During summer in parts of Alaska, the sun shines for more than two months straight. The endless days are punctuated by the appearance of gigantic thunderheads that, many afternoons, seem to boil up into the sky. They often bring torrents of rain and bolts of lightning that ignite fires. Fort Wainwright, a U.S. Army facility in Fairbanks, Alaska, houses about two hundred federal wildland firefighters. Roughly seventy-five of them, stationed at a group of unassuming buildings near an airstrip, are known as smokejumpers—firefighters who leap out of airplanes, parachute to the ground, and work to contain blazes in some of the most difficult and remote terrain in the country. Smokejumpers work from nine bases in the Western U.S.; they may fight a fire for a day or for several weeks. When a job is done, they often bushwhack to the nearest road or helicopter landing spot.
In June, on the eve of the summer solstice, there were thirty-four people on the “jump list,” which sets the order in which smokejumpers hustle onto outgoing flights. Their names were written on a whiteboard in “the box”—a central area of desks, computers, and maps that serves as the operational headquarters of the Alaska Smokejumper Base—along with runic notations indicating their roles and qualifications. Much of Alaska’s interior was under a red-flag warning because of high temperatures, dry fuels, and strong winds. Everyone wondered when the “bust,” an explosion of lightning and new ignitions, would arrive. Jesse Olstead, a twenty-nine-year-old with shaggy brown hair, kept stopping by the box to check the jump list. He was No. 18 in line.
Olstead, who grew up in a logging community in Washington State, described smokejumping as “the best-kept secret I’ve ever seen.” He took a job as a firefighter during the summers when he was in college, and he eventually joined the Chena Hotshots, an élite firefighting crew at Fort Wainwright. When some of his friends became smokejumpers, he was intrigued. Smokejumper openings often attract hundreds of applications from experienced firefighters. Olstead submitted one, and he was selected to begin training in the spring of 2024.
In Alaska, it takes rookie smokejumpers five to six weeks to prepare for fire season. Roughly a third of them wash out. On Day One, rookies are given sixty-five minutes to hike three miles while carrying a pack that weighs a hundred and ten pounds. Other bases are said to make rookies run long distances across challenging terrain, or to spend sixteen hours digging firebreaks. “We put you in a bottle and shake you up and see if you’re going to perform,” Evan Burgess, a jumper in his sixth year, told me. Mimi Scissons, who rookied in the eighties, said that she washed out during a three-mile hike with a ninety-pound pack. “I totally broke down mentally,” she told me. She went through a period of heavy drinking before getting sober, trying again, and finally spending twelve seasons as the first Native American woman smokejumper. In some ways, the process echoes what an Army recruit would go through in boot camp. “Making it through that and not having an M16 on your shoulder is pretty sweet,” Nick Biedscheid, who trains rookies in Alaska, said.
Rookies ultimately have to master such challenges as flight dynamics, parachute malfunctions, and landing in dangerous conditions. They complete at least twenty practice jumps of increasing difficulty; the last one requires landing in a half-acre zone surrounded by woods. A rookie who completes training is “beyond reproach,” Wally Wasser, who is known as the all-time Jump King because he parachuted to an unsurpassed three hundred and ninety-five fires, told me. “You would never, ever not trust that person.”
While Alaska’s smokejumpers waited for thunderheads to ignite fires, several of them worked in the loft, an airy room crammed with sewing machines and bolts of fabric on long tables. One was patching a parachute. Others were sewing gear out of black nylon. Outside, on the tarmac, jumpers drove forklifts loaded with cargo—firefighting tools, fuel, provisions—to waiting airplanes. In the box, jumpers gazed up at several large monitors that displayed maps and live weather updates. By 2:16 P.M., lightning had struck more than seven hundred times. Yet the siren that calls smokejumpers to a fire, triggered by a small black button on the wall, had not yet gone off. (The button was decorated with the cover of the Chemical Brothers’ album “Push the Button.”)
When the siren sounds, the jumpers at the top of the list have two minutes to get their gear and start loading onto a “jumpship.” Smokejumpers can reach anywhere in mainland Alaska in less than two hours. Waiting for the siren, Burgess told me, is like a “slow adrenaline drip.” By 3:13 p.m., another five hundred and sixty-four bolts of lightning had struck Alaska, but there was still no siren. Two jumpers were bent over a chessboard. Outside, a pilot sat near a plane, reading a copy of “War and Peace.” A barely perceptible tension built. By 4:41 p.m., the number of lightning strikes across the state had surpassed two thousand, yet the button remained untouched. “All right, we should do it,” Keaton Shepherd, a tall smokejumper with reddish hair and a beard, suddenly said. “We need to make the sacrifice.”
