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(Mail Tribune / Roy Musitelli) A leap of faith Former smokejumper spearheads effort to turn a closed base near Cave Junction into a museum honoring the airborne firefighters Stories by Paul Fattig Mail Tribune CAVE JUNCTION — Gary Buck crouched in the doorway of the C-45 "Twin Beech" airplane, looking down as a fellow smokejumper dropped like a rock until his parachute caught air. This would be Buck's first jump on a forest fire. And it would be in the extremely rugged and remote Illinois River drainage in what was then the 2-year-old Kalmiopsis Wilderness Area deep in the Siskiyou National Forest. "I was scared," the veteran smokejumper freely acknowledges of his first jump in the summer of 1966. "When you are out there looking down from 1,000 feet up, the terrain looks rough and scary," he adds. "There are lots of hazards. Snags. Big rocks." Buck never regretted taking that flying leap into a 17-year airborne firefighting career that began at the Siskiyou Smokejumper Base, the first U.S. Forest Service smokejumper base in Oregon when it opened in 1943. Advertisement Buck is the president of the Siskiyou Smokejumper Base Museum Project, a nonprofit group whose mission it is to establish a smokejumper museum at the base which closed in 1981. The group's nomination resulted in the base being named to the National Register of Historic Places last November. The base is located at the Illinois Valley Airport about a half-dozen miles south of Cave Junction. During a recent walk through the base's old headquarters and parachute loft, Buck talked about those with whom he spent 17 summers leaping out of perfectly good airplanes. From the Siskiyou base, they would jump fires from Alaska to Virginia, although most of their battles would be in the West. It wasn't the $2 an hour they were being paid in the mid-1960s that drew them to the hazardous duty, he says. He figures it was the spirit of adventure that drove them to give up the safety of airplanes and jump over a wildfire. "Whatever it was, I sure liked them," he says. "They are classy, funny, real characters. They would go way beyond the norm to do a job. Non whiners." Fellow veteran smokejumpers describe Buck — a youthful-looking 60 whose 6-foot-3-inch height was almost too much for him to qualify as a smokejumper — as a tough non-whiner. "He was a stud," says former Siskiyou smokejumper Gary Thornhill who retired last year as vice principal and athletic director at Illinois Valley High School where he was an outstanding athlete. Thornhill was later a standout college football player. "At that time, there were a lot of college athletes jumping — it was a summer job," adds Thornhill, a jumper from 1968 until 1980. "They were all great people but it was hard. And 'Joe Buck' didn't have any problems doing any of it." The nickname came from Buck's having a strong resemblance to the Jon Voight character in the 1969 "Midnight Cowboy" movie, he explains. "My first fire was pretty easy," Buck recalls. "We got it out. But then we had a 12-mile pack out. We had 140-pound packs. That was a real eye opener. "I was 19 and I thought I was in good shape," he adds. "But it was a killer." The historic buildings on the base are empty now of those who wore jump suits. The smokejumpers would become everything from astronauts to teachers, attorneys to loggers. A smokejumper named Stuart Roosa, who would become an astronaut and the command pilot on Apollo 13, spent the summer of 1953 working out of the base. Willie Unsoeld was a Siskiyou smokejumper in 1950, before he gained fame as the first climber to scale Mount Everest in 1964 via the treacherous west ridge route. National Geographic magazine regarded it as a one of the top five climbs to the roof of the world. Perhaps the most famous jumper in the smokejumping community was Buck's friend Allen D. "Mouse" Owen, a 4-foot-101/2-inch tall former Marine who served three tours in Vietnam. Owen had to get a congressional waiver to join the Corps as well as the smokejumpers. An article in Life magazine described him as "a small person to look up to." Owen, who jumped out of the Siskiyou base for a dozen seasons, died Sept. 9, 1981 in a skydiving accident near North Pole, Alaska. "Mouse was one of a kind," Buck says. Buck stepped into the old headquarters building, circa 1936. It was originally at the district ranger headquarters in nearby Cave Junction until it was moved here in 1961. "The jumpers used it down there in 1943," Buck says. "They were trucked out here to jump fires." When they weren't jumping fires, the smokejumpers kept busy by sprucing up the base. In 1977, jumpers Thornhill and Gary Mills were told by supervisor Terry Mewhinney to cover the interior pine boards in the headquarters with paneling. "I really didn't want to cover this fine wood but Mewhinney made me," reads tongue-in-cheek graffiti signed by both jumpers which was uncovered when the paneling was removed. Mills recently retired from the Forest Service after serving as a fire boss for many years. The parachute loft, built in 1948, is the oldest in North America. Buck remembers when it bustled with the noise of sewing machines repairing torn chutes. "We had big sewing machines in here when I got here," he says. "Smokejumpers did the packing, repairing and all the sewing." Jump gear, harness, cargo bags and other items were all made in the loft, he adds. Buck, who attended college during the summer, earning a bachelor's degree in cartography, would take a two-year sabbatical from smokejumping to serve in the Army in Vietnam after he was drafted. But he returned to smokejumping. After the Siskiyou base closed in 1981, he would jump for four more seasons from other bases. During the 1985 season he jumped on a fire in western Alaska near the village of Silawik, some 300 miles northeast of Nome. "It was real windy out there — I was blown backwards," he says, noting jumpers turn against the wind when landing to reduce the speed at which they slam into the ground. He got up after the hard landing with severe neck pain. Still, the non-whiner battled the blaze. "I was feeling pretty bad, but I went to work on the fire," he says. "When I came out I went to the doctor." The doctors pronounced Joe Buck healthy enough, if it weren't for his broken neck. Surgeons operated, reinforcing his fractured vertebrae with a piece of bone taken from his pelvic bone. "That was the end of jumping for me," he says. Reach reporter Paul Fattig at 776-4496 or at [email protected] Would you like to respond to this story? 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