MISSOULA — Miss Montana, a World War II vintage C-47, flew a 16-man crew of smokejumpers into the Mann Gulch Fire 75 years ago and only three survived making it a turning point in the evolution of smokejumping.
Bryan Douglass is a pilot for Miss Montana told this harrowing story of some of the jumpers from that day:
“One of the jumpers was a foreman, Wag Dodge, and Earl Cooley, one of the earliest smoke jumpers, and Wag Dodge were laying on their bellies looking out this door as the plane circled over the fire at Mann Gulch trying to figure out the best drop spot and how to, where to actually go out,” Douglass said looking at the door of the plane.
“I never look… go through this door without thinking of those two laying right there because they had no idea what was about to happen,” Douglass said.
Patt Collins from the Museum of Mountain Flying in Missoula says many current smoke-jumping practices are the result of lessons learned from Mann Gulch.
“Right here in Missoula, we have the Fire Sciences lab just down the other side of the airport here and they study fire behavior there,” Collins said.
“So they can look at all kinds of weather conditions. They can look at fuel conditions, they can look at the terrain, they can look at all kinds of things that I think they learned from being able to analyze what happened at Mann Gulch and other tragedies, there’s been others too,” Collins said.
Although Miss Montana’s role in the Mann Gulch Fire has a tragic ending, at the time it was the best plane for the job.
Douglass has flown and worked on Miss Montana for years and he explained the mechanics of what makes this plane the ideal machine to help fight wildfires.
“It was fast, it would carry everything you could put in it, it could land short and go into some of these backcountry strips and of course you could jump out of it,” Douglass said. “So it was perfect for that and it’s still being used for a lot of that stuff today.”
Douglass also says Miss Montana has stayed flying for 80 years thanks to volunteer maintenance and donations from people across the state.
“Well, it’s pretty remarkable that this airplane dropped those jumpers in 1949 and it’s still around, much less flying, much less in Missoula Montana flying, that by itself is really incredible because to be that old to have done so many things, we took her across the Atlantic in 2019 and back. I mean she has lasted and I think other than… I guess the crosses on the ground in Mann Gulch, she’s the last physical connection to the events of that day”
Miss Montana flew over Helena and the site of the Mann Gulch Fire on Sunday, Aug. 4.
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