As a young outdoorsman who had built logging roads, lookout towers, and a home for his mother, Mr. Cooley was as prepared as anyone - which is to say hardly prepared at all - for the task of jumping from a propeller-driven plane into a lightning-triggered fire in Idaho's Nez Perce forest on July 12, 1940. The first man out the plane's door was Rufus Robinson, followed closely by Mr. Cooley.

The wind was blowing so hard that afternoon that Mr. Cooley's load lines twisted up behind his neck. As he bent to look at the emergency chute, the lines unwound. He was nearly in a free fall, and as he drew closer to the ground, he clipped the limbs off a big spruce tree. He landed without injury, as did Robinson, and the pair squelched the fire by 10 a.m. the next day, then hiked 28 miles to the nearest ranger station.

That was the start of the Forest Service's storied corps of smoke jumpers who even today jump in hazardous, remote areas to quickly control fires that ground-based crews cannot reach.

Mr. Cooley went on to make 48 more jumps. He was aboard the C-47 transport in 1949 from which a dozen smoke jumpers leaped into the Mann Gulch fire near Helena, Mont.

Mr. Cooley was the spotter, the man who found the landing site and tapped each jumper on the left calf to alert him that it was time to go. The firefighters landed safely, the additional equipment fell to the ground, so Cooley and the plane went back to base. But the fire "blew up" and overran the men in what became the Forest Service's biggest tragedy until the 1994 South Canyon Fire in Colorado.

"Earl lived a very long time, and he was acutely aware of his place in the history of smoke jumping," said John Maclean, author of three books on wildland fires, including one on the South Canyon Fire, and the son of Norman Maclean, who wrote on the Mann Gulch incident.

Mr. Cooley retired from the Forest Service in 1975. He had been a district ranger and superintendent of the smoke-jumper base in Missoula as well as regional equipment specialist.

- Washington Post