Risky Business tales of the outdoors: Smoke Jumpers

Early last summer, on a float trip down the Middle Fork of the Salmon River in Idaho, a group of us spotted a thin white plume of smoke against the otherwise perfectly blue wilderness sky. We watched for about a half hour, wondering out loud whether the U. S. Forest Service were going to let the blaze burn its course or try somehow to get fire fighters into this roadless spot to knock it down.

About the time the ribbon of smoke became a small column, we got our answer: A DC-3 made a couple of passes, then let two parachutists into the air near the smoke. We watched them drop softly out of sight behind a ridge. Soon after, the smoke turned wispy, then was gone.

There was a beautifully quiet sort of drama to the whole thing, and it made me remember something a friend had asked me after I made my one and only sky dive: "You jumped out of an airplane that wasn't on fire?" Made me wish he'd been there to see those smoke jumpers-- two guys jumping out of an airplane that wasn't on fire into a forest that was.

"Probably the most important thing out there is that you never want to come down to your last option," Jim Thrash told me when I asked him about his work. "You always want to have someplace to go if things get away from you." Thrash is 39, and in the fall and winter, he works as an outfitter and guide, packing people by horse into the Idaho back country to fish and hunt. Summers, for the past eight years, he's been a smoke jumper for the U. S. Forest Service. I met him shortly after the incredible firestorms of 1988 had finally burned themselves out. No one had ever seen a summer like it, he said, and those who were actually on the fire lines knew early that they were in trouble. In the first 11 weeks of the season, Thrash worked 850 hours and jumped 14 fires.

That's what those guys call it--jumping a fire: going out the door of an airplane 1500 feet above some remote patch of burning wilderness, hoping that the mountain weather doesn't sail them into the tops of the big ponderosas, hoping that there is at least a small piece of flat ground to land on and that by the time they are down, the fire will still be small enough so that a few men with Pulaskis can dig a line that will contain it.

And what if the line doesn't hold? What if the fire gets up into the trees and begins to run?

"Happens all the time." Thrash said. "Especially in conditions like we had last season. Four years of drought, near zero fuel moisture, high winds. A lot of times last summer, we were just overwhelmed. That's when you hope you haven't come down to that last-resort situation, where all of a sudden, you hear the roar of the flames coming up a canyon and your partner looks at you, and you look at your partner, and you're both thinking, We're taters."

There are about 400 smoke jumpers in the U. S. They work for the U. S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management, and from June to September, they are on call for duty anywhere in the country, including Alaska. When a smoke column is spotted, usually in deep back country, a decision is made to either let it burn--a so-called management fire--or attack it with the paratroops while a commando assault may still make a difference.

The jumpers go in pairs, at least, and sometimes in teams of as many as 20, with just survival gear and personal kit. Tools and drinking water are dropped to them on cargo chutes. When they've done what they can, they hike to the nearest road with more than 100 pounds of gear on their backs. They make seven to ten dollars an hour, time and a half for overtime, with a 25 percent hazard-pay bonus for fighting uncontrolled fires.

Thrash works out of the McCall, Idaho, loft, which is where he took the fourweek training course that's designed to turn an already experienced fire fighter into a jumper. Altogether, the trainees make nine practice jumps: onto clearing and open hillside at first, then into heavily wooded terrain. Thrash got through jump training and even his first fire jump into meadowless woods on Ironside Mountain with no particular fear or trouble, he says. It was the final test he hated. "That was the worst. You have to hike three and a half miles over mountain terrain in three and a half hours, with a one-hundred-and-fifteen-pound pack. It's fairly simple on flat ground, but when you start going up or along sidehill over downed timber, it's really tiring, because once your pack gets moving in a certain direction, it takes all the strength you have to keep it from pulling you off your feet. My first time out, it took me three hours and thirty-six minutes, which meant I had to do it again."

Three days later, with a patch of moleskin over a large sore that the pack had worn into the middle of his back, he made the walk in two hours and 18 minutes.

About 70 jumpers work out of McCall, and, Thrash said, they're a motley crew. "If you were looking for a common thread, it would be that they all like adventure. They're adrenaline freaks. Otherwise, we have all kinds, from ultrareligious family men to drunken welfare types and everything in between. A lot of guys are real quiet, not what you'd call macho, and then there are some John Wayne types. Strangely enough, an amazing number of them are afraid of heights. That doesn't show up so much on the jumps, because from fifteen hundred feet, it looks like a diorama or a relief map down there, and you really can't feel the height. But when a cargo box lands in a tree and somebody has to climb a hundred feet or so, that's when you see the fear."

