Skydiving Firefighters
From planes to flames
Photo by Jake Niece
Kendrick landing near a remote initial attack fire
It’s 1959. Chuck Sheley is 3,000 feet above an ocean of pine trees in southwest Oregon. Flying in a small plane — a Beechcraft Model 18, also known as a “Twin Beech” — Sheley feels the apprehension building within him as he nears the drop spot.
“What the heck am I doing here?” Sheley recalled. “I could be back at my guard station sharpening a Pulaski with a file.”
Sheley jumps out of the airplane. From here, it becomes mechanical. Sheley focuses on what’s required of him. He focuses on what he notices. How many acres is the fire? Which way is the wind blowing? Where to land? How to maneuver the parachute so he doesn’t accidentally land in any of the countless 200-foot-tall trees below him? He only has two minutes to figure it all out. But in the midst of it all, when the roar of the twin engine disappears and the fear begins to dissipate, Sheley takes the time to notice the one thing that stands out above the rest… the silence.
It’s the summer of 2000. Tory Kendrick is a rookie flying over the Anaconda-Pintler Wilderness in southwest Montana in a DC-3. Plumes of smoke billow up from a half-acre canopy cover. Drift streamers, 15-foot-long strips of weighted paper, are deployed to simulate the descent rate of a parachute. Once they hit the right spot, Kendrick, his partner, and 15 other smokejumpers jump out. When the parachute deploys, Kendrick takes the time to notice the loudest thing… the silence.
“It’s very calm,” Kendrick said. “Everything moves slower…Your objective at that point is to safely get to the ground. Then once you safely get to the ground, it's to safely get to the fire and safely put the fire out. Then safely find your way back off that fire, which is always different, whether you're hiking out or a helicopter comes and gets you, or you hike down to a river and get in a boat.”
Kendrick, 49, and Sheley, 86, make up two of the estimated 6,200 smokejumpers to have ever jumped over the course of 84 years. Today, The U.S. Forest Service has about 320 smokejumpers stationed at seven bases across Idaho, Montana, California, Oregon and Washington. The Bureau of Land Management has two bases and approximately 150 smokejumpers working out of Fairbanks, Alaska, and Boise, Idaho.
With smokejumpers, firefighters are able to reach difficult, remote areas without having to lug pounds of gear and equipment with them. Their main goal is to suppress fire. Kendrick said once he’s on the ground, most of the work is digging lines with a Pulaski, a hand tool that combines an ax and an adze in one head, to prevent the fire from spreading.
“At the end of the day, you’re digging ditches in the woods,” Kendrick said.
Smokejumpers, in some instances, can also save other firefighters a lot of work. Along the California-Oregon border, at a place called Pyramid Peak, Sheley remembers responding to a fire with three others. It became clear pretty quickly that they were going to need more hands on deck, so they called in another team of four.
An hour later, backup arrived and the two teams rendezvoused to begin digging a line as the winds kicked left and right. Once they had nothing but “line and black,” as Sheley said, they waited for the fire to burn up.
“That thing burned so hot at night, it was unbelievable,” Sheley said. “The good thing is, when the sun came up, the dog on fire was out. So as we demobbed to a place called Happy Camp in Northern California, they had about 500 reinforcements lined up to come in and handle this fire. We walked by, we just said, ‘hey, hey guys, it's out.’”
Sheley has been in wildland firefighting for over 34 years in many different jobs. He started his firefighting career on a tanker crew in the summer while taking classes at Chico State University. He was on the tanker for two years before becoming a smokejumper. Sheley believes his time as a track hurdler and 400-meter athlete in college prepared him for the physical challenge of smokejumping. Oddly enough, Kendrick said his time as a cross-country ski racer in college helped him too.
“It's just like learning the techniques for a collegiate event,” Sheley said. “Instead of learning the hurdles or whatever it is, you're learning parachute manipulation, exits and so forth. So it was definitely a structured classroom situation. You either adapted to it or they sent you down the road the next day.”
Sheley and Kendrick agree that training has changed over time. When Sheley was a rookie, training only lasted four weeks. Now training is six weeks and the qualifications to become a smokejumper are a bit more rigorous. Parachute manipulation, malfunction training, tree climbing, aircraft exiting procedures, parachute and cargo retrieval, fire line operations and other basic physical training requirements are all skills that have remained necessary since the very first fire jump over the Nez Perce National Forest in 1940. Smokejumpers-in-training have to jump at least 25 times before they’re able to respond to a real fire.
After 10 years of smokejumping in Oregon and three years in Fairbanks, Alaska, Sheley was forced to retire because of a nagging knee injury. If he had the chance, Sheley said he would’ve kept going as long as he met the physical requirements. After smokejumping, Sheley spent 19 years training college students to be wildland firefighters in Northern California. Now Sheley is the editor of a magazine all about smokejumpers called, well, SMOKEJUMPER. This year will be Sheley’s 63rd year coaching high school track.
Kendrick started off in firefighting, similar to Sheley, on an engine tanker with the Bureau of Land Management in Idaho in 1995. In 1999, he joined a hotshot crew for one season before getting picked up by the Missoula smokejumpers.
For 22 years, Kendrick was a smokejumper, the last five of which he spent as a base manager in Missoula. Kendrick said he’s technically still a smokejumper, but he’s detailed out into a management position in the last two years. While he doesn’t jump anymore, Kendrick said he has around 450 jumps over the course of his career. Much like his grandfather and Sheley, Kendrick said he will be a smokejumper for life.
“It's just the people, and it's good, honest, hard work,” Kendrick said. “Now you could probably do lots of things that make better money, but it's an adventure, and it is unmatched. The old joke was, Bill Gates can't parachute into Yellowstone National Park. It's just not possible. And yet we would do it regularly.”