Smokejumper Read online

  MAP OF SMOKEJUMPING BASES

  Map of smokejumper bases © by Jenn Tate

  DEDICATION

  I dedicate this book to my dad, for teaching me that a handshake

  and the word of a man is all he has, and without that, you’re nothing

  EPIGRAPHS

  Fire has always been and, seemingly, will always remain, the most terrible of the elements.

  HARRY HOUDINI

  I’ve always followed my father’s advice: he told me, first to always keep my word and, second, to never insult anybody unintentionally. If I insult you, you can be goddamn sure I intend to. And, third, he told me not to go around looking for trouble.

  THEODORE ROOSEVELT

  CONTENTS

  Map of Smokejumping Bases

  Dedication

  Epigraphs

  Foreword by John N. Maclean

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Photo Section

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Map of Response Times

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Acknowledgments

  Appendix A: U.S. Forest Service Ten Standard Firefighting Orders

  Appendix B: Eighteen Watchout Situations

  Glossary

  Index

  About the Authors

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  FOREWORD: OLD FIRES, NEW LIFE

  by John N. Maclean

  Over the past three-quarters of a century nearly six thousand men and women have served as smokejumpers, leaping from airplanes to fight fire in backcountry. It all started when fifteen firefighters died on the Blackwater Fire in 1937 in Wyoming backcountry. David Godwin, an assistant chief of the Forest Service and one of the fire investigators, concluded that the management of the fire was “intelligent and protective of the men.” But it took so long to get to the fire that flames were far beyond control by the time firefighters arrived: a faster response by only a couple of hours, he concluded, might have saved fifteen lives.

  Within two years, the smokejumper program was under development at Winthrop, Washington, and in Montana at Moose Creek and Seeley Lake. My family built a cabin on Seeley Lake in the early 1920s that we own and enjoy to this day; my father Norman Maclean, who was there when the early jumps were being made, later wrote about the smokejumpers first great tragedy, the Mann Gulch Fire of 1949, in his book, Young Men and Fire: he went from the cabin to see the fire while it was still smoldering. I wrote about the next one in my book Fire on the Mountain (William Morrow, 1999), an account of the South Canyon Fire of 1994 in which three smokejumpers and eleven other firefighters died in the flames; I did a lot of the work at Seeley Lake.

  Today, the smokejumper program is in trouble. Partly to blame is the loss of backcountry: development has encroached into previously wild country, a lot of roads have been built, and helicopters can land where there are no roads. Modern regulatory life being what it is, however, many fire supervisors are suspicious of the smokejumpers, always individualistic, sometimes arrogant, prone to jump injuries. Smokejumpers don’t fit in well with the bureaucratic slowness that too often marks getting started on a fire. Supervisors often decline to call for smokejumpers as a first resort instead of taking advantage of their finer qualities: quick to a fire, capable of independent action, tireless, and an inspiration to others to perform at peak level.

  The good news is that smokejumping’s storied past may help maintain its future. Jason Ramos’s Smokejumper is a rousing personal adventure story, a nutshell history of the great wildland fires, and an insider’s brief for making smokejumpers more relevant on today’s fire line. “Jumpers are the Swiss Army knives of wildland firefighting,” Ramos writes. “We don’t just parachute into remote fires. We can also make it to close-in fires by helo or vehicle, often faster than anyone else.”

  Ramos is a Puerto Rican kid from suburban Los Angeles, small as smokejumpers run, who put in years as a municipal firefighter and helitack, shunned minority preferences, hid a serious injury, and eventually achieved his ambition to become a smokejumper. That’s enough material for a book, but there are other smokejumper books around—and probably more to come as more jumpers step out of parachute harness and take up the pen.

  What distinguishes Smokejumper is Ramos’s mixing of fire history and personal anecdote. He interspersed his own story with brief accounts of the great wildland fires of the past, from the catastrophic Upper Middle West fires of the nineteenth century to the Yarnell Hill Fire of 2013. Ramos has personal ties to several of these fires: he lost a friend and mentor on the 1994 South Canyon Fire and went to the Thirtymile Fire in 2001 while it still burned, after it took the lives of two teenage girls and two young men on a fire crew. History comes to life through Ramos’s personal connections.

  The sites where these fires happened are more than sacred ground, the stories of what happened there more than tales of misadventure, and the casualty lists more than footnotes to history—though they are all these things too. Old fires carry embers that can turn to flame and teach new lessons to later generations. Firefighters can walk where others like them walked, face the decisions they made, and try to imagine how they would have handled a life-threatening situation. Civilian visitors get a strong dose of the price mostly young people pay to defend forests and homes, and may come away determined to do their part to make their homes defensible. These days, as fire seasons start earlier and end later, as fires burn hotter and become less predictable—and those who fight them do not doubt that’s what’s happening—everyone needs a greater awareness of the stakes involved. The spirit of these sites is always there to be discovered, but you have to look for it. Smokejumper is an invitation to do just that.

