Jumpers practice at Ranch

Smokejumper Sara Brown lands safely and right on target. Photo by Meredith McKittrick

The twin-propeller driven airplane, with its red and white twin tail fins and matching body, circled 20 or 30 times.

From a door two-thirds of the way back came two blue and white striped parachutes, dangling two neophyte smokejumpers practicing their craft last week near Glaze Meadow at Black Butte Ranch.

The jumpers were part of six trainees from the Redmond firefighting school. Their target: a meadow about the size of a football field one mile southeast of the Glaze Meadow pool and golf course.

Before the jumpers came crepe paper streamers, 12-feet-by-one-foot, in fluorescent pink and lime green. These were to test the wind conditions before the humans followed.

One man landed opposite the small crowd gathered to see this annual event, about where the 40-yard marker might be, slightly out-of-bounds and right on the tree line.

"Another six feet and I would have been hung up," said Tony Loughton, one of the rookies.

Sara Brown landed "right on target" (a crepe paper circle) "and am I glad of that," she said.

Her chute came down so close to observers that part of it floated over Mimi Muraoka, visiting here from Santa Barbara.

"I could not believe that they could be that precise to land only a few feet from where we all were standing," Muraoka said. "If the instructors were not concerned, neither was I."

According to Michael Jackson, training foreman, once the apprentice jumpers have graduated from this "intensive five-week program they will be part of" the Redmond smokejumper base.

He said that this year, it was likely that most, if not all, of his group would go to Alaska first.

"We hit the small fires, actually try to surround them and get them out before they become conflagrations. That's our job, get in fast and get the fire out quickly," he said.

Once the jump plane had unloaded her human cargo, it then continued to circle lower and lower to the ground until, at tree top level, its crew dumped out firefighting equipment and survival tools.

Other necessary supplies were unloaded at the same place where moments before the smokejumpers landed.

Chain saws, boots, sleeping bags, food and water were sent down in prepackaged cartons, cushioned to stand the impact of a hard landing.

The jumpers practice long hours before getting into an airplane learning how to fall and tumble, landing and rolling on their backsides. They practice this maneuver endlessly from a specially designed jumping-off platform without parachute, landing and tumbling on sand.

"Our jumpers work hard eight hours a day, five days a week. They must have two years of firefighting experience before being accepted as a jumper," he said. "We do hundreds of push-ups, work on a climbing wall, and run three or four miles a day."

Not only are they physically equipped to handle the rigors of jumping and fire fighting, "but they must all be leaders," Jackson said.

"Each one must be able to give orders and lead a crew," he said.

"This means that they must also be able to follow orders. We switch leadership so that there is no one who cannot do both."

Standing near the jumpers, one was filled with awe at the courage and intense concentration of these relatively young people risking their lives to save field and forest.

Brown turned to the small crowd of onlookers and, upon landing, she said, "My body is so well trained and conditioned that all I think of in the air is hitting my spot. I did good today, right? I only missed the center by a few feet."

Smokejumpers can adjust their fall rate and direction by manipulating their parachute lines, spilling air and sloughing in one direction or another. They can be told how to do this, but there is nothing like putting it into practice.

And that was the purpose of their jumping from about 1,500 feet in the air onto the beautiful and solid ground of Black Butte Ranch.