Former smokejumper, 86, earns master's with historical jump database (2024)

The yellowing pages fill binders packed into cardboard boxes at the Missoula Smokejumper Base; they contain almost a century of profound but niche history: every jump made by every smokejumper there since the program started in 1940.

Some of the earliest records, mainly in the '40s, are handwritten. Fine, flowing script preserves the names, ages and weights of the jumpers, and the dates, aircraft, forests and wildfires they jumped on — plus practice and refresher jumps around town. Some pages record the final jumps of those who didn't return.

Thompson, Silas. 21 years old. 175 pounds. "Fatally burned on Helena fire 8/5/49."

The fading records, and their corresponding volumes at the West Yellowstone and Grangeville, Idaho, bases, would have been consigned to profound obscurity if not for Missoula's Roger Savage.

Now 86, Savage spent decades meticulously building a digital database of every smokejumper and every jump in U.S. Forest Service Region 1. In conjunction with the National Smokejumper Association, he built and maintains a national database estimated to contain 99% of the barely 6,000 smokejumpers in U.S. history. He has datasets ordered chronologically by fire, others alphabetically by last name. They're online and searchable.

On Saturday morning, Savage's efforts yielded him a degree from the University of Montana. This was no honorary degree, but an earned Master's of Science in Forestry from the W.A. Franke College of Forestry and Conservation.

Although Savage's database is modern and his degree only days old, his original master's coursework is as old as some of the historic records he's preserved.

'Find all the names'

Born in Kalispell and raised in Choteau and then Hamilton after third grade, Savage went to UM for undergrad, graduating in 1960. He served in the Army National Guard, where he learned to fly fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters. Then he returned to UM to pursue a master's degree.

All the while he was smokejumping, 1957 to 1966, save for the couple years when he was learning how to fly planes instead of leaping out of them.

In his rookie year in 1957 he completed his mandatory seven practice jumps between July 3–12. (Rookies must now complete 25 practice jumps.) Days later he was jumping on fires: Fish Lake on the Nez Perce, July 19; Sweathouse Creek on the Bitterroot, July 26; and so on. Six fires in all his rookie year, July 19 to Sept. 27.

Then it was back to college, as was customary for many smokejumpers of the day. After the Guard, he completed all of the coursework for a master's. But he never got to the final project.

"I completed my coursework and one day airlines came through Missoula recruiting pilots," he said, noting that a pilot friend at Johnson Flying Service who'd flown him on jumps gave him a heads-up. "I went down and talked to them and the rest is history, I went off and worked for them."

He spent the next 31 years, from '66 to '97, flying around the country and, later, the globe for United Airlines. He finished his career as a relief pilot on Boeing 747s making the 12–14-hour trek from New York City to Tokyo. And then, at 60, he hit forced retirement per federal regulations for commercial pilots.

By then he'd already started on the smokejumper database. As a member of the National Smokejumper Association, he helped organize reunions starting in the '80s. Back then he was an early adopter of personal computers.

"Nobody had put in a full list of all the jumpers before," he remembered. "Since I was a computer guy, I was assigned that job to find all the names I could."

Once he left United in '97, "It became pretty much a full-time retirement job that I really enjoy doing."

In the decades since, he's built a master spreadsheet of jumps with 65,689 rows of data — "all the fire history of Region 1," he called it — including the date, jumper names, spotter name, aircraft, forest, fire and location of every jump since 1940. In the "remarks" field he records the sometimes tedious process he undertook to flesh out early jump details left unclear by sometimes incomplete record taking. He pored over historical newspaper accounts and contacted the few living jumpers from the era to get details.

He also built the database of nearly every jumper to have worked in the U.S. And the work goes on.

"Especially when I got into retirement age in years, I made it more of a full-time project for me," he said. "I’m still looking at the names, making sure we haven’t missed somebody. Every year there’s 50 more jumpers that will come on board, that will train this year."

'Right on target'

The database, and Savage's dedication to it, garnered appreciation and admiration long before it came onto the university's radar.

At the Missoula Smokejumper base on Thursday, Assistant Operations Manager Tyson Atkinson pulled out binders of jump records from the '40s and '50s. He said people come to the base at least monthly to search the records, oftentimes to better understand the jump history of a deceased father.

