The Smokejumpers of Missoula: A Legacy of Wildland Firefighting
On a clear summer afternoon at the Aerial Fire Depot on Missoula's west side, it isn't unusual to look up and see a cluster of parachutes drifting down over the runway — jumpers packing up from a training exercise, or returning from a real fire somewhere in the Northern Rockies. Missoula is home to the largest active smokejumper base in the country, and that fact says something about the town's relationship with the forests that surround it: this is a place where fighting wildfire from the air isn't a curiosity, it's a core part of the local identity.
Smokejumpers are wildland firefighters who parachute directly into remote, often roadless terrain to attack fires while they're still small, before they can grow into the kind of blaze that threatens whole drainages or communities. A jump crew carries chainsaws, hand tools, and enough food and water to be self-sufficient for several days, because once they're on the ground, the nearest help may be a long hike away. It's specialized, physically demanding work, and Missoula has trained and based some of the country's most experienced jump crews for generations.
Becoming a smokejumper starts with one of the most demanding training programs in wildland firefighting. Rookie candidates typically need to meet strict physical standards — timed runs, pull-ups, and pack-out tests — before they're even considered for a multi-week training course that covers parachute landing falls, tree-let-down procedures for when a jumper lands in timber instead of a clearing, and the physical demands of hiking heavy gear out of the backcountry after a fire is contained. Not everyone who starts the course finishes it.
Inside the Aerial Fire Depot, the parachute loft is as much a working shop as a storage room. Jumpers pack, inspect, and repair their own parachutes and jumpsuits by hand — a point of pride in a program that has always valued self-reliance. The aircraft have changed over the decades, from the DC-3s that carried jump crews in the postwar era to the twin-engine turboprops used to reach fires today, but the basic idea has stayed the same: get a small, well-equipped crew onto a fire before it becomes something bigger.
The base itself sits at the Aerial Fire Depot, 5765 West Broadway, on the west end of Missoula International Airport. It isn't just a jump base — it shares the property with the USDA Forest Service's Northern Region Fire Cache, the Missoula Fire Sciences Laboratory, the Northern Region Training Center, and the Missoula Technology and Development Center. Taken together, it's one of the most concentrated hubs of wildland fire science and operations anywhere in the country, tucked into an unassuming stretch of West Broadway that most visitors drive past without a second glance.
According to the U.S. Forest Service's own history of the program, the roots of Missoula's aerial firefighting tradition go back further than the smokejumpers themselves. Between 1918 and 1919, Forest Service leadership began exploring aerial fire detection in partnership with the Army Air Service, with early support from Col. Hap Arnold. By 1925, Region 1 — the Forest Service region covering Montana, Idaho, and eastern Washington — had launched regular aerial fire patrols, with pilots Nick Mamer and R.T. Freng flying loaned DH-4 biplanes out of Spokane to spot smoke across the region's national forests.
That early reconnaissance work quickly turned into something more ambitious. By 1929, crews were experimenting with dropping cargo from aircraft to resupply firefighters working fires deep in the backcountry, years before anyone in the region had tried dropping a person the same way. It was this decade of aerial innovation — photography, patrol routes, cargo drops — that built the technical foundation smokejumping would rely on once the idea of parachuting firefighters onto fires took hold in the Pacific Northwest in the years that followed.
Nick Mamer, one of the pilots most closely associated with that early era, didn't live to see where it led. He died in 1938 in a Northwest Airlines crash after a tail structure failure on a Lockheed aircraft — a reminder that the people who built Missoula's aviation-and-fire tradition were often working at the edge of what the technology of the day could reliably do.
In the decades since, the Missoula base grew into the anchor of the national program. Today, Region 1 maintains roughly 80 smokejumpers in Missoula alone, alongside smaller crews in Grangeville, Idaho, and West Yellowstone, Montana — making Missoula's base the largest active smokejumper operation in the nation. It's a workforce that deploys not just around Montana but across the West wherever fire conditions demand it, and often internationally in cooperation with other countries' fire services.
That workload has only grown in recent decades. Montana's wildfire seasons have lengthened compared to a generation ago, and crews based at the Aerial Fire Depot are now routinely dispatched not just within Region 1 but to fires across the country during peak summer months — a reflection of how much national demand rests on a relatively small, highly trained workforce.
The Missoula Smokejumper Visitor Center, at the same West Broadway address, is open to the public and offers a rare, close-up look at the program — parachute lofts where jump gear is packed and repaired by hand, retired aircraft, and exhibits on the program's history. It's one of the few places in the country where visitors can see this side of wildland firefighting up close, and it's worth checking current tour availability directly with the base before planning a visit.
The base's location next to Missoula International Airport is no accident, either. Being able to load jump aircraft and cargo planes within a short taxi of the runway has been part of the program's logic since the earliest cargo-drop experiments of the 1920s, and it remains just as practical today, when crews need to be airborne quickly once a new fire is reported.
For a blog built around Celtic Festival Missoula, the smokejumper story fits a pattern that runs through a lot of what makes this town what it is: a willingness to take on specialized, difficult work in service of the landscape around it, whether that's the immigrants who built the railroads through these valleys or the crews who still jump out of planes to protect the forests those valleys depend on.