Firefighters Get a Jump on Long Hot Summer

Kiersten Sorensen tucked her braid under her hard hat, screwed the headband down tight, looped her climbing lanyard around the trunk of a big ponderosa pine and sank her climbing spurs into the thick bark.

After 16 days of long hikes with heavy packs, running up five-story towers in padded Kevlar jumpsuits, endless push-ups and three low-altitude jumps out of airplanes, it was time for Sorensen and 11 other rookies from the Redmond Air Base to show whether they had the right stuff to be smokejumpers.

“It takes a lot more out of you mentally to climb up a tree way up high, disconnect the safety belt and free-climb than it ever takes to jump out of a plane,” said squad leader Mark Corbet, 50, the old man of the crew with 264 jumps on remote forest fires since his rookie season in 1974. “A lot of people who jumped fine get to tree climbing and have to quit.”

Not Sorensen, a 24-year-old studying to be a paramedic in the off-season. It falls to the rookies to retrieve the gear that lands in the trees, and she figures that is part of the fun.

“I’ve wanted to do this since I was in high school,” she said. “It looks fun, it looks hard, and it looks crazy.”

After wildfires burned 6.8 million acres last year in the worst season in a half century, President Clinton persuaded Congress to boost spending by $1.8 billion. The National Fire Plan calls for hiring 3,500 new firefighters for the U.S. Forest Service and 1,700 for the U.S. Department of the Interior, as well as thinning 3 million acres of federal forests to reduce fire danger and restoring 5 million acres that have already burned.

Historically, Congress has only funded about 70% of what is called the most efficient level, a balance of the cost of fighting fires against the potential losses of timber and homes, said Lyle Laverty, who oversees the National Fire Plan.

But after the nation watched nightly broadcasts of homes and forests going up in smoke in Los Alamos, N.M., and Montana’s Bitterroot Valley, lawmakers agreed to fund 100%.

With the West in a severe drought and forests loaded with fuel from a century of stopping fire from running its natural course, the nation’s wildfire crews are looking at another tough summer.

Some of them will work their way up to the smokejumpers, about 400 men and women at nine bases around the country who are the elite of the wildland firefighters. Seven bases are Forest Service, and two are U.S. Bureau of Land Management.

Despite Forest Service brass reservations about the sanity of anyone’s jumping out of an airplane, the smokejumpers started in 1939 in Washington state to see if small crews of firefighters could be quickly dispatched to remote fires and control them while they were still small.

The program grew, and this year 150 people applied for the 12 openings at the Redmond Air Base in central Oregon, bringing their total complement to 34 men and six women--five more jumpers than last season, said smokejumper manager Dewey Warner.

“We look for people who are smart enough for the job but will not give up,” said training foreman Michael Jackson. “We don’t want people to get out there and decide it’s too tough.”

The washout rate is low. Rookies generally come from a Hotshot crew--the elite of the ground-based firefighters. But to make sure, Warner and his lieutenants put them through a tough training regimen.

To qualify, they must do seven pull-ups, 25 push-ups, 45 sit-ups and run a mile and a half in 11 minutes.

Then comes the tough part--a three-mile hike over flat ground with a 110-pound pack and a five-mile hike over rough terrain packing 85 pounds.

That’s followed by a week in “The Units,” where they run--wearing full jump gear--to the tops of practice towers to work on their aircraft exit, ride a wire to the ground, then hit and roll.

“You have to stay in your zone, focus on what you’re doing, and tune out the people yelling at you,” said Sorensen.

“I drank 2 1/2 gallons of water in one day,” added rookie Jon Hernandez, 23.

After the fire is out, smokejumpers pack out all their gear--main and reserve parachutes, sleeping bag, jumpsuit, helmet, crosscut saw, Pulaski, tree-climbing gear, let-down rope, gloves, hard hat, radio, emergency fire shelter, personal gear, any leftover Spam, Beanie Weenies, sardines and water they haven’t had time to choke down, and their garbage.

The 110-pound pack weighs just 10 pounds less than Cindy Champion, who at 37 is in her third season as a smokejumper after deciding that fighting fire was more fun than identifying rare plants.

“You just decide that you’re going to make it to this point and then to another point,” Champion said. “It’s downhill, generally.”

Most of the rookies were bitten by the firefighting bug early, but Champion only learned to fight fire because she had to while working as a Forest Service botanist. After working through the night mopping up her first fire, she wanted to go home.

But the hazard pay and overtime made it all feel better. She worked her way up to a Hotshot crew, and after a year off to learn massage therapy, applied to the smokejumpers rather than go back to the Hotshots, where she was dating one of the crew.

Where Champion fits in is in her love of doing a tough job in the great outdoors, and the prospect of a fire call’s sending her anywhere from the Alaskan tundra to the Florida Everglades.

“I don’t think anyone does it for the money,” she said. “You end up working with a lot of happy people. This isn’t the real world.”

At 48, Jackson has made a year-round career of smokejumping. He’s fought a 500,000-acre fire in Alaska, where 16 smokejumpers beat out the flames with spruce boughs because you can’t dig fire line in tundra, and climbed trees in New York’s Central Park to control Asian longhorn beetles. Mandatory retirement age is 55, but he’ll keep fighting fire as long as his body holds out.

“I wouldn’t do it if I couldn’t do that,” he said.

Back in Glaze Meadow, high in the Cascade Range on the Deschutes National Forest, Jackson and squad leader Tony Loughton stand in the dewy grass as a twin-engine Shorts Sherpa C-23A, an Irish-built light transport plane, makes a pass at 1,500 feet for the rookies’ third jump.

From the plane, Corbet tosses a pair of crepe paper streamers--one red, one yellow--to mark the wind drift. They land in the wet grass just a few feet from the targets, blaze-orange streamers laid out in a circle and a square.

“The safest place to stand is in the circle or the square,” quips Loughton.

With each pass, one or two jumpers launch. Their blue and white parachutes open against a backdrop of snowcapped mountains. Jackson and Loughton note whether they keep their feet together, if they haul on their shrouds smoothly, if they turn into the wind to get the softest landing.

“Beautiful--headed into the wind,” said Jackson as Sorensen glided to the ground. “Give it some gas! OUCH!”

Afterward, Sorensen sat on a log, munched a sandwich and recalled her jump.

“Nothing else feels like that,” she said. “This opened a whole new door for me.”