Lessons Learned: Former smokejumpers say Mann Gulch was pivotal

“Once a jumper, you're always a jumper,” Larry Ashcraft said. He was standing alongside fellow smokejumpers Nels Jensen and Ron Normandeau at the grave of Phillip Rolla McVey in Ronan.

McVey – one of 13 young men who died Aug. 14, 1949, at Mann Gulch near Helena – was honored during a ceremony Saturday at the Mountain View Cemetery, where his remains are buried alongside his parents, Clarence and Lillian McVey. The salute to McVey was among 13 tributes held across the nation in August to honor each of the men who died during one of the most deadly firefighting disasters in U.S. history.

Fifteen men parachuted into Mann Gulch, northeast of Helena, to fight the small lightning-caused fire. They were joined on the ground by James Harrison, a fire guard and recreational specialist with the Helena National Forest. As they made their way down the canyon, toward the Missouri River, the fire exploded forcing them to retreat up a steep ridge as it consumed the dry grass and timber around them.

Two men, Walter Rumsey and Robert Sallee, made it safely to the top of the ridge, and a third, crew foreman Wagner Dodge, lit an “escape fire” in the grass ahead of the approaching flames. He urged his men to take refuge in the burned-out area, but panic had overtaken them and they continued to flee up the slope. Eleven died on the hillside, including McVey, while two more were evacuated to a hospital in Helena where they soon succumbed to injuries sustained in the fire.

McVey was born April 1, 1927, in Choteau, the son of a US. Immigration Service officer who worked along the U.S.-Canada border. A good athlete, he played semi-pro baseball as a short stop; his friends also remember him as strong, easygoing and adventuresome.

In 1943, he started his junior year in high school in Browning, and enlisted in the Navy in 1945, just shy of graduation, serving as an airman. He lived in Ronan with his parents after the war and trained as a smokejumper at the Ninemile Ranger Station. Like many of his friends, it was a means to earn money for college. He was 22 at the time of his death.

Personal connection

For Ashcraft, who grew up in Helena and now lives in Polson, the Mann Gulch tragedy was personal. He was 7 years old in 1949, and had been hospitalized on Aug. 5 for a hernia operation.

“Before I went in to the operation, I was the only one in the room,” he recalls. “When I came out of the deal and woke up, there was a person in the next bed and that was William Hellman.” The badly burned smokejumper was one of only two who survived the fire, and died of his injuries in the same hospital room where the boy was recovering.

As a high school student, Ashcraft spent a summer working for the Forest Service on a crew that built a trail from Merriweather Canyon, over the ridge and into Mann Gulch, where 13 crosses mark the places where the firefighters fell.

“And then, a few years later, I was fortunate enough to get on as a smokejumper,” he recalls. And his rookie class of 1962 at the Missoula Smokejumper Base included the two men standing next to him at the cemetery last week, Jensen and Normandeau.

Despite the danger (or perhaps because of it), smokejumping had a mystique, says Ashcraft. As a teenager, working for the Forest Service, “you would maybe see a jumper, or you'd see what they're doing, and you always kind of had that feeling – ‘I’d like to do that.’”

When he went to the University of Montana in Missoula, a few members of his fraternity were smokejumpers. “You put your name in the hat and hoped that you would get on.”

Ashcraft spent a year as a smokejumper before pursuing his commercial pilot’s license. Jensen jumped for three years and then joined Johnson Flying Service as a pilot. He estimates that he dropped smokejumpers on fires for 35 years.

Normandeau, a tribal member, jumped for two years, and then transferred to Great Falls where he became an Indian liaison officer with the Blackfeet Tribe “because I wasn't making money enough to go to college.”

He returned to school at UM and studied forestry, specializing in cartography and photogrammetry. He became a mapmaker for the U.S. Geological Survey, and then the Forest Service.

Lessons learned

The tragedy at Mann Gulch came just a decade after the Forest Service launched its smokejumping program in 1939. “They were just learning their way around,” says Jensen. “And in a lot of policy people's cases they questioned whether the program could even survive after that.”

But by 1962, crucial lessons had been distilled from Mann Gulch.

For Normandeau, the fire educated a generation of smokejumpers who had become squad leaders and foremen by 1962. “We benefitted from our supervisors because to be a supervisor you had to be there seven, eight years,” he said. “So they were new jumpers immediately after that Mann Gulch fire. And they were probably taught time and time again what you should do and what you should not do.”

Among those lessons: “When the wind shifted, you got out of the way.” He recalls a fire he fought in the Bitterroot-Selway when the wind circled back toward his crew, which was able to move to safety.

“It burned up our parachutes because they were still hanging in the trees – that's the only fire I remember that scared the devil out of me,” he said.

“The emphasis in those days was ‘pay attention to what is happening around you.’ Don't get just digging line and forget about everything.”

All three agree that Mann Gulch was pivotal for the smokejumping program and probably saved each of their lives. Jensen and Ashcraft recalled one of their earliest jumps together, “a 52-manner” in the Salmon-Challis National Forest in Idaho. Their foreman, veteran smokejumper Hal Samsel, “saved our lives,” said Jensen.

Samsel recognized the danger immediately and ordered his crew to drop their gear. “We started dog trotting and we basically hustled all day long and never touched a fire line but were just trying to get out of the way of it,” said Ashcraft.

They ended up in a rock slide, “and that thing burned all around us. Next day we hiked out to the Salmon River.”

Jensen said it could easily have turned into the kind of situation that had killed 13 firefighters 13 years before.

Samsel, he said, “was just an absolute artist at keeping you safe. When he started cooking his coffee in the middle of that rock slide, I thought he was going nuts. Then he invited us all over for a cup of coffee. And the fire went right over the top of us.”

For Ashcraft, the message instilled by Mann Gulch was discipline and obedience.

“When you're on a fire, there's a lot of teamwork involved. And you fell in line,” he says. “If your squad leader told you to do something, then you did it.”

    Members of the American Legion Honor Guard were on hand at Mountain View Cemetery in Ronan Saturday to honor veteran Phillip McVey during a tribute to the smokejumper – one of 13 men who died in the Mann Gulch fire, Aug. 5, 1949. (Larry Ashcraft photo)
  

    Members of Phillip McVey's family were on hand last Saturday at Mountain View Cemetery in Ronan for a tribute honoring the fallen smokejumper, who died at Mann Gulch 75 years ago. (Larry Ashcraft photo)
  

    An emblem commemorating Phillip McVey's death at Mann Gulch in 1949 was recently added to his grave marker in the Ronan Cemetery. (Kristi Niemeyer/Leader)