admin | November 17, 2009
Earl Cooley, who died Nov. 9 at his home in Missoula, was actually the second man to jump from a plane to fight a fire for the Forest Service. The late Rufus Robinson proceeded him by a minute or too, in the Marten Creek region of what’s now the Bitterroot-Selway wilderness in Idaho. Here’s a [...]
admin | November 17, 2009
If I understand correctly, Earl Cooley and the first smoke jumper class in the summer of 1940 did their ground training at the Seeley Lake Ranger Station, stayed at Camp Paxson on the south end of Seeley Lake, and did their training jumps over Blanchard Flats, near (or at?) Clearwater Junction. Here’s Cooley’s own account [...]
admin | November 17, 2009
They buried Earl Cooley yesterday afternoon in his Bitterroot hometown of Corvallis, and the barrage of tributes to Cooley’s work as one of the first smoke jumpers keeps coming. It’s interesting just to Google Cooley’s name and see them all. Cooley graduated from high school in Corvallis in 1930, but he didn’t enroll in Forestry [...]
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