four, dismissed as impractical, and then quietly tested anyway. By nineteen forty, a training operation had been established outside Missoula, and on July twelfth of that year, two men named Earl Cooley and Rufus Robinson made the first live fire jump in Forest Service history, into a blaze on the Nez Perce National Forest in Idaho. They put the fire out. Then they walked back out of the mountains.

Missoula became the center of smokejumping in the United States. The Army watched the program closely enough to send officers to Missoula to study parachute techniques; one of them, Major William Cary Lee, later organized the first paratrooper training at Fort Benning, Georgia. Smokejumping was formalized as a permanent Forest Service program in nineteen forty-four, and in the mid-nineteen fifties, the Aerial Fire Depot was built adjacent to the Missoula airport, a facility purpose-built for housing, training, and dispatching crews.

The Aerial Fire Depot is still there, still sending smokejumpers into remote terrain across the American West. The visitor center offers public tours during summer months, and the base remains one of the largest smokejumper operations in the country. The men and women who train here pack their own chutes, maintain their own gear, and are ready to jump within hours of a fire call.

What Missoula built over eight decades is less a tradition than a discipline, a set of skills refined through hundreds of deployments and paid for, in the early years, with painful losses. The mountain just east of town is called Mount Sentinel. The smokejumper base sits in its shadow, down by the river, ready to go.