Daring to Leap: Meet Paris Harris

It was peaceful from the bench outside of the Deary, Idaho fire station just after the Fourth of July. Birds were calling and answering, and Potato Hill, colloquially called “Spud,” rose in the distance. Deary has a population around 500, quite a change from the southern suburbs of Chicago where Paris Harris grew up.

Harris had never been to Idaho, nor had she been in a car for 27 straight hours, which was how long it took her and her father to drive from their home in Calumet Park, Illinois. The trip was a big deal for Harris in the summer of 2023. After all, she was about to enter her first year at the University of Idaho.

“Being in the city your whole life, you just feel trapped,” said Harris, now 19 and starting her sophomore year at U of I. “But when you go out here you see things you’ve never seen before like all these different types of trees and mountains … it’s very beautiful.”

Harris came to the Gem State not only for the views but also with a mission: to become the first Black female smokejumper in America. She knew the journey, like the drive, would be a long road.

African American men and women have worked for land management agencies since the beginning of the 20^th century, but the racism they encountered commonly cut short careers and made these places difficult to stay long enough to effect change.

Ralph Brock became the country’s first Black forester in 1906—just one year after the U.S. Forest Service was established—but after the “relentless racism” he faced from white students at Pennsylvania’s State Forest Academy, he left forestry a few years later. Melody Mobley launched her career as the first Black female forester for the Forest Service in 1977 and retired 28 years later, after enduring unthinkable indignity, including rape, which she wrote about for Mountain Journal in 2018. Today, Randy Moore is the first Black American chief of the Forest Service, appointed in 2021.

As climate changes and wildfire seasons get longer and hotter, experts across the fire field agree that diversity is crucial to understanding how to adapt in the years to come.

Harris would be a new “first” if she takes her inaugural leap out of a plane as a member of firefighting’s most elite force. She spent this summer fighting wildfires on an engine crew with the Idaho Department of Lands, during which she reported to 15 fires, working the engine and digging fireline. As of early September, according to the National Interagency Wildfire Center, 1,088 fires in Idaho had burned more than 750,000 acres so far this year.

Harris is still grappling with all the firsts. “I feel like I am making my mark in history, but I don’t know,” she said.

On the shorter side at five feet, three inches and petite, Harris may not have the stature of some firefighters, but she makes up for it with perseverance. She had an interest in fighting fire from an early age. She grew up in a house down the street from the fire station in Calumet Park, which allowed her to see the action as fire trucks drove in and out of the apparatus bays. The station hosted a fire academy for kids every summer and Harris began attending at age 12. 

Howard Fisher was fire chief in Calumet Park when Harris was taking academy classes. He remembers her being more devoted to the activities than other girls: donning the equipment, handling fire hose, crawling through a maze in the dark. And she asked some big questions.

If she were to pursue firefighting, a young Harris asked, would it be hard if she’s the only female firefighter at the station? It depends on how you look at it, Fisher replied. “Where you have a female climbing the ladder, proving that she’s capable of doing the same job as males, that’s huge because a lot of women would be discouraged,” he told Mountain Journal.

When LaVell Rucker, Harris’s dad, started to research smokejumping, he cried. He recalls telling his daughter that you’re not supposed to jump into a fire, you’re supposed to run from it.

“We thought [she] was just going through a phase,” Rucker said. “When she talked about smokejumping, I had never heard of it before because we don’t have that type of thing here in Chicago.”

But smokejumpers are the cream of the crop in the firefighting world, and that’s what Harris was after. It shook Rucker that she wanted to go all the way to Idaho—and crushed him that she couldn’t come home for the summer—but that didn’t stop him from driving her there.

“Me and my dad, we both sat together, and we both watched YouTube videos, documentaries and stories about smokejumping and I was like, you know what? I want to do this, even though it may sound scary to other people,” Harris said. “I’m looking for the thrill.”

As of late July, the Forest Service reported employing more than 11,000 wildland firefighters. But across the nine jump bases in the country, there are only 320 smokejumpers.

Ted McClanahan lives in Big Sky, Montana, and retired from smokejumping in 2017 after 24 years on the job. When he started, he saw it as a means to finance his skiing.

“I always thought it was the most fun thing I’ve ever done,” said McClanahan, who entered the fire world following four years as a paratrooper in the Army.

The path to becoming a smokejumper requires jumping through administrative hoops. A hopeful candidate needs either two years on a fire crew—engine work, hotshot experience, for example—or one year with a related degree, like something Harris is pursuing. McClanahan says when he was jumping, somewhere between 1,500 and 3,000 applicants were competing for 14 jobs. And that was just within Region 1, which includes bases in Grangeville, Idaho—close to Harris—and Missoula and West Yellowstone in Montana. As training intensified, often just eight of the 14 jumpers remained.

Rookie training lasts about six weeks and starts with the basics. First, you must be between 5 feet and 6-foot-5-inches tall. Minimum requirements set by the Forest Service include pullups, sit ups and a mile-and-a-half run, and progress to a pack test where rookies must run with 85-pound fire packs over terrain gaining 1,000 feet in elevation. Other elements of rookie training include tree climbing, land navigation and eventually the jump phase where rookies begin jumping out of airplanes.

As difficult as the physical challenges are for rookies in training, McClanahan says the mental challenges are just as hard. “You’re building your stress tolerance because a lot of the things we’re doing are as simple as tying your shoes. But if you don’t do it correctly,” he said, “things don’t work