Many smokejumpers worship a god they call Big Ernie. He is a kind of jolly Odin for whom the cardinal sins are entitlement, whining, and bragging. Big Ernie is said to maintain the modesty of his flock by squashing notions of grandiosity; he alone decides who gets a good fire, a bad fire, or no fire at all. The smokejumpers hatched a plan to appeal to Big Ernie’s perverse sense of humor. “If you’re ready, nothing happens, but if you’re unprepared, you’re definitely going out,” Shepherd said. “Somebody go into a pack and randomly take something out.”
Finally, at 7:19 P.M., a ticker displayed a message: “FIRE 232 REQUESTING JUMPERS.” The jumper who was supervising the box that day, Joey Cowen, confirmed the request. Then another jumper walked over to the wall and pushed the button.
The siren let out a deafening wail, and eight jumpers sprinted to nearby racks of gear. They zipped up Kevlar suits and strapped on knee and shin guards. They dipped their arms through parachute harnesses and, laden with a hundred pounds each, rushed through a bay door. Firefighters who weren’t yet being deployed lined the route to the tarmac, hooting and clapping and giving high fives. The jumpers climbed into the belly of a maroon-and-white jumpship as its propellers began to whir and then roar.
Back in the box, Cowen stood in front of the whiteboard and updated the jump list. Big Ernie had apparently been pleased. Shepherd had risen from No. 14 to No. 6.
“Did you take something out of your pack?” Cowen asked Shepherd.
“I did,” Shepherd said. “A tent.”
Cowen grinned. “That’s why we’re going!”
Twenty minutes later, the siren wailed again. A lightning fire had broken out near an elementary school in a small town north of Denali National Park. Olstead ran to his cubby, put on his jumpsuit and harness, and hurried across the tarmac to the waiting jumpship. The bust was here.
The history of American smokejumping began with a dare. In 1939, a crew assembled near Winthrop, Washington, to conduct what was described as the smokejumping experiment. The Soviets had begun parachuting to fires in the mid-thirties, but U.S. officials initially rejected the approach as too risky. “All parachute jumpers are more or less crazy,” Evan Kelley, a regional forester, wrote. “Otherwise they wouldn’t be engaged in such a hazardous undertaking.” The first jumps resulted in wrenched backs and injured knees. But the crew came up with solutions. After a parachutist in a leather aviator hat scraped his face bloody, they sent jumpers up in catcher’s masks and football helmets. When someone got caught in a tree, they trained jumpers how to get down with ropes.
Francis Lufkin, whose job was to climb into trees and retrieve parachutes, had been forbidden to jump out of planes by his wife. He had never even been in a plane at the time. But his fellow crew members challenged him to leap out of a Stinson, an aircraft with a propeller on its nose, so he suited up. When he got home, his wife knew what he had done by the funny smile on his face.
Lufkin went on to become the manager of the North Cascades Smokejumper Base, one of the country’s first, and stayed for decades. Back then, crews were made up of young Quakers and Mennonites who refused military service. “I didn’t believe in killing,” Elmer Neufeld, a conscientious objector from Kansas who worked under Lufkin, once recalled. “Now we got a job, not only can we do it, but it’s fun. . . . It’s a lot of hard work, so what?” Rookies often pretended to be older than they were. “I kind of fudged on my age, and it haunted me until my retirement,” Bill Moody, who began fighting fires in 1956, when he was seventeen, told me.
Smokejumping fascinated the American public. In 1949, a TV broadcast showed four handsome jumpers parachuting onto the Ellipse in Washington, D.C. Jumpers starred in adventure books and inspired a G.I. Joe set that featured a tiny chainsaw. The job was obviously dangerous: jumpers impaled themselves on trees, cut themselves with tools, and broke their legs, ankles, and shoulders. (Just last year, one smokejumper fractured both feet in a hard landing, another fractured both legs, and a third broke a leg.) Thirty-two smokejumpers have died in the line of duty. Twelve of them, plus one former jumper, lost their lives in 1949 when the Mann Gulch Fire, in Montana, overran them. A film inspired by the tragedy, “Red Skies of Montana,” was made in the fifties, and the production built a seven-acre forest in Los Angeles at a cost of a quarter of a million dollars. It was set on fire for the cameras.
