Drier winters, warmer springs and hotter summers make wildfires even wilder. These elite firefighters extinguish small fires before they grow into monsters

The alarm sounded and in a blink the base thrummed with activity. Smokejumpers grabbed helmets, donned kevlar suits, tested radios and strapped on parachutes. A speaker blasted Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries.

“Final checks, OK, let’s go,” boomed a command. Within minutes eight smokejumpers were airborne in a Twin Otter, climbing into a blue Idaho sky. The plane soon returned, empty, to pick up another eight jumpers.

Below them stretched wilderness with names such as Hells Canyon, Thunderbolt Mountain and River of No Return: America’s rugged, spectacularly beautiful west – the part that burns.

Here, a single spark can ignite a huge wildfire that reduces forests to charred stumps and homes to ash.

Smokejumpers are the elite firefighters; their job is to leap into the void, hike to a blaze others cannot reach, and kill it. They have been doing this since 1939.

But the rules – the fires – are changing. The jumpers that took off from the base at McCall on this particular morning saw no flames – it was a training mission – but the landscape betrayed an ominous new reality.

Snow had retreated unusually fast from the mountain peaks that ring this corner of Idaho. Instead of gleaming white slopes, there was bare grey granite. A spring heatwave triggered record snowmelt here and in parts of Oregon and Washington state.

It’s part of a trend of drier winters, warmer springs and hotter summers. Climate change has extended the west’s traditional fire season by 78 days since the 1970s, running from June to October. Fires start earlier and burn longer.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Smokejumpers training. Photograph: Rory Carroll/The Guardian

The US’s lower 48 states just experienced the hottest June on record, surpassing 1933 dust bowl records, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It warned that this year could set a record for the most billion-dollar weather disasters. “2016 has been hot, wet and wild for the contiguous US,” said NOAA climate scientist Jake Crouch.



The legacy of a century of fire suppression, which has left forests overgrown, has also contributed to the average fire doubling in size. Wildfires, in others words, are getting wilder.



Smokejumpers have deployed in recent weeks in Alaska and Washington and are bracing for missions elsewhere. California’s season has gotten off to an explosive start with multiple blazes scorching tens of thousands of acres, destroying scores of structures and claiming at least two lives.

Some 10.1m acres burned in the US last year, double the typical losses seen 30 years ago, pushing the federal government’s firefighting bill to $2bn and the US forest service’s budget to the breaking point.



For smokejumpers, arguably more than anyone, the stakes have escalated.

“Impressive fire growth has become the new norm. You need to be more engaged and focused when you’re out there,” said Hans Ohme, acting assistant operations foreman at the McCall base, and veteran of more than 250 jumps. “It seems like we’re breaking records more and more.”

It has added a sense of urgency to the pre-summer ritual in McCall, a picturesque resort town on the edge of Payette Lake.

Along with blooming flowers, you can tell fire season looms by the sight of would-be smokejumpers hauling 120lb (54kg) packs on gruelling treks, part of rookie bootcamp training, plus the sound of grunts, whirring pulleys and clanging bars at the base, where veterans return for refresher parachute courses. A suspended harness that drops them on the dirt, mimicking a landing, is nicknamed the “mutilator”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Smokejumpers do a final drill before boarding a flight for a practice jump. Photograph: Rory Carroll/The Guardian

“It’s time to get focused again,” said Damon Neeson, 49, who has done more than 400 jumps, as two colleagues whizzed towards him on a zipline. “The work stays the same but it starts earlier and ends later.” He downplayed any mystique about the job. “All we do for the most part is dig shallow trenches in the forest. Dig a line around the fire, put it out.”

True, if modest. In the same vein one could say Neil Armstrong collected rocks for a living. The main idea behind smokejumping is to extinguish small, remote fires before they grow into monsters. It fills a gap for when there are no roads and aerial spraying is not available or effective.

Smokejumpers use hand tools, notably a pulaski axe, to clear vegetation around a blaze and deny it fuel. Conditions can change in an instant – embers carried on a gust of wind; a burning tree branch cracking and rolling down a hill. They test the soil’s temperature with bare hands to make sure a fire is dead. Then they pack up all their gear, which can weigh more than they do, and hike out of the wilderness.

You face something new every time you go out of the plane. It’s up to you to figure it out Zachary Freundlich

“You face something new every time you go out of the plane,” said Zachary Freundlich, 28, who was starting his second season. “It’s up to you to figure it out.”

