Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
on August 5, 1949, when a small fire grew with blistering hot winds into an inescap-
able wall of fire.
Fifteen U.S. Forest Service smokejumpers embarked on a fairly routine call that
day. As they departed from their base in Missoula, temperatures in Helena hit 97°F
and the winds picked up. The cargo drop did not go as planned—heavy turbulence
forced a higher than usual jump, the crew's radio was broken, and much of their
equipment was scattered over a wide area—but within about an hour, by 5pm, the
smoke-jumpers gathered their gear, rendezvoused with a local recreation and fire pre-
vention guard who had initially called in the fire, and headed down the slope toward
the fire, which was burning up from the river. When their path to the Missouri River
was blocked by fire around 5:30pm, the crew turned around and headed back up-
hill. At 5:53pm, with the fire rapidly gaining on them, foreman R. Wagner Dodge
advised the firefighters to drop their tools in an attempt to speed their flight. The men
were literally running up the mountain, a 76 percent grade in places, trying to es-
cape 20-foot flames that were traveling an estimated 280-610 feet per minute. The
fire was seconds away when, at 5:55pm, Dodge lit what has come to be known as an
escape fire in an open grassy area. Despite his pleas for the men to stay with him in
the burned-out area he was creating, the crew continued their mad dash uphill away
from the flames. Thirteen of the men were overtaken and burned to death between
5:56 and 5:57pm. Dodge survived by lying in his burned-out area, although he was
lifted off the ground three separate times by the winds created by the main fire. The
only other survivors, Sallee and Rumsey, escaped by taking the shortest and steepest
route through a crack in the rimrock to the summit.
The shocking tragedy—the first deaths in the relatively new field of smoke-
jumping—were not without meaning. Copious research was done at the site to de-
termine more about fire science and, in particular, firefighter safety. The best book
on the subject is the posthumously published
Young Men and Fire
(1992) by le-
gendary Montana writer Norman Maclean. Modern safety techniques—including
safety zones, individual fire shelters, and survival training—were created in the af-
termath of the disaster and are still relied on today. In August 1985, seventy-three
firefighters were trapped while they fought a fire near Salmon, Idaho. Because of the
knowledge that came out of the Mann Gulch tragedy, all 73 survived. It's worth not-
ing that despite technology, no amount of experience can eliminate the danger from