Gary Welch saw “Red Skies of Montana” as a teen-ager in Texas, where he worked as an oil-field roughneck. He and his two brothers all became smokejumpers. Welch broke his back during his second season, yet he returned to jump again the next year. He eventually became a banker, while his brothers chose careers as schoolteachers so that they could keep jumping every summer. “All of us always agree that it was the best job we ever had,” Welch once said.
The first woman to try to become a jumper, Deanne Shulman, passed the physical test in 1979. Nonetheless, she was disqualified because she weighed too little. She sought advice from Allen (Mouse) Owen, a legendary four-foot-eleven smokejumper who had previously got congressional waivers to fight as a marine in the Vietnam War. In 1981, after filing an Equal Employment Opportunity complaint, Shulman became a jumper. Owen sent her a congratulatory letter. Five days later, he died in a skydiving accident.
Since the start of the experiment, eighty-seven years ago, there have been about six thousand American smokejumpers. They have gone on to become priests, farmers, cowboys, coaches, painters, philosophy professors, nuclear engineers, Shakespeare scholars, Olympians, and diplomats. One member of the Alabama National Guard who escorted Martin Luther King, Jr., from Selma to Montgomery was a smokejumper. So was one of the first people to summit Mt. Everest via the treacherous West Ridge. A smokejumper helped draft the 1964 Wilderness Act. Another piloted the Apollo 14 mission to the moon. At least eight smokejumpers were suspected by the F.B.I. of being the infamous hijacker D. B. Cooper, who collected a ransom of two hundred thousand dollars and then parachuted out of a Boeing 727, never to be found. A remarkable number of these individuals share Gary Welch’s opinion that it was the best job they ever had.
The jumpship carrying Olstead taxied to the runway and took off into a sky filled with mammoth gray thunderheads. He and eleven other jumpers were squeezed together on canvas benches. The plane, a Dash 8 turboprop, was small enough that their boots were touching the cargo on board: several thousand pounds of chainsaws, hoses, pumps, rations, and other equipment, including a satellite phone and a trauma kit. After they jumped, the cargo would be “kicked”—parachuted down to the fire—so that the crew could be self-sufficient for days. On the way to the fire, some jumpers rested with their eyes closed. Olstead gazed out a window until he saw an impressive column of gray smoke. A door at the back of the plane was opened, and the combination of wind and engine noise made talking difficult. The jumpship circled the fire while the spotter—a smokejumper who oversees the mission from the air—leaned out the door to assess it. Lightning had struck between the town and the Clear Space Force Station, a radar installation that detects ballistic missiles. The fire already stretched across a hundred acres in a forest of black spruce and hardwoods.
Smokejumpers parachute out of planes in “sticks” that usually consist of two people. Each stick conducted a twenty-nine-step “buddy check,” inspecting harnesses and chutes. The spotter dropped three crêpe-paper streamers to estimate the wind drift. Finally, he signalled that it was time for the jumpers to come to the door. Three sticks leaped out in quick succession. Olstead and his partner were up next.
“Ready?” the spotter shouted. “Leg straps tight?” He told the pair to hook a cable called a static line to their drogues—miniature parachutes that slow and stabilize one’s fall before the main chute opens, preventing jumpers from somersaulting through the air or falling head first. The spotter yelled, “Any questions?” There were none. “We are on final. Get in the door.”
Olstead’s partner sat on the edge. The spotter stretched himself out of the door as far as he could, confirmed their proximity to the jump spot, and told them to get ready. Then he slapped Olstead’s partner on his right arm. The jumper flung himself out the door, hands on his lower back and knees bent in a crouched position. Olstead, close behind, dropped himself onto the edge. For a split second, he faced forward, into the sun. Then he leaped.
Olstead quickly accelerated to ninety miles per hour. He felt rain on his face and began to recite a five-second count. “Jump thousand!” He could see the tributaries of a river glinting gold down below. “Look thousand!” Above him, he could see the plane flying out of view. “Reach thousand!” With his right hand, he felt for the handle on his chest. “Wait thousand!” In the distance, his partner’s parachute opened. “Pull thousand!”
