Mountain of youth: Retired smokejumpers return for summertime ritual of work
By KIM BRIGGEMAN of the Missoulian/Photographed by KURT WILSON of the Missoulian
NICHOLIA CREEK - You know these guys. They speak of horseflies in the abstract, if they mention them at all, even as they're buzz-barded by the things.
Come bugs or high water, there's nothing in these mountains they're going to bitch about.
The old smokejumpers strung out comfortably last Monday morning on a four-mile hike up to base camp in the deepest southern cirque of the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest. There was conversation - a razzing here, a man-would-you-look-at-that there. But not a lot of it.
This was new country for most, but they'd been here before. Each was a veteran of the National Smokejumper Association's Trail Maintenance Program, which is in its 10th year.
Former smokejumpers Doug Wamsley, left, and Richard Trinity use pulaskis, a general tool of firefighters, to shore up a trail across a hillside of shale rock. Wamsley is a retired prosecuting attorney from Denver and Trinity a surgeon in Red Oak, Iowa. Both are returning veterans of the National Smokejumper Association Trail Maintenance Program, in its 10th year.
Photo by KURT WILSON/MIssoulian
They followed the willow-lined creek through sage country and aspen groves, snapping photos and rousing a bull moose along the way. Each repaired into a private world of reflection and, oh, what images they must have been.
The nine of them averaged 67 years of age. Spud DeJarnette, who grew up in Missoula and taught music in Sacramento, Calif., for most of the last 50 years, will turn 80 next May. A rookie jumper in 1949, he missed the call to a fire at Mann Gulch north of Helena by one plane load. A high-school friend, Eldon Diettert, didn't and was among the 12 firefighters to perish in the upslope rush of flames.
DeJarnette continued smokejumping summers through 1955, with two years off to fight in Korea. Most of the others did their jumping in the late 1950s and '60s out of Missoula, for three or four summers apiece.
They weren't all men. Wendy Kamm was one of three women who became the first female smokejumpers out of Missoula in 1982, a year after Deanne Shulman became the nation's first in McCall, Idaho. Kamm, 53, was the youngest of the group on Nicholia Creek by eight years, and the only one who had to take time off from her job to come. A game warden in Fort Benton, she has missed only one of these volunteer trail projects since their inception in 1999.
"This is my cheap vacation," Kamm quipped. "They pay so well I couldn't pass it up."
They weren't all smokejumpers either. Richard Johnson, 61, is an associate member of the NSA. He retired after a couple of decades as district ranger on the Tahoe National Forest and drove up with DeJarnette from Auburn, Calif. The two of them are spearheading the smokejumpers' first California trail project in September.
The men and woman left families and homes behind to drive or fly at their own expense from Michigan or California, Iowa, Denver or Dillon for another swig from this fountain of their youth.
Over the past decade, it has become a summertime ritual for all nine, and nearly 200 others, to take one or two weeks in July to come to Montana and Idaho and clear trail, restore lookouts and cabins, build fences or corral or whatever the crew boss and Jon McBride, the program's co-founder and coordinator, have lined up.
Why?
"Where can you find a greater group of people, these jumpers, to spend some time with?" asked DeJarnette, relaxing in camp after the first day of work. "Just sitting here and looking out at that valley is about as good a reason as any I can think of."
"Jon called me several years ago and asked if I'd head up a team in California," said Dan Hensley, 71, a jumper from 1957 to 1963 who lives in the Los Angeles area.
"I told him, 'Jon, I'm not interested. I worked in Montana and Idaho, and I want to go back to Montana and Idaho, the country I saw when I was 19 years old, and see it with old eyes, fresh, and be with old friends.' "
"You're trying to recapture some of your youth," agreed Bill Breyfogle, 74, a retired science teacher and Boy Scout leader from Kalamazoo, Mich. "We were smokejumpers, and if we can come out here and we can work for the Forest Service for a couple of weeks and get some satisfaction out of it and renew old ties ... ."
Breyfogle said his first year in the project he worked with people he hadn't seen in 50 years. He hadn't seen another smokejumper in almost that long.
"Where do you see a smokejumper in Michigan?" he said. "You don't."
"I try to remind these guys the No. 1 priority is to have fun. No. 2 is to work on trail," McBride said at a Sunday evening send-off social in Missoula.
McBride coordinates the program from his Grant Creek home. A week earlier, he'd dispatched seven crews in all directions for weeklong projects. Starting early Monday morning he sent out half a dozen more, to the Bob Marshall Wilderness, to the Selway-Bitterroot in Idaho, to Seeley Lake for a restoration project, and to this gorgeous hunk of Montana along the Continental Divide Trail, in the proposed Italian Peaks wilderness area.
Bill Kolar, the crew chief, is a veteran of 46 jumps starting in 1959 and a retired Forest Service engineer from Dillon. Driving a pickup loaded with the week's worth of supplies and equipment, Kolar led a loose convoy on the three-hour drive from Missoula to a rendezvous at Dell, 40 miles southeast of Dillon.
From there, they faced a 28-mile drive to the trailhead on a road that dwindled to a rocky, rutted track for the last 3 1/2 miles. There, Gordon Ash and Quane Wofford of the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest met them with a string of pack mules to haul in the gear.
The Forest Service provides the packing and the food in exchange for a week's worth of volunteer labor.
It's a win-win proposition, said Ash, who first became involved with the smokejumpers' trail projects when he was on the Flathead National Forest at Spotted Bear.
"They take care of the project work that we're not going to get to," he said. "It's still a strong priority, but we're not in a position to do it. As soon as these guys started (offering) out their services, it was a real easy one to tap onto."
The Nicholia Creek project was to last six days, through Saturday. The week's formal tasks would be basic trail work, Kolar said.
