Parachutist leaps into heart of fire

Gazette, The (Colorado Springs), Sep 3, 2000 by Bill McKeown

MISSOULA, Mont. - Nearly every day for a month, Mike Pennacchio has laced up a pair of $300 logging boots, pulled on a Kevlar suit with an Elvis collar, and launched himself out of a DC-3 over a burning Montana.

He's having the time of his life.

"It's a lot of fun. I can't explain it," said the sinewy 25-year- old, a rookie with the elite Forest Service Smokejumpers based in this college town. "It's like the feeling you get walking away from a car crash."

Pennacchio is one of just two rookies accepted into the 70- member Missoula Smokejumper corps this summer. The Mississippian knows he's in select company. The Forest Service employs 40,000 firefighters, but just 400 smokejumpers, 30 of them women, assigned to eight bases throughout the West.

The smokejumpers have played a critical role in trying to rein in the fires that have ravaged Montana this summer. Their job - parachute into roadless, remote areas and douse spot fires sparked by lightning before the flames have a chance to breed or merge with other fires.

It's dangerous, macho, exhilarating work, and it's the culmination of Pennacchio's childhood dream.

The adrenaline rush and the camaraderie among team members lures the same men and women every spring, said Gayle McMurray of the Smokejumpers Center.

"Once they become a smokejumper, they remain a smokejumper," she said.

Pennacchio is willing to take every risk, tote every 120-pound pack it takes to keep his spot in the squad. The danger, he said, is part of the job.

Although there have been only three deaths in more than 350,000 jumps since the creation of the cadre in 1939, there have been innumerable broken legs, arms and backs from hard landings on rock and in trees.

And the death toll doesn't count the 13 smokejumpers who died in the Mann Gulch Fire near Helena, Mont., in 1949, a tragedy recounted in author Norman Maclean's book "Young Men and Fire."

Outside the Smokejumpers Center, 13 flat headstones commemorate the men who died when flames 50 feet high and moving 150 feet every 10 seconds swept over them as they labored to climb out of a steep gulch.

On a recent weekday, Missoula resident Pat Manlove pointed out the marker commemorating Eldon Diettert to her foreign guests. She knows the Diettert family and recalls that Aug. 5, 1949, was Eldon's 20th birthday.

"His mom sent him a birthday cake that day," she said. "He ate a piece and then went out and died."

- Bill McKeown covers general assignments and may be reached at 636-0197 or mckeown@gazette.com