Olstead yanked the handle to release his parachute and watched the red-white-and-blue fabric unfurl. The world went quiet and the raindrops stopped. Now he was floating between Heaven and earth. He reached overhead, pulled one of his parachute’s steering toggles, and turned himself toward the column of smoke.
To the north of the fire, between a forest and a small dirt road, Olstead spied a green field—the jump spot. He could see the bright parachutes of jumpers who had already landed there. He arced to the right, facing into the wind as he approached. He tugged on the toggles to slow himself down. The ground rushed toward him; he bent his knees and let the balls of his feet hit first, falling forward in a fluid motion to distribute the shock across his body.
“Jumper O.K.!” he shouted.
His fellow-jumpers were already taking off their Kevlar suits and stuffing chutes into bags. The crew leader, the first person to parachute out of the jumpship, announced the plan: “We’re going to take the right flank.” The crew dispersed into the forest.
Most wildland firefighting crews work in strict hierarchical command structures. Smokejumpers, in contrast, are trained to be self-reliant and independent. Jim Veitch, a smokejumper who rookied in 1967, wrote that he once saw a “regimented hotshot crew” watching “in disgust as a milling mob of jumpers ambled off in seeming disorganization.” The smokejumpers’ strategy is to adopt whatever technique allows them to contain a fire as fast as possible. One jumper is famous for having smothered miles of flames with his jacket; in Alaska, jumpers have used spruce boughs and burlap bags filled with moss. “No one is telling you what to do or when to hike,” a second-year jumper—a “snookie”—said. “It’s like going from the military to a farm commune. The amount of structure is the opposite.”
Olstead has six different firefighter qualifications—he can lead wildfire crews, tourniquet a wound, and participate in helicopter missions, for instance—but today he cut line, a fundamental firefighting tactic that creates a gap in vegetation to stop a fire’s spread. The crew worked for five hours as flames punched up from nearby trees. Under the light of the midnight sun, Olstead and a partner used a chainsaw to remove brush. Helicopters arrived with water, and the jumpers directed the pilots via radio.
At 2 A.M., Olstead joined forces with a bulldozer that had been driven out to the site. Just beyond the flames, he hiked through thick forest, marking a trail that the dozer could follow. The machine uprooted trees in its path as though they were twigs, leaving behind a swath of earth that was bare all the way down to the permafrost.
By 3:30 A.M., the flames and smoke had mellowed in the wan light of morning. Two jumpers went scouting for a camping spot. The others soon joined them, set up tents, and slept for a few hours. At 7 A.M., the crew was up again, drinking coffee around a campfire. For the rest of the day, as planes and helicopters dropped water, Olstead worked the fire line with the dozer while others put out spot fires with pumps and hoses. Several hotshot crews arrived and took over; vehicles came to pick up the smokejumpers. By evening, they were back at the base, on the jump list again.
My guide on the Alaska Smokejumper Base was Rod Dow, a seventy-eight-year-old retired smokejumper who once held the record for jumps onto fires. Dow, who has a white mustache and a baritone voice, rookied at the McCall Smokejumper Base, in Idaho, but spent most of his thirty-two-year career in Alaska. Federal officials had approved my visit after he’d agreed to accompany me. Dow had a knack for finding ways to get back to his former base. In 2019, when Alaska’s fire season burned two and a half million acres, he volunteered for weeks of wrapping and strapping cargo; the base ultimately kicked eight hundred thousand pounds of supplies for wildfires.
While I was there, he again spent hours on the tarmac in front of thousand-pound loads of canvas-wrapped gear. A rotation of bluegrass, surf rock, and rap played over outdoor speakers. Dow stood with three tattooed and shirtless jumpers, weaving white paracord through hooks in the canvas and cinching it tight. The Alaska Smokejumper Base is said to be the largest civilian “paracargo” operation in the world. Only the U.S. and Russian militaries deliver more cargo by parachute. “We’re like the FedEx for wildland fire,” Robert Ordonez, a smokejumper of fourteen years and a paracargo specialist, told me. “Four-wheelers, boats, you name it—we’ll figure out a way to put it on a pallet, same-day delivery.”