The path along the creek makes a beeline for the Continental Divide and Idaho. Ash and Kolar scouted it out a few weeks ago, noting stretches that could use widening, stabilizing or marking.
It would be high-altitude trail work - 8,600 feet by the time the crew got to its campsite.
"This is going to be the highest one I've been on," said Hensley, who comes from the Los Angeles area and 400 feet in elevation. "I imagine that'll take a toll on some of our old bodies."
It did. A couple of crew members were obviously feeling the effects of the rarefied air when they reached the campsite on a pine-covered knoll above a branch of the creek. Both knew better, but there was wood to gather, tent platforms and a latrine to dig, water to fetch, and the cook tent to assemble.
With no overt directions, all set to the tasks.
"These guys all know what has to be done," said Doug Wamsley, a retired prosecuting attorney from Denver. "The tent's got to go up, so somebody will figure out how to do it and somebody else will help them. That's one of the reasons I really like this. Things just get done."
As evening approached, eyes began glancing down the meadow in search of the mule train. Supper would have to wait until it arrived.
"Dr. Ash, I presume," greeted Jack Atkins, a retired Bozeman attorney, when Ash and Wofford finally rode in at 4:45 p.m.
"My golly, this looks like a camp," Ash proclaimed.
The campfire stories started even before dinner was finished. Atkins, who grew up in Connecticut and jumped out of Missoula in 1968 and '69 after a stint in Vietnam, had been on a project in the Bob Marshall Wilderness the week before.
He got into a conversation with John McMahon, a Missoula jumper in 1958 and 1960 from western Washington, and learned that McMahon too was originally from Connecticut. As the discussion progressed, the two men discovered they were from the same small town in Connecticut. Matter of fact, they had indeed gone to the same high school.
"He was two years ahead of me, but we were both in trapping club," Atkins said.
The stories inevitably turned to the old smokejumping days, and just as inevitably to Mann Gulch. Though they were separated in age by decades, in some cases, and by a wide range of careers and experiences, to these men and woman the 1949 disaster was a vivid, living event.
They referred familiarly to the men involved, including the three who survived - Wag Dodge, Bob Sallee and Walt Rumsey. No one had to explain at this campfire who they were and what they represent to the fraternity of jumpers.
Norman Maclean's account of the disaster in "Young Men and Fire" is held in high esteem.
"When I read that book, when those guys are running up that slope, I get tears in my eyes," Atkins admitted.
DeJarnette placed a wreath at Diettert's memorial monument at Mann Gulch on the 50th anniversary of the disaster. He was back at Hale Field in Missoula, where Sentinel High School now stands, when word came that men had died up there.
"I've said this many times, but the jump center was just like a morgue, it was so quiet," he said. "It just kind of took the heart out of us."
There wasn't room for all the gear on Monday's pack train. One of the items left behind to be packed in on Tuesday was the chainsaw Kolar counted on to cut water bars for the first day of work.
That prompted a change of plan Tuesday morning. The crew headed down a secondary trail on the west fork of Nicholia Creek and shored up a narrow stretch across a rocky face that presented problematic footing. That finished, they hiked with pulaskis and shovels to the saddle between the forks.
After a rest in a spectacular open meadow, one that offered a view of soaring rocky crags and the route of the main trail as it disappeared through a notch in a faraway ridge, Kolar and the trail crew started back down. They blazed marks in a couple of trees to show the preferred route to the top, and scratched a faint path on the grassy slope.
Near the bottom, Kolar, 68, appeared lugging a 7-foot post over one shoulder.
"I got a sudden burst of energy," he explained, and headed back up to the top, where he left the post for the next day's work.
It was a warm day made more pleasant by a breeze.
Back in camp, a makeshift shower was erected in the trees. The crew gathered around the fire and waited for the chainsaw and rest of the supplies to arrive.
Hensley, a Tennessee native who taught for years at the junior high and community college level, has a training hill mapped out near his home in West Hills, Calif. Two or three times a week, he'll don a 34-pound pack and hike the 1 1/2 miles to the other side, then turn around and walk back.
"I would not do that if I wasn't coming up here," he said. "If I wasn't coming up here, I'd probably be moping about."
Wamsley used to hike on the trails behind his office in Golden, Colo. Since he retired, he works out at a gym to get ready for Montana and for the program's Colorado Project that he helped initiate last year.
DeJarnette, who plays saxophone and clarinet in a swing band around Auburn, is still an active hiker. He and Johnson walked the entire 100-mile length of the Western States Trail in 2006.
DeJarnette plans on returning for next year's project after his 80th birthday, but it's no big deal, he said. Bob Derry, who along with his older brothers helped initiate the Forest Service smokejumping program in the late 1930s, is well into his 80s and he comes to work on a trail crew every year. Last week, Derry was at the Webb Lake Cabin project north of Lincoln.
"Bob Derry, especially, is a guy I really look up to. He's an inspiration," DeJarnette said.
They worry that younger jumpers aren't joining the program, though it seems to grow every year still. They have the support of wives and families back home, but they know those loved ones worry about them way up here in the Montana mountains.
What they don't worry about is themselves.
"You give to your community or your country as long as you can, because most of your life you end up taking," Hensley said. "People put in streets for you, they have police for you, they look after you, take care of you. At some point in time you get old enough that you can give back, and you give until you can't give any more."
"I'm being taken care of by society with teacher's retirement and Social Security," said Breyfogle. "I think you should recognize this as a payback."
"We are all indeed very fortunate to be able to do this," concluded Atkins.
Horse flies be damned.
Reach reporter Kim Briggeman at (406) 523-5266 or by e-mail at kbriggeman@missoulian.com. Reach photographer Kurt Wilson at (406) 523-5244 or by e-mail at kwilson@missoulian.com.
