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A fascinating look (Esquire) at the thrilling world of smokejumpers, the airborne firefighters who parachute into the most remote and rugged areas of the United States, confronting the growing threat of nature's blazes.

Forest and wildland fires are growing larger, more numerous, and deadlier every year -- record drought conditions, decades of forestry mismanagement, and the increasing encroachment of residential housing into the wilderness have combined to create a powder keg that threatens millions of acres and thousands of lives every year. One select group of men and women are part of America's front-line defense: smokejumpers. The smokejumper program operates through both the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management. Though they are tremendously skilled and only highly experienced and able wildland firefighters are accepted into the training program, being a smokejumper remains an art that can only be learned on the job. Forest fires often behave in unpredictable ways: spreading almost instantaneously, shooting downhill behind a stiff tailwind, or even flowing like a liquid. In this extraordinarily rare memoir by an active-duty jumper, Jason Ramos takes readers into his exhilarating and dangerous world, explores smokejumping's remarkable history, and explains why their services are more essential than ever before.

Julian Smith is an award-winning travel writer whose work has appeared in Outside, National Geographic Adventure, National Geographic Traveler, Smithsonian, Wired, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times, among other publications. He is the author of guidebooks to El Salvador, Ecuador, Virginia, and the southwestern United States, and he has been honored by the Society of American Travel Writers for writing the best guidebook of the year. He lives with his wife and daughter in Portland, Oregon.

John Norman Maclean, a longtime Washington journalist and prizewinning author, has published several books on wildland fire, including one about the 2006 Esperanza Fire in Southern California. In order to provide an accurate account of what firefighters go through, he has spent over a decade working with them, taking their training classes, and listening to their personal stories, calling it the best job he's ever had. He resigned from the Chicago Tribune in 1995, after thirty years of working as a reporter and editor, to write Fire on the Mountain, a critically acclaimed account of the 1994 fire on Storm King Mountain in Colorado, which took the lives of fourteen firefighters. The book, a national bestseller, received the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award for the best nonfiction book of 1999. A History Channel documentary based on Fire on the Mountain won the Cine Master's Award for Excellence as the best documentary of 2003.

Jason A. Ramos has devoted twenty-six years of his life to the fire service. His career began at the age of 17 as a volunteer with the Riverside County Fire Department, then progressed to wildland firefighting in Southern California. Now a smokejumper in his sixteenth season, he is based in Winthrop, WA, at the North Cascades Smokejumper Base, the "birthplace of smokejumping."