Smokejumpers know so much about dropping people and things out of airplanes that the C.I.A. recruited them for operations such as the Bay of Pigs invasion, in Cuba, and the training of nationalist paratroopers in Taiwan. Starting in the nineteen-fifties, the C.I.A. covertly owned an airline, Air America, which supplied and supported the U.S. military in Asia. Smokejumpers kicked cargo destined for mountain villages in Vietnam, Hmong rebels in Laos, and Muslim dissidents in China. (Back then, the joke was that if a smokejumper told you how he’d spent the off-season, he’d have to kill you.) In 1959, the Dalai Lama fled Tibet through the Himalayas; a smokejumper designed a special high-altitude parachute to drop three hundred thousand Indian rupees to his escape party. Johnny Kirkley, an ex-smokejumper, told me that he joined Air America in 1965. “We got hired to do that job because of what we did on fires,” he said. “In smokejumping, you have to be spontaneous, and in war you gotta be the same way.” Among the items that Kirkley transported in Southeast Asia were munitions, bags of rice, and live potbellied pigs wrapped in burlap bags. At least eight smokejumpers recruited by the C.I.A. were ultimately killed in action. One was taken as a prisoner of war in Laos and went missing while trying to escape.
When Dow arrived at the Alaska Smokejumper Base, in 1975, sixty-five men worked out of an airplane hangar that had been abandoned after the Second World War. It had no heat, no running water, and a single porta-potty. Murry Taylor, who jumped for twenty-seven seasons, many of them with Dow, compared the recruits to wild horses. “The rebels, they came to Alaska,” he said. “It was guys from Vietnam and guys who couldn’t fit with the authoritarian, do-what-you’re-told deal in the Lower Forty-eight.” The base became an unexpected source of innovation. Early on, the government issued wildland firefighters fire-resistant pants that were pocketless and uncomfortable. Alaska’s jumpers took a vote and decided to strike. “We were the last people in the nation that were not wearing them,” Dow told me. “We just had a meeting on the lawn and decided we’re not getting on the plane. It fucking floored our boss.” By the following year, the government was issuing improved fire pants with pockets, and they are still worn by wildland firefighters today. Dow and his crewmates were also the first smokejumpers to experiment with square-canopied parachutes, which increased maneuverability. They tested them by launching themselves into the air from carts pulled by speeding pickup trucks. They sent their findings to Washington, D.C., and square chutes were eventually adopted by smokejumpers across the nation. “They assumed a lot of risk in pioneering that,” Burgess, the sixth-year jumper, told me. “It was some cowboy inventing.”
Burgess is a supervisor in the loft, where jumpers hunch over tables as they cut fabric. He taught himself how to use the software AutoCAD so that he could create his own patterns instead of outsourcing them. “It’s a very specific thing that we do,” he said. “That’s why we build all of it, down to our gear bags.” He showed me technical drawings and multi-page sewing patterns for parachute-deployment bags, harnesses, and jumpsuits. The patterns included detailed specifications for thread tension and stitches per inch. Hannah Kligman, who last year became the sixth woman to rookie in Alaska, described the way that smokejumpers approach communal tasks: “What needs to get done? What did I get trained in doing? Where can I fit in?” She called the rhythm of daily work monastic.
Dow watched as Nick Hampe, a jumper working in the loft, stretched a billowy, three-hundred-and-seventy-five-square-foot parachute onto a table, and began folding it. Rookies learn to pack parachutes by doing it twenty times, and having each one inspected. They jump with their twenty-first, which is jokingly called the death chute. Some smokejumpers eventually become senior or master riggers, certifications issued by the Federal Aviation Administration. (Togie Wiehl, an Alaska Native jumper who retired from the profession after twenty-nine years, told me that he read a master-rigger handbook so religiously that he grew self-conscious; he disguised it by taping a Playboy magazine cover over it.)
Hampe executed the sixty-one-step process of packing the chute from memory. At times, he got onto the table, using his arms and legs to muscle the silky fabric into intricate, origami-like folds. After an hour of work, he slipped it into a bag that measured thirteen by fourteen inches. Once a jumper pulled the handle, the parachute would blossom like a flower. “Gorgeous,” Dow said. Hampe logged the chute in a database and deposited it on a shelf with dozens of others. “They’re all good chutes,” Hampe said. “I’ll jump with any of them.”
