Day Five: Smoke Jumpers!
Day Five:
7/11/18
This morning we woke up around 6:00am. It was freezing cold. I didn’t want to get out of my bed. Breakfast was good. I’m glad they had bought some more bagels. Anyway, we started getting ready for the day and we had a long day ahead of us. We were able to meet with the smoke jumpers! I had fell asleep so I don’t really know how long it took to get to the Pacific Northwest Training Center. First we met people to kind of give us a run down on what they do and what opportunities are open to anyone interested in firefighting. This kind of open my world a little more. I wanted to do a lot of things in college such as being a musician or band director, nurse, and now possibly, firefighting. The smoke jumper carry so much weight on them it’s kind of mind blowing. To think how much weight those men can carry and that’s 60-70 pounds just the suit they wear and the gear they have when they jump. Plus another 45-50 pounds of cargo they have dropped for them. Everything that leaves the plain, they have to bring back. For the gear they wear, they have to have to be dressed within 2:00 min. The men that showed us around were rookies smoke jumpers. Their names are Doug or Dougie, and Sam or Sammy, says Destiny.
This is Dougie. He is also a rookie for the Redmond Smoke Jumpers. He was demonstrating how to land properly when landing from a plain and using a perashoot.
They showed us around the whole base. One place that was interesting was going to see the airplanes that the smoke jumpers jump out of. It was awesome to sit inside the plain. We also got to see another plain a retardant dropper plain. I don’t know the real name of it. But the tank that was inside was huge and had stickers of the places of where they been. It was nice to see what these people can do. I learned that fighting fire is more a life style and less like a job. Seeing how these people can risk their lives is truly amazing. I’ll now have an open mind.
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