Missoula Smokejumper Visitor Center

In June 1940 the Forest Service gathered a handful of experienced firefighters at the Seeley Lake Ranger Station, northeast of Missoula, for an experiment. Two canvas tents set end to end served as the parachute loft. For most of them the first practice jump was also their first ride in an airplane, and of the Region 1 men only Jim Waite and Earl Cooley, a Bitterroot boy from Corvallis, finished all ten training jumps.

On the afternoon of July 12, 1940, a fire was spotted at the head of Marten Creek in the Nez Perce National Forest, across the Idaho line. Rufus Robinson, who knew the country, went out of the airplane first; Cooley followed and came down in a tree, climbed out, and by morning the two of them had the fire under control. It was the first fire jump in history, the first of seventeen the pair made that season. Cooley stayed with the Forest Service, came back to Missoula in 1958 to run the smokejumper base, and later founded the National Smokejumper Association. He died in Missoula in 2009, aged ninety-eight.

The jump operation moved to Missoula in the 1940s and has trained and dispatched crews from here ever since; jumpers out of this base still fly to fires across the West. The visitor center at the base, beside the Missoula airport on the west edge of town, tells the story with the gear, the aircraft and the jumpers' own accounts.