Dow told me that he kept travelling to Alaska to see if the “jumper attitude” lived on. Decades ago, he and some crew members had removed a fence, ferried in thirty truckloads of soil, and created a garden. To this day, smokejumpers grow asparagus, kale, cabbage, and potatoes there. They also continue to ride skateboards across the tarmac. And they decide almost everything via coin flip, including who will buy the day’s ice cream and who will wear a silly robe to the showers all season. In the seventies, Dow inaugurated an annual coin-tossing contest called the Big Flip; last year, a smokejumper won more than twenty thousand dollars. The sight of a thunderhead could still make Dow misty-eyed. “If they gave me an opportunity to go jump a fire right now, I would do it,” he told me.
It is not a given that smokejumping will continue to exist in the decades to come. America’s roadless areas, which jumpers specialize in reaching quickly, have been shrinking since 1939. Firefighters can access more places with trucks, or with helicopters that allow them to rappel rather than parachute onto difficult terrain. Meanwhile, as a result of warming temperatures and historic accumulations of trees and brush, wildfires have grown larger, more complex, and more unpredictable—requiring hundreds and sometimes thousands of firefighters. Increasingly, the wildfires that most urgently need suppressing ignite in the interfaces between rural and urban areas, places smokejumpers were not originally intended to go. Some smokejumpers believe that they are being sent to fewer fires than before, and fear that their profession could go extinct.
Already, they are in a period of tremendous change. For decades, jumpers in Alaska and Boise, Idaho, were employees of the Bureau of Land Management. Recently, however, they became employees of a new U.S. Wildland Fire Service created by the Trump Administration. Jumpers at the country’s other seven bases work for the U.S. Forest Service; a feasibility study is under way to see if U.S.F.S. firefighters can also be moved into the new agency. It was rumored that smokejumpers might even become a test case for the consolidation, prompting speculation about shrinking budgets and potential base closures.
In 2025, when the Department of Government Efficiency—DOGE—began identifying thousands of federal employees for cuts, it targeted numerous “forestry technicians,” a broad category that included fire lookouts, fire-behavior specialists, and smokejumpers. One day, the Bureau of Land Management, which is part of the Department of the Interior, received a list of names from DOGE that included multiple Alaska smokejumpers. The B.L.M.’s fire leadership pointed out that any cuts were supposed to spare public-safety workers. The smokejumpers ultimately kept their jobs, but the episode incensed the Alaska crew. (“Smokejumpers are an integral part of the Department of the Interior’s wildland firefighting organization,” a spokesperson for the department said. “The wildland fire workforce was exempt from recent downsizing efforts.”)
At the time, Sam Forstag, a fourth-year jumper, was the vice-president of a union representing eight hundred Forest Service workers in Montana. DOGE instructed the agency to fire about three hundred and sixty Forest Service employees in the state, including forestry technicians—cuts that Forstag considered senseless. Forestry technicians often work part time as firefighters; some make sure that smokejumpers get picked up after a long firefight. “They’re firing the lowest-paid, most efficient workers that we have in the federal government,” Forstag told me. Most smokejumpers start out earning about twenty-five dollars an hour, or thirty-eight dollars an hour for overtime. In April, 2025, Forstag criticized the cuts at a rally organized by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders. Afterward, the office of the Secretary of Agriculture, which oversees the Forest Service, reportedly tried to have him fired. Forstag kept his job and jumped for another season, but he felt depressed and infuriated. “I remember thinking, We can’t let them get away with this,” he told me.
In January, at a dive bar in downtown Missoula, Forstag launched a House campaign for Montana’s First Congressional District. His initial campaign ad started with the sound of a siren. “When that siren goes off, you go,” he narrates. “Off to some wildfire ripping through a chunk of forest you’ve never seen. When you get there, you jump. Right now, the richest people in this country are trying to burn it all down so they can buy it all up.”
Smokejumpers are a politically diverse community. “If you’re a good smokejumper, you’re a good smokejumper,” Dan Helterline, a retired jumper in Montana and a staunch conservative, told me. “Doesn’t matter what your political views are.” Forstag is running as a Democrat, on a platform of economic populism and anti-corruption, but he touts endorsements from several Republican legislators in Montana. He donated to four Republican campaigns in the recent past, and he argued that a liberal obsession with “processes and committees” was “part of why people have started to lose faith that government can actually do big things.”
Until recently, Forstag and five campaign staffers worked from his thousand-square-foot house. Conor Hogan, a smokejumper and Forstag’s best friend, took the summer off to work on the campaign, helping organize events and scouting a tree for Forstag to cut down, for a political ad. Because Forstag’s house is close to the Missoula airport, where local smokejumpers are based, they frequently heard jumpships taking off, carrying their fellow-firefighters. “We’re missing it a lot,” Hogan told me.
