The McCall Smokejumper Base sits at the south end of the Payette Lake, sharing a runway with a small commercial airport. The standby room has a TV, a coffee pot, four recliners, and a speaker on the wall.
When the speaker beeps, the room empties in under three minutes.
Wyatt Ostendorf is twenty-nine. This is his sixth season jumping. Before McCall he was on a hotshot crew out of Prescott, Arizona, for four seasons.
He is a GS-7 step 4. His base pay is around 49,000 a year. With hazard pay, overtime, and night differential through a fire season, he says he can clear 85 to 95.
"The pay is better than people think and worse than it should be," he says. "Especially when you do the math on the risk."
The base flies a Twin Otter and a Sherpa. On a fire dispatch, two jumpers go out the door first, then four, then the cargo. A standard McCall jump load is eight jumpers.
He wears a padded Kevlar jumpsuit, a wire-mesh face cage on the helmet, gloves, and boots. The whole rig with his gear bag is about 110 pounds.
“He wears a padded Kevlar jumpsuit, a wire-mesh face cage on the helmet, gloves, and boots.”
His main parachute is a ram-air FS-14. His reserve is round. He packs his own main, every time, on a long carpeted table in the loft. It takes him about thirty-five minutes.
"You don't rush the pack," he says. "You rush the pack and you're going to ride a reserve someday."
He has ridden his reserve once. A mid-air collapse on a jump in the Frank Church wilderness in 2024. He landed in a meadow with no injuries beyond a bruised hip.
When the fire is reached, the cargo drops on a different chute, a cargo drogue with break-cord. It contains chainsaws, a pulaski, MREs, fire shelters, a stove, and water cans.
Then the work is the same work any wildland firefighter does. Cut line. Dig line. Burn out. Mop up. Sleep on the ground.
A jump can be two days. A jump can be fourteen. He has walked out twenty-six miles with all his gear after a Selway fire was contained.
"The jump is twelve seconds," he says. "The walk out is the job."
In the standby room at 14:20 on a Tuesday in late May, three of the eight jumpers on call are doing a crossword. Two are eating microwaved burritos. One is asleep in a recliner.
Wyatt is sewing a patch onto a personal gear bag with waxed thread. He has a daughter, eleven months old, with his partner Holly, who works at the hospital in Boise.
"She doesn't know what I do yet," he says. "She will."
The speaker beeps at 14:47. Two-jumper load. He drops the sewing on the chair, walks to the suit-up room, and is on the Twin Otter twelve minutes later.
The fire is a lightning strike north of Yellow Pine, half an acre, in steep timber. He jumps at 16:02 from 1,500 feet AGL.
He lands on the ridge. He stands up. He starts to walk.