  I met Ramos while I was researching the Thirtymile Fire and he was the public information guy for the North Cascades Smokejumper base in Winthrop, a couple of dozen miles from the site of the fire. The base managers kindly extended barracks privileges to me on several occasions, and Ramos and I became friends. He was a bundle of energy then and is the same today, running his own gear company, writing a book, and still jumping fires. But he also has a conscience. Sadly, none of the lessons from the past have stopped wildland fire tragedies from happening again in the future. As Ramos notes, the Granite Mountain Hotshots took a detour from a fire assignment to visit Storm King Mountain, site of the South Canyon Fire, a few years before they met their own tragedy in 2013, and they vowed nothing like that would ever happen to them. You cannot change the basic nature of fire, which is fiercely unpredictable in the extreme. But you can try to keep alive the lessons of the past to give those of us who live with fire better odds, and this Ramos has helped to do.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  THIS BOOK IS A memoir based on my recollection of past experiences over the years. I have done my best to fact-check my memory against any and every factual record I could find, as well as the memory of those who were there with me. When records were not available, I re-created events, interactions, and conversations, to the best of my ability. If I have misstated, misinterpreted, or misremembered anything, I apologize deeply and sincerely in advance. No current jumpers’ names are in this book, out of deference to their privacy.

  As soon as I entered the fire service, back as a seventeen-year-old volunteer, I began to learn about the vast and mostly unknown legacy of the brave pioneers
who served long ago. I hope this book is enjoyed by many and that it helps to inspire a new generation to carry on this proud tradition—not only for the smokejumper program, but for the entire fire service.

  Sincerely,

  Jason A. Ramos

  PROLOGUE

  “ARE YOU READY?”

  The spotter* was shouting into the side of my helmet. His voice rose above the roar of the plane’s engines and the wind howling through the open door.

  My jump partner glanced out the door, then made way for me. I only had a moment to look out over the rippling green expanse of the Ochoco Mountains in central Oregon.

  My left hand was on my red reserve chute handle, my right gripped the bar alongside the door of the plane. The rushing air rippled the heavy fabric of my jumpsuit. My pockets bulged with gear.

  A few seconds after I left the plane, the static line that trailed over my left shoulder was supposed to open the parachute on my back automatically. If anything went wrong that I couldn’t fix on exit, I could always pull the red handle of the reserve chute on my chest. From fifteen hundred feet, roughly halfway to the ground, I’d have twelve seconds to do this and still land safely. At fourteen seconds I’d become a permanent part of the scenery. At least that’s what was drilled into our heads in training.

  At twenty-six I already had years of experience fighting fire under my belt, including six seasons rappelling out of a helicopter in California. In five weeks of training as a rookie smokejumper I had already made nineteen successful jumps from a plane, on top of countless practice jumps from the Tower . . .

  But like my four other rookie brothers on the plane, this would be the first time putting the two together. My first fire jump.

  Was I ready?

  Hell yeah. I was ready to go.

  SAY THE WORD SMOKEJUMPER and the response—if people have heard of us at all—is usually something along the lines of: Aren’t those the crazy guys who parachute into forest fires?

  Well, no, not exactly. For starters, it wouldn’t make much sense to land in fires if we possibly can help it, would it? We aim close, not in.

  Second, we’re not all guys; women have been jumping since 1981.

  And, last, we’re only partly crazy. Depends on how you define crazy, really. You’ll probably find a slightly different answer if you ask a jumper. Smokejumpers are actually very highly trained and experienced wildland firefighters, not to mention extremely safety conscious.

  After all, we’ve been doing this since the first silk canopies popped open over central Washington in 1939. We’ve had time to get it right, and our success rate—and safety record—reflect that.

  So why all the misconceptions about a profession that’s older than World War II?

  One reason is there aren’t that many of us. While the numbers vary each year, there are fewer than 500 jumpers on duty in the United States at any given time. Fewer than six thousand people have ever earned their smokejumper wings—total.

  And jumpers on the whole are a modest bunch. Self-effacing, publicity shy, call it what you will, but tooting your own horn is definitely not part of the mentality. After fifteen years of being a smokejumper, I’m still amazed at how little people know about what we do. And more important, why.

  Giving public tours of our base in Winthrop, Washington, I get that question all the time: How can you do this for a living? Why take two activities, parachuting and fighting wildfire, that in themselves would be too much for most people—and combine them?

  How do you train for it? What does it do to your personal life? What’s it like to have this as your full-time job? How do you not die? How do you have a spouse?

  Answering those questions is part of the reason I wrote this book. I want to share what it’s like to be a U.S. smokejumper, a job that’s as rewarding as it is respected.

  It’s not a job everyone can do, not even close. But someone has to do it. And those who choose to—and all those who have in the past—have served our country with honor and bravery since 1939. The program deserves to have its story told.

  I’m just one guy. There are jumpers who have done it longer, gotten hurt worse, and had closer calls or moments of heroism I could never hope to equal. I’ve included some of their stories here too.