Hogan, who spends the off-season as a graduate student in fiction writing at the University of Houston, seemed to view smokejumping not only as a profession but as a world view. He has written that the establishment of America’s national forests was a triumph of conservation over corruption, of working-class values over corporate greed. He believes that smokejumpers and the land-management agencies they work for should not be seen as anachronisms but as models for public service. “What if we created a modern G.I. Bill, but instead of fighting overseas, young men and women were financially and socially incentivized to work on a fire crew, fuels crew, or trails crew?,” Hogan wrote in the trade magazine of the National Smokejumper Association. Some could be trained to conduct prescribed burns, which thin out accumulating fuel. “What might our society look like, decades down the line, if entire generations had spent three or four summers working in the woods?”
In “Young Men and Fire,” a nonfiction account of the 1949 Mann Gulch Fire, Norman Maclean describes smokejumpers as people who “love the universe but are not intimidated by it.” Maclean, who worked as a wildland firefighter as a teen-ager and considered becoming a smokejumper himself, said that his subjects possessed an “it” inside them. “This ‘it’ is the something special within that demands we do something special,” he wrote. “ ‘It’ could be within a lot of us.” All smokejumpers have a way of explaining what compels them. Mike McMillan, who jumped in Alaska for seventeen years, laughingly described smokejumpers as “benevolent narcissists.” Sandy Ahlstrom Romero, the first woman to go through rookie training in Alaska, applied for the job after a man at a party predicted that she’d wash out if she tried; she compared the experience of overcoming sleep deprivation, pain, stress, and danger to spiritual training. “There’s no knowing what’s going to come,” she said. “You have to give up expectations.” Mel Tenneson, another former Alaska jumper, told me that he sometimes parachuted to places so beautiful that he’d hike for hours instead of sleeping. Wasser, the all-time Jump King, remembered floating to the bottom of a five-hundred-foot-deep canyon, in southern Utah, where he saw cliff dwellings that Ancestral Pueblo people had made some thousand years ago. “It’s sometimes scary and sometimes awe-inspiring,” James Baker, a smokejumper in his fourth year, told me. “But you’re always experiencing it with these people. It’s like this group processing of sublime phenomena.”
As the bust continued in Alaska, work on the base accelerated and intensified. Dozens of additional smokejumpers arrived from across the country. In the box, the jumpers in charge of operations played logistical chess on the whiteboard, moving jumpships between Fairbanks and a “spike base”—a far-flung temporary outpost—to the west, in Galena. Names cascaded up and down the jump list. At the height of the bust, a hundred and sixty-one smokejumpers fought fires across the state. Bill Cramer, a smokejumper of thirty-seven years who had risen to chief of the Alaska Smokejumper Base, parachuted to fires like everyone else. He has always been amazed at the way smokejumping defies hierarchies; whoever is at the top of the jump list is typically the incident commander of the fire. Sometimes his crew leader was a second-year smokejumper. “I’ve never found an equivalent system anywhere on the planet,” he told me. “We intentionally give people responsibility early, and it creates an organization where you have a ton of people that are ready to step forward.” Cramer was fifty-six, and he was facing mandatory retirement in the winter.
Jumpers often parachute with something special—often a small luxury such as a frozen steak or some olive oil—in a pocket of their suits. Cramer jumps with a stuffed toy pig. One of his four daughters gave it to him after a co-worker died, in 2000, owing to a parachute malfunction. On July 3rd, the pig made its hundred-and-forty-ninth jump, to a fire on the Seward Peninsula that Cramer and another jumper worked to contain. A helicopter transported them to Galena, a hundred and fifty miles away, and he and eleven other jumpers were swiftly dispatched to a fire in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, near the Alaskan town of Aniak. Shortly before midnight, the crew beat out a fifty-acre fire that was smoldering delicately through lush green tundra. The sky was peach and violet. They walked through wildflowers as wisps of gray smoke pooled around their legs.
