February/March 2009 Winter scene photo by Becky Hart
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Vol 25 No 3
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Evaro’s Andy Hayes Jumps into Retirement
Jumping thousands of feet into a burning forest and then fighting a raging fire for days on end seems extraordinary to most people, but to Andy Hayes, it was his job for more than 30 years. In the photos above , Andy descends toward the landing zone on a practice jump in 2008 and is shown in jump gear beneath hanging parachutes at the Missoula Smokejumper base.
Article & Photos by Craig & Liz Larcom Smokejumper Andy Hayes didn’t retire because he was running out of steam. He just wanted a summer vacation and more freedom to ski. So the Evaro man hung up his jumpsuit and helmet for the last time August 2, 2008, finishing 30 years of smoke jumping. Andy mapped out his last season of smoke jumping as carefully as he would plan an attack as the Incident Commander of a forest fire. He wanted to get out of the office and make more smoke jumps. In the last few years he had become Operations Manager at the Missoula Smokejumper Base, cutting down the number of jumps he could make. “I wanted to just go back and be the smokejumper that I loved,” he says. So he convinced his boss to backfill his office position. Andy also wanted to jump in his home state, so he set his retirement a month after the Montana fire season typically starts. His last goal was to know at the time that he was making his last fire jump. For Andy, the 2008 fire season kicked off with an assignment on the ground at Ruidoso, New Mexico where dry conditions made a fire likely. “We got a call for a fire right up by Albuquerque. It went really big one day and burned down, I think, 97 structures. They called us and we came up to manage that whole fire. It was like 20,000 acres,” he says. “We managed that fire for about 24-36 hours while they got a team in there to take it over. And when we did that, we drove into one section where there had been quite a few houses destroyed. “We decided to make a stand there and save this guy’s retreat which was a beautiful place. There were a bunch of bunkhouses and a real nice lodge and people came there for summer camp.” Andy’s 20-person team told the caretakers they could stop the fire there, and sent them out. “The fire just blew up about three o’clock in the morning. But we had put up a line of defense and so the fire came at that and stopped, and came around on both sides. It was crowning out and making huge noises like fires do, but people that aren’t around fires don’t realize it.” The owners watched the fire from a distance. “So at six in the morning when they drove back in, they thought for sure that the whole retreat was gone. But we’d saved everything,” Andy says. Being greeted like heroes was fun. “It was a rewarding experience because the majority of time when we do this, it’s out in the woods and no one’s around and no one cares or knows. There’s no one to thank you,” Andy adds. Stints that took him far south and then north followed, so that he hiked across the Mexican and (Continued on page 48)