Sometimes your up......And sometimes your down.

3 weeks of fires and then rain, fires then rain. But I got to jump some fires and make some overtime. It's the end of August and thus the best chance for jumping fires in Idaho are fading away.
What can you do?
If I could control the weather I would be doing something besides firefighting.

Since I can't predict the future and jumping out of airplanes is ridiculously awesome I'm still grinning and hopeful that the rest of the season will be exciting.

Well, that’s more like it.

You guessed it.

Can't say it's going to be a real interesting blog if we don't have fires to go to. Things are slow and at the base learning all the various jumper duties, like sewing (which I am not good at.).

But, the weather's been nice and the weekends have been fun with rodeos, rafting, and tubing on the river.

I wish July would last for 60 days.

Slow

Still no fires, the weather has been getting more conducive the past couple of weeks but everything is still pretty green around northern Idaho. Hopefully this coming week will bring some smokes and first fire jumps for me and the other rookies at Grangeville.

Out of the Fire and into the......fridge.

Well, after rookie training regular station duty is pretty dull. It's nice to be able to workout on my own and choose what I want to do, but 5 weeks of stress and training left me wound up and ready for jumping fires.
It's not a huge surprise that there are no fires, it's been cold and rainy for weeks. Hopefully things will dry out in the coming weeks or we can go south where there are fires.

DID IT.

A Good Week

We’ve focused a lot on our jumps now, they still run the shit out of us in the mornings and throw in some suffering throughout the day, but we’re in the meat parachute flying and land skills. On Friday we did our 10th and 11th jumps, and each time I’m getting better at estimating my flight path and what the winds are doing to my parachute. I still need the streamers on the ground so I can tell which direction to turn to but a landing panel isn’t really necessary anymore. On my 10th jump, I treed up and while I’m not happy about missing the spot, I handled it well and I knew that I was not going to make the spot with enough time to look for where I was going and what to do.
I felt upbeat about the week and about successfully completing rookie training until Friday afternoon when they let a fellow rookie go because of his parachute manipulation skills. I’m not and I don’t think anyone of the rookies in training with me are so dialed with parachute skills that we still couldn’t wash. To be honest I pretty mad at the trainers for failing the guy. He’s a good guy and would’ve made a great smokejumper.