The firefighters made camp at two in the morning, reclining on the pillowy grass, and ate dinner around a flickering campfire. The next day, they were dispatched to a place called Selawik, near the western coast. A fire had started in a dump and was spreading toward a solar array. Wildland firefighters don’t usually fight fires that are igniting hazardous materials. But Cramer has spent his career teaching jumpers that there is a time to bend every rule. “If you don’t use your judgment, you are putting lives at risk,” he told me. They beat out the flanks of the fire as smoke from burning trash permeated their hair and their clothing. They halted the head of the flames just a hundred feet from the solar panels.
When I talked to Cramer two days later, the crew was still working to secure the fire using pumps, hoses, and helicopter bucket drops. They were sleeping in shifts in the gym of a local school. The town was mourning a child who had recently died by suicide, and the jumpers passed the funeral in the streets. Cramer was having trouble patching his yellow fire shirt fast enough to cover all the new holes. The days and nights felt increasingly surreal. “I feel like I’m on a vision quest,” he told me.
Carl Gidlund, who rookied in 1958 in Missoula, once professed that the bonds he felt with his fellow-jumpers surpassed those that he forged during the Vietnam War. At least one smokejumper has been cremated in a jumper T-shirt. In 2024, on a flight from the former Siskiyou Smokejumper Base, Tom (Troop) Emonds tossed the ashes of a friend, the late jumper Gary Mills, out of the plane. Cramer carried the ashes of his predecessor, a base manager named Al Dunton, in a jumpsuit pocket during his hundred-and-ninety-ninth fire jump. The crew had to outrun a fire tornado—but, for Cramer, what was most memorable about that day was that he wound up on the edge of a lake at twilight, gazing out at bull moose and listening to loon calls as he spread Dunton’s ashes.
Cramer, who sometimes listens to Metallica while driving his truck, is one of the few smokejumpers on the base with a crewcut. When I visited his office and asked about the future of smokejumping, he was surprisingly hopeful. His father and his two brothers were smokejumpers; he trusts that today’s generation will not be the last. “I’m not naïve to the external threats, but I wish I was a rookie today,” he told me. “I’m so jealous. I think smokejumping is going to be so much better and more effective twenty years from now.” To explain why he felt this way, he pointed to the jump list, which was just outside his office. Every individual on it possessed numerous qualifications: a single plane full of jumpers is likely to include people who can command entire divisions on megafires, organize air attacks, conduct a prescribed burn, operate a bulldozer, or build maps on a computer. Fires are becoming more complex, but smokejumpers are ready. “It’s Tuesday—what do you need? An archeologist? We got one,” Cramer said. Fire archeologists are experts in protecting important sites from wildfires. “We have this incredible pool of skilled and motivated humans,” he went on. “The complexity actually works in our favor.”
At most bases, the jump list is set in the spring. Whoever completed the most jumps the previous year reaches into a box and pulls out the name of the season’s first jumper. That jumper pulls out a second name, and so on, and from the list flows all the serendipity of the fire season. The jump list has determined that sisters and even twins will jump out of a plane together. In 1992, Karen Dorris Morrow and her husband were assigned to a two-person fire crew in the wilderness. Nine months later, their son was born. “I definitely jumped a few fires pregnant,” Morrow told me. “And I loved the job so much I jumped another three summers.”
Rookies begin the season at the bottom of the list. They flip coins to see who among them will be first to jump to a fire, and they are not considered smokejumpers until they do. In 2026, the winner of the rookie coin toss in Alaska was twenty-four-year-old Daniel Kehoe. “I’ve never won a flip in my life,” he told me. “I was, like, ‘This is great, it’s gonna be a great season.’ ” After three weeks with no opportunity to jump, Kehoe spent a day off visiting family. While he was gone, all the other rookies were sent out to fires. In the days that followed, Kehoe suited up and loaded onto a jumpship three separate times only to have the mission cancelled at the last minute.
Before the bust, Kehoe was at the bottom of the list—No. 52. He was at risk of becoming one of the few rookies to go an entire season in Alaska without jumping to a fire. Everyone suspected that Big Ernie was up to mischief. But on June 20th, when the fires began to break out in earnest, Kehoe’s fortunes seemed to shift. The siren blared again and again; one load of jumpers and then another took off into the skies over Alaska. As the clock ticked down to the end of shift, at 10 P.M., Kehoe’s name ticked upward. At 9:54 P.M., only one jumpship remained on the tarmac, and the siren went off for a final time. Cramer and Dow helped the jumpers put on their harnesses. When Kehoe was ready, he rushed out the bay door, high-fiving everyone along the way. ♦