On July 12, 1940, a Forest Service spotter named Earl Cooley made the first operational smokejumper jump in American history out of a Travel Air over the Idaho backcountry. Nine years later he watched a different airplane drop sixteen men into a Montana gulch where thirteen of them would die in twelve minutes. The base he helped found is still flying out of Missoula.
A Pirep featured story · KMSO Missoula Montana / Bert Mooney Field, Missoula, MT
In 1939, the U.S. Forest Service was looking for a way to get firefighters onto remote lightning strikes before they grew into uncontrollable wildfires. The Aerial Fire Control Experimental Project had been trying water drops from aircraft and failing. In 1940 they switched to parachuting men in. On July 12 of that year, a 28-year-old Forest Service spotter named Earl Cooley jumped out of a Travel Air biplane onto the Marten Creek fire in the Nez Perce National Forest of Idaho — the first operational smokejumper deployment in American history. The training base was at Hale Field in Missoula. The program made it through the war by training conscientious objectors who couldn't carry weapons but volunteered to fight fires.
By 1949 the base at Missoula was the busiest smokejumper operation in the country. It had also never lost a man in the line of duty. That changed on the afternoon of August 5, 1949.
At 2:30 PM a Douglas C-47 named Miss Montana lifted off Hale Field with 15 smokejumpers, foreman R. Wagner "Wag" Dodge, and Earl Cooley aboard as spotter, bound for a lightning fire reported in Mann Gulch — a steep two-mile cleft in the Gates of the Mountains north of Helena, named by Lewis and Clark in 1805. The temperature on the ground was 97°F. Fire danger was rated 74 out of 100 — explosive stage. The flight was rough; one smokejumper got airsick and didn't jump, returning with the airplane. The remaining fifteen parachuted into the head of the gulch around 4 PM. The radio's static line broke and the chute failed; their only communication tool was destroyed on landing.
They linked up with Forest Service Fire Guard James Harrison (himself a former smokejumper who had quit the previous year because of the danger) and started downhill toward the Missouri River, planning to use the water as a safe refuge. They couldn't see that the fire had already crossed the gulch and was spotting ahead of them. When they rounded the bend, the way out was on fire. They turned and ran uphill. The fire, accelerated by up-canyon winds and dry grass, advanced 3,000 acres in ten minutes. Foreman Dodge stopped, lit an escape fire with a match in the grass, and called for the men to lie down in the burned area he was creating. They didn't understand and kept running. Dodge survived in his escape fire. Two smokejumpers — Walter Rumsey and Robert Sallee — found a crack in the ridge rock and slipped through. The other twelve smokejumpers and Harrison were overrun. The total elapsed time from blowup to overrun was about twelve minutes.
The Mann Gulch fire rewrote how the Forest Service trains and equips wildland firefighters. The "Ten Standard Fire Orders" and "Eighteen Watch-Out Situations" came directly out of the inquest. Norman Maclean spent the last years of his life on the book Young Men and Fire (published posthumously in 1992), which remains the canonical account. The C-47 that flew the crew that day, Miss Montana, is at the Museum of Mountain Flying at KMSO and was restored to airworthy status; it flew to Normandy for the D-Day 75th anniversary in 2019, then back over Mann Gulch on August 5 to drop wreaths for the 13 men. The Missoula smokejumper base — Aerial Fire Depot — is still on the field, the largest in the country, and still flying.