Pioneer Smoke Jumper Dies at Age 98

One of the first smokejumpers dies at 98:
Earl Cooley, who made the first parachute jump on a wildfire in 1940 passed away Monday at the age of 98. Here is an excerpt from an article in the Missoulian.

Pioneer smokejumper Earl Cooley once told a newspaper reporter the only bad part of parachuting into a forest fire was the walk home.

Considering that his chute nearly failed to open and he landed 140 feet up a spruce on the Forest Service’s first-ever jump on a wildfire, it’s fair to wonder why the practice of smokejumping ever got a second chance.

But Cooley and fellow jumper Rufus Robinson had their fire under control by the next day when a team of ground-pounders finally arrived. Then they all hiked the 28 miles back to the ranger station.

Sixty-nine years after he made that historic jump into the Nez Perce National Forest on July 12, 1940, Cooley died in Missoula on Monday at the age of 98. He left behind plenty of “silk stories” from his days as a smokejumper, U.S. Forest Service district ranger and Missoula real estate broker.

“There wasn’t the safety consciousness there is today,” author John Maclean recalled of the man his father, Norman Maclean, interviewed extensively for the book “Young Men and Fire.” “You took the risks, and nobody paid attention to that anyway until Mann Gulch. Smokejumping didn’t need to be sold because it worked. There were lots and lots of fires you couldn’t get to and you had to get to.”

Cooley’s smokejumping career included the Mann Gulch tragedy, where he was the spotter for 12 jumpers who later burned to death when the fire overran their escape route. Danger was part of the job for the men who established the techniques later used by the U.S. Army Airborne troops in World War II.

“He was acutely aware of his place in the history of smokejumping,” Maclean said of Cooley. “By the time my dad started investigating the Mann Gulch fire, there was a dwindling number of primary sources. We are all better off because Earl put down on paper that early history. No one else could have done it.”

Cooley also helped found the National Smokejumper Association and served as its president for three years. In 1984, he chronicled much of the Forest Service’s early smokejumping history in his book “Trimotor and Trail.”