  In telling my own story, though, I want to show that appearances aren’t everything. Even if someone is quiet, doesn’t carry on or seek the spotlight—like almost every jumper I know—it doesn’t mean he or she is arrogant or condescending.

  When the mission’s on, we’re savages. But in the end we’re just people, even if our job is a little different than most.

  We don’t do it for the glory or the glamour. We provide a meaningful public service, one that’s part of a proud legacy.

  This is what we do.

  STANDING IN THE DOOR of the plane, the first, most important goal was reaching the ground in one piece.

  On the flight in, we had all sat cocooned in our suits and helmets, alone with our thoughts. My mind was buzzing like the plane’s propellers. I silently ran through all the different ways a parachute could malfunction, and what I needed to do in each case to stay alive.

  Through the metal mesh of my face mask, I glanced toward the front of the plane. Those of us sitting further back could only see out to the sides. But the jumpers closest to the cockpit, those who would be last in the load to jump, could already see the header—the plume of smoke from the fire—miles out. They turned and faced the rear of the plane, and their hand gestures, body movements, and facial expressions told us clearly that this was no small fire. Down below, the lightning-sparked fire already covered ten or fifteen acres—as we call it, a “going fire.” Definitely not a two-manner.

  Like the rest of the others I looked out the window, watching the smoke and streamers, picking out a landmark to make sure I’d land facing into the wind as we had been trained.

  We knew we were on station, over the fire, when the pitch of the engines fell. The pilot throttled back to drop speed and started orbiting left, the side the door was on. It was like taking a long, curving freeway off-ramp.

  Things started to happen fast. Weighted crepe paper streamers fluttered to the ground, showing which way the wind blew and how long it would take us to touch down.

  The spotter started issuing commands.

  Jumpers began to leave the plane in pairs a few seconds apart.

  When our turn was up, my jump partner and I stepped forward to the door, and listened for the spotter’s commands.

  “Leg straps tight?” I gave a thumbs-up.

  “Hook up.” I connected my static line and gave it a small tug. Now came a quick pre-jump briefing—short and sweet.

  “Did you see the streamers and the jump spot?”

  We nodded, shouted “Yes!”

  “Stay the fuck out of the fire, rookie!”

  Within seconds, the plane was turning on its final pass for our designated exit point. The spotter shouted the last commands.

  “Turning final, fifteen hundred feet. Your static line is clear,” to my partner. And then to me: “Your static line is clear.”

  “Get in the door.” I stepped toward the open door, right behind my partner.

  The spotter slapped him on the leg, the signal to jump. Out he went.

  It was my turn. Everything I’d trained for the last five weeks came down to this: no hesitation, no second thoughts. Just muscle memory and the mission.

  I launched out into the void.

  CHAPTER 1

  LATE-SUMMER SUNRISE OVER THE Owens Valley, 1992. Snow lingers on the orange-lit Sierra Nevada to the west.

  Across the wide basin, Telescope Peak and the rest of Death Valley is silhouetted in the morning glare.

  A gray ’72 Chevy LUV, packed with gear, rolls north up Route 395 along the base of the mountains.

  At the wheel is a nineteen-year-old Puerto Rican kid from the SoCal suburbs, anxious and excited, on his way to start an ass-kicking new job in the middle of nowhere.r />
  That’s me.

  A week earlier I had gotten an offer for a seasonal position in the California Desert District, working on an engine crew with the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). During the long, dark drive north, I had plenty of time to wonder what exactly I was getting into. Is the captain going to be a hard-ass? Can I handle the workload? Will the crew eat me alive?

  Growing up in Los Angeles and Riverside Counties, I had already seen my share of crazy shit. From the natural disasters that plagued the state—earthquakes, floods, forest fires—to the drug-fueled violence of the 1980s, era of Boulevard Nights and Colors, California was not a boring place to live.

  In a year with the Riverside County Fire Department, I’d rolled out to fatal house fires, cardiac arrests, and bloody car accidents. I had even worked several wildfires, though nothing too big. (I burned my foot on my very first one, walking through the flames like a greenhorn rookie.)

  I had no plans after high school. College wasn’t an option; my grades sucked. Law enforcement was out since, in my world, “cop” meant “narc.” I thought about going into the military, hopefully as a long-range marksman. I grew up precision shooting with my dad. By the time I was in my late teens, my dad’s challenge was for me to shoot the head of FDR out of a dime at a hundred yards—that part was easy—then to put four more shots behind it—a little bit more difficult. So a job that used those skills sounded interesting.

  But something about fire had always fascinated me. Like every boy and half the girls in America, I played with toy fire engines and put out imaginary blazes when I was young.

  I remember standing on the roof of our house in my early teens with my father, watching a wildfire eat up a hillside just a few blocks away. I had never seen anything like it: the incredible, almost industrial heat, the hum of activity, the sheer relentless power of the flames.

  The air was filled with an eye-stinging haze, the blare of fire engines, and the buzz of helicopters. Fat air tankers swooped in to dump loads of rust-colored retardant.