"I think it's something that's long overdue," he said of Savage's master's degree, "and I'm glad he stepped up and was able to take a project of that magnitude on. It's a lot of work. That data's very important to a lot of people in and out of the smokejumper world."

Examining Savage's rookie year in the records, Atkinson was surprised by the pace at which Savage went through training and started jumping on fires: "That's quick, that's unheard of." In all, Savage recorded more than 150 jumps, more than 50 of which were on fires.

Chuck Sheley, vice president of the National Smokejumper Association and editor of Smokejumper Magazine, called Savage's database "the foundation of our organization."

"I think our database is probably 99.9% accurate in keeping the names and the bases of smokejumpers we’ve had in smokejumper history," he said. "I’m in the database continually, maybe four or five times a day. It’s the bread and butter of our association."

In the magazine, Sheley writes obituaries for members when they die, often relying on Savage's database. And the information Savage collected, he said, "has proven to be right on target."

'A no-brainer'

But that was mostly unknown at the University of Montana, where records simply showed a grad student named Roger Savage stopped attending in 1966 and didn't finish his degree.

And then, on Feb. 8, the journalist Breanna McCabe, a PBS producer who made the smokejumper documentary "Higgins Ridge," emailed Elizabeth Harrison, the communications director for the College of Forestry and Conservation. She explained Savage's work, which she discovered and relied upon while making the documentary, and she wondered: Could his data be preserved at the Mansfield Library at UM, and could it count as the project he needed to earn his master's degree?

Paul Lukacs, associate dean of research and graduate studies at the College of Forestry and Conservation, received a similar letter a month later, this one from Robert McKean, president of the National Smokejumper Association. He implored Lukacs to see if Savage was eligible for a master's degree for his two databases: the database of all smokejumpers in the U.S., and the comprehensive and detailed list of every individual jump in Region 1.

Initially there was talk of an honorary master's from the college, but that doesn't exist, Lukacs said. "But he had all the work done to get an earned master’s."

"I saw all that and I sort of thought it was kind of a no-brainer," he said, recounting his work to confirm that Savage's coursework and project met all academic standards for a master's. "It wasn’t something I had to spend a lot of time pondering."

And the project, he said, although not original research, was more than worthy: "It’s an important accomplishment and an important piece for the profession. One, sort of the historical context of all the contributions that these people have done, risking their lives and helping other people through firefighting. And the other part … understanding fire behavior in a whole long string of history is important context, too. It’s hard to get that many fires cataloged in one place."

It all happened fast, Lukacs and Harrison said. So fast, in fact, that Harrison had to contact the cap and gown company after their deadline to secure regalia for Savage. Lukacs called Savage just two weeks before graduation to share the news.

"That was the biggest surprise of my life," Savage said two days before graduation. "Here it is, 64 years after I graduated from college."

'Best of both worlds'

On Saturday he was joined at graduation by his wife, Bonnie, a daughter and two granddaughters. Last year they attended his granddaughters' college graduation in Victoria, British Columbia.

"One of them is working on her master’s," he said, "and I told her, I might beat ya."

Savage said "it's nice to have any degree" and noted that he's been a strong proponent of higher education his entire life. He still takes classes at UM's Lifelong Learning Institute, and his current endeavor is exploring and experimenting with artificial intelligence.

He also still actively hikes the area's mountains. For 75 years he hiked each Monday with Roy Williams, a friend from Boy Scouts in Hamilton.

"We had a scoutmaster that wasn’t really big into merit badges but he was big into hiking, and that’s what got me into it," he said. "I’ve been hiking ever since in the mountains of western Montana and northern Idaho."

And it was a hike in the southern Bitterroot decades ago that also helped spawn his database. After the hike, he realized he'd passed through a place he'd jumped into long before "and I didn't even know it," he said, recalling that it would've been more meaningful had he been aware in the moment.

So, he went to the Missoula base and pulled his records. Things progressed from there, he said, "because somebody had to do it." Since then, he said, he's responded to hundreds of requests for historical jump information.

Savage's taste for hard work, and doing it with a smile, was evident even in jumping days.

"You’re just in beautiful country a lot of the times. Some of the pack-outs were really interesting," he recalled. "I jumped on the Salmon River one time, we had to hike uphill. One time we hiked up to the Magruder Corridor Road near Salmon Mountain Lookout and it was a 20-mile hike out. But for somebody who likes to hike anyway and you’re getting paid for it, it’s the best of both worlds."