It isn't only cargo boxes that land in the trees, of course. "A lot of things can happen on the way down," is the way Thrash put it. "You get these tremendous winds in the mountains and they can be very local. I remember jumping once in an area of thunderstorms. We dropped the streamers and everything seemed OK, so I went out the door, and all of a sudden, I got hit by a microburst that blew me straight backward, which is how I landed. On a pile of rocks. Hurt my neck and my back a little is all.

"Tree landings are the biggest danger. The branches collapse your chute, then you just drop, sometimes more than a hundred feet. Happened to me once and I think it was about the worst scare I ever got. My lines caught on a little branch and stopped me about six inches from the ground. I've been lucky, though; more than a hundred twenty jumps with no serious injuries. I think the casualty rate is something like three injuries perhundred jumps."

Casualties are usually evacuated by helicopter from the nearest clearing. If no one is hurt, the team sets to digging a line wide enough to stop the spread of fire. If the flames jump that line, the effort sometimes turns into a survival exercise.

"When fire gets up into the forest crown," said Thrash, "when the whole vertical array of fuel is involved, there's just nothing you can do about it under the severe sort of conditions we had last summer. All you can do is fall back, get yourself into a safety zone, hope it is safe, and regroup. Most of the effort thrown at fires like that is for the media. So they can't say, 'You guys didn't do anything about it.' Once a fire escapes initial attack, chances of catching it are very minimal until the wind dies, or it rains, or until the fire reaches a natural barrier.

"Big fires create their own weather and the release of energy is unbelievable. Sometimes you get fire whirls, which are like tornadoes, and talk about problems! You get these two-hundred-mile-an-hour cyclonic winds that will lift the burning debris up into a column and then just kind of wander off. And when the embers do come down, all of a sudden, the fire's a lot bigger than it was before. When you're standing fifty or a hundred yards from a fire and it burns your skin, you know you're in a hot one. We saw a lot of that last summer."

Like many of those who were involved with the wildfires of 1988, Thrash thinks most of what happened was unstoppable, given the drought in the Western mountains and the winds that fanned whatever got started. But he does think those in charge might have decided to hit some fires earlier and harder if their estimates of the potential danger had been more complete.

"I think there was just too much emphasis on computer models and not enough on common sense. The theorists were basing their projections on fuel loads and fuel types. But things were so dry out there--remember, this is an ecosystem that normally gets daily rain, and it didn't get any for ninety days last summer--they were seeing stuff burn that they thought was fireproof. Now they're saying, 'Gee, weather has a lot bigger role in this than we thought it did.' Surprise, surprise."

Thrash will tell you that all smoke jumpers' stories begin with "There I (concluded on page 178)Smoke Jumpers(continued from page 126) was..." and end with "And that's no shit"; but when I asked him what the worst moments were like out there, he rendered a scene that had more grunt than bravado to it.

"You jump in the afternoon, dig line till three or four in the morning and are two or three miles from where you started with a minimum of stuff to survive the next several hours. You're tired, you're hungry, you're filthy, you've been working real hard, so you're probably soaking wet; it's ice cold, pitch black, you can't look around for a place to relax, so you just sit wherever you are, even if you have to jam your Pulaski into the ground to keep from rolling off the mountain."

When I asked Thrash why he does it, he told me that was a good question and that it would probably take several hours over several beers to come up with a good answer. Then he said, "I just like it. I like going all over the Western United States, seeing the neatest, most remote places. I like being out there in a spot I've never seen before and more than likely will never see again. I'm comfortable in the wilderness. I also enjoy the physical challenge of the work. It's like being an athlete--you have to get yourself up for every jump. It's a grind sometimes, putting in that many hours without any time off. In a way, though, that's part of the attraction of the work. Smoke jumpers are pretty much expected to be tougher than a two-dollar steak."

I told him I'd try to resist any jokes about a well-done two-dollar steak.

"We have our own little jokes," he said. "Like, we always carry an apple out there, for use in that last-option situation I was talking about. We have these small alummized fire shelters. About a three-pound package, shaped like a pup tent when you get it set up. It will resist temperatures as high as eight hundred degrees for ten or fifteen minutes. We figure if it comes to that, you crawl inside, stick the apple in your mouth and wait."