The forest service and the bureau of land management employ about 400 smokejumpers, scattered at bases around the western US, plus Alaska.

They are a tiny group in the firefighting community but have an outsized reputation, which draws applicants from other elite branches such as hotshot and helitack crews. Some flunk out on the first day of bootcamp. “It’s very challenging. (Trainers) break them down physically and mentally,” Ohme said.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Smokejumpers make a practice jump into a meadow. Photograph: Rory Carroll/The Guardian

Those who make it through emerge with sculpted physiques and bone-crushing handshakes. Reality TV shows, sensing a market for hunks in peril, have lobbied for access. The smokejumpers turned them down – they don’t want to be tripping over camera crews.



Those who work seasonally tend to use the colder months to study or travel, often combining skiing and surfing.



There have been female smokejumpers since 1981, though they remain a small minority. Ashley Taylor, 30, was the sole female among McCall’s 60-plus jumpers. “I love it. I feel part of the group, part of the family. But it’s not for everyone.” A highlight for Taylor was helping native crews fight a fire in Alaska last year.

Rory Carroll (@rorycarroll72) Ashley Taylor, polevaulter-turned Smokejumper. Hauls 110lb+ pack through burning wilderness. Loves her job. pic.twitter.com/UkNXgSaemP

More than 30 have died in the line of duty. The first was Malvin Brown, part of an all-black army paratrooper unit assigned to firefighting in 1945. He landed in a tree and fell into a creek. The most recent was Mark Urban, whose chute opened late in a jump in 2013.

Fire claimed others. Flames can move so high and fast they catch birds mid-flight. If caught in a “burnover”, a smokejumper’s last resort is a personal shelter, a special foil that reflects heat and traps cool air. But when temperatures exceed 1,000 degrees – they can reach 2,800 degrees – superheated air can penetrate shelters and suffocate you in seconds.

Smokejumpers have been featured in films such as Steven Spielberg’s Always and in novels by Nora Roberts and Nicholas Evans, which play up the danger.

Jason Ramos, a Washington-based veteran, said in a recent memoir that some fire managers consider smokejumpers a “colorful anachronism”, too expensive and dangerous to deploy. In reality, Ramos said, smokejumpers are safety-conscious and a good value.

Colleagues at McCall stressed the focus on safety, saying the daredevil image masked rules and protocols to minimise risk. As a result, fire was something to respect, not fear, said Nelson, the veteran. “If you’re scared, you’re doing something wrong. I haven’t been scared in a fire since a long time ago.”

If you’re scared, you’re doing something wrong. I haven’t been scared in a fire since a long time ago Damon Nelson

With much of the western US a tinderbox, smokejumpers won’t be out of work any time soon.

“We are seeing real challenges on the ground – climate change is real and it is with us,” Robert Bonnie, undersecretary for natural resources and environment at the US Department of Agriculture, told the Guardian in February. “The whole US forest service is shifting to becoming an agency dominated by wildfires. We really are at a tipping point. The current situation is not sustainable.”

Western forests are battling not only drought but bark beetles that thrive in dry, warm conditions. They have killed billions of shrubs and trees in one of the biggest forest insect outbreaks ever recorded. Dead trees increase wildfire risks.

So, too, does the legacy of a century of fire suppression. Huge fires in the late 19th and early 20th centuries prompted an aggressive stamp-out-all-fires policy even though wildfires can be natural and beneficial aids to clearing undergrowth and renewing ecosystems. The result: vegetation multiplied and forests thickened, in some places sevenfold. Firefighters compare the effect to a timebomb.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Smokejumpers train at their base. Photograph: Rory Carroll/The Guardian

The policy now is to let more wildfires burn. But often that’s not possible. Either because a human caused the fire, in which case it must be fought, or because human settlement has encroached into the forest, putting lives and property in need of saving.

Enter the smokejumpers, floating from the sky.

The practice jumps at McCall went smoothly. Two Twin Otters each made two runs to drop a total of 32 jumpers onto a meadow in Bear Basin. For many it was the first jump of the season, a chance to shake off winter rust.

With global temperature in March shattering a century-long record, the smokejumpers could be considered climate change’s first responders but they prefer to leave the science – and politics – to others.

They are, said Todd Franzen, 44, a base foreman, just firefighters who happen to get to jump out of planes. “It’s pretty addicting. It hasn’t become old hat for me and this is my 19th year. Day to day you can be sent to Alaska, Nevada, wherever. It’s the unknown.”