McCall Smokejumper Base

Smokejumping was invented in the northern Rockies. The first fire jumps were made in July 1940 onto a fire in the Nez Perce National Forest, and in 1943 the Forest Service opened a base at McCall to cover the rough, roadless country of central Idaho. The timing mattered. The war had taken the young men who fought fires, and the service turned to men the rest of the country wanted little to do with: conscientious objectors.

They came through Civilian Public Service, the program that let men whose faith forbade them to fight do civilian work of national importance instead, without pay. Many were Mennonites, Brethren and Quakers. About seventy trained as smokejumpers in the first spring and were divided among bases at Missoula, Cave Junction in Oregon, and McCall, and more followed. They jumped onto fires across the Idaho backcountry, worked on trails and roads between jumps, and lived with open contempt in camp; one of the first smokejumpers remembered men arguing that anyone who ate at the same table as a conscientious objector was unpatriotic. As late as 1995, a history of smokejumping read aloud to a national reunion of jumpers did not mention them.

The base still operates, at the McCall airport on the south edge of town, sending jumpers by aircraft to fires across the West each summer. The town's old lumber-mill streets and the shore of Payette Lake are a few minutes north.