Using aircraft to fight forest fires goes back to 1919 when aircraft pilots would fly patrols over the national forest lands following lightning storms. The US Forest Service did not own their own planes, or have trained pilots, so they employed civilian pilots. Over the next few decades, experiments with water and chemical bombs and other efforts were used as initial attack methods, with fair results. 

In the 1930’s the Forest Service began building airfields and bases in remote forestlands, for staging and organizing equipment for the purposes of fighting forest fires. This still required difficult and time consuming transportation of supplies using mules, or backpacking to the burn areas, so they trained on air drops of cargo into these locations. By 1936 these efforts were perfected in the Pacific Northwest, and became a standard deployment option for the US Forest Service. Everything from axe-handles, wash pans, radios, and food supplies including eggs were delivered with very little breakage. 

In 1939 the first tests for manned smokejumping began, using dummies and parachutes designed by Eagle Parachute Company specifically for navigating jumps into challenging terrain. Next, accomplished parachuters were deployed, and finally, in fall of 1939, proof of concept was complete when men trained to fight fires were successfully dropped out of the sky into the remote areas of the Methow Valley. Two of the test smokejumpers had never worn a parachute before the testing. 

By 1940 two bases were established, the North Cascades Smokejumper Base in Winthrop, WA, and one at Johnson Air Service near Missoula Montana. The first jump was on a forest fire was in July of 1940, from the Montana base. A wildfire on August 10, 1940 was the first opportunity for jumpers from NCSB to deploy.

It was intense work. Potential smoke jumpers originally had to be single males, between the ages of 21 and 25. They had to be in incredible physical condition and had to have firefighting experience. A 10-day training program separated the men from the boys, and graduates of the program earned $193 a month. 

Training included a physical-fitness regime that rivals any “Insanity” workout. Early on the North Cascades base had a training area with body-building aids, an eight-foot scaling wall, overhead ladder, horizontal bars, just for the maintaining their physical conditioning for the rigors of the aircraft jump, landing, and then fighting fires in extreme heat and brutal conditions. 

You can still see the training tower at North Cascades Smokejumpers Base where they practice jumping and landing. 

Smokejumpers were deployed to the fires wearing a two-piece padded suit designed to prevent catching on tree limbs during descent, and a football helmet with a wire mask to protect their face. An equipment pack they jumped with included:

• 200-foot coil of rope (to lower themselves to the ground if the parachute was caught in the tree tops)
• Orange streamers (to signal aircraft)
• A two-way battery-operated radio
• Leather gloves
• Knife (for cutting tangled parachute lines)
• A Main and a backup parachute.

Firefighting tools and supplies would be dropped separately after the team landed.