Oregon Public Broadcasting

The wildfire season in the Northwest is fast approaching. Firefighting crews will spend the summer and part of the fall shuttling back and forth among blazes.

Some will make dramatic entrances, dropping from airplanes and helicopters to get to places where trucks can't.

Six new smokejumpers, as they're called, recently finished their training at a Forest Service camp in north central Idaho. Inland Northwest Correspondent Doug Nadvornick takes us there.

We're in a grassy meadow on a hillside above the town of Grangeville, Idaho. A small campfire is burning.

Circling above us is a small plane. It's carrying one veteran and six rookie U.S. Forest Service smokejumpers. If all goes well, the seven will soon drop in here as part of their training for this summer's wildfire season.

Six newly-graduated smokejumpers confer during a break in their recent graduation ceremony in Grangeville, Idaho.

Randy Nelson directs the smokejumper training program here. He says this exercise simulates what these rookies will face on-the-job.

Randy Nelson: "Primarily initial attack firefighting, to be able to get to fires in remote locations and keep them small."

A spotter inside the plane throws out two orange crepe paper streamers to gauge the wind. When she's satisfied with the conditions, she sends the jumpers in groups of two.

The first three get down just fine in the wide open spaces. The fourth has a close call.

Doug Nadvornick: "So he sheared off a little bit of the tree, but obviously he's ok."

Randy Nelson: "He got close to it, but, yeah."

Jumpers five and six also get down safely. Number seven, the veteran, comes down alone.

Once they land, the jumpers climb out of their suits, gather their parachutes and stuff them into their heavy backpacks. Nelson says it all adds up to 70 pounds of gear.

Randy Nelson: "We carry raincoats, our hardhats, gloves, some drinking water, sometimes a little bit of food, headlights, spare batteries. Mostly what we have in there is the stuff that we really need."

Rookie smokejumper Chris Markey accepts congratulations during his recent graduation ceremony in Grangeville, Idaho.

Smokejumping is a dangerous, but popular job. For every one open position, Nelson gets a hundred applicants. Rookies undergo five weeks of intense training, including 15 practice jumps. It's too much for some.

Brandon Sheehan is one of the six who graduated from the program this summer.

Brandon Sheehan: "The first year I got into fire I saw some jumpers come in on a fire and just fell in love with it. And it's been a 14-year process of getting to this point."

Sheehan's persistence tells you a little about the glamour and tradition of smokejumping in the West. The Forest Service started its program in 1940.

Now it employs more than 300 smokejumpers at seven bases, including McCall, Idaho; Winthrop, Washington and Redmond, Oregon.

While the agency considers the practice an important part of its wildfire strategy, smokejumping has its critics, who say it's obsolete. Seattle writer Doug Gantenbein is the author of "A Season of Fire", a book that explores how wildfires are fought in the West.

Doug Gantenbein: "Given the enormous expense it takes to manage the smokejumper bases, to train the smokejumpers, to maintain the aircraft and so on, I just do not believe we get good value for that."

Gantenbein says ground-based fire crews can already get to most wildfires. And, besides, with the switch in policy toward allowing fires in remote areas to burn, he says there's really no need to drop people into the backcountry.

But Gantenbein hasn't convinced the Forest Service and its spokeswoman Rose Davis.

Rose Davis: "We will be using those smokejumpers."

After their practice jump, Brandon Sheehan and his fellow rookies graduate from smokejumping school. Sheehan says he's come a long way in five weeks.

Brandon Sheehan: "The first jump I was quite terrified. But you just take a few deep breaths and you're out the door all of a sudden and the chute opens and it goes from this really incredible hurricane of activity, energy, noise. Pop. Just complete silence. It was the most remarkable feeling I've ever had."

The next time he jumps from a plane, it'll be for real.

On the Web:

U.S.F.S. smokejumper page

National Smokejumpers Association