by Tyler Van Dyke
SHASTA COUNTY, Calif. — After a Forest Service smokejumper was rescued from the Marble Fire in the Klamath National Forest on Wednesday morning, KRCR’s Tyler Van Dyke wanted to take a deeper look into what it’s like being a smokejumper.
Base Manager of the only smoke-jumping base in California Mitch Hokanson explained the exhilarating job to Van Dyke.
“Smoke jumping to me is the greatest job in the world, it’s adrenaline we get paid to parachute.”
Hokanson understands people’s fears with smoke jumping but said they do it to help extinguish fires right away.
“Smokejumpers specialize in getting to remote fires and getting to them early, a lot of people think it’s risky to parachute into forest fires,” Hokanson continued, “we see it as minimizing the risk by getting the fires early and catching them small.”
Hokanson told Van Dyke about his first experience jumping.
“The adrenaline gets going this is the real-life scenario it’s a place you’ve never jumped before it’s just the greatest feeling that I’ve had in a career, I’ve been doing this for 23 years and that feeling never goes away.”
There is also special training that they have to go through to become smoke jumpers.
“We hire people that have firefighting experience we don’t teach them really anything about fire, we teach them how to climb trees, we teach them how to fly a parachute, we teach them how to do a safe landing.”
You also better not have a fear of heights if you want to be one.
“We jump from 3,000 feet and we do a 5-second ride under a drogue parachute and then we pull our rip cord and when our parachute opens it’s about a minute ride to the ground.”
Hokanson also said they have seen an increase in the use of their services this year compared to last year.
“This year in the month of June alone we have jumped more fires than we did all of 2022.”
LINK: https://krcrtv.com/news/local/a-look-into-the-adrenaline-filled-world-of-smokejumpers-the-brave-firefighters-parachuting-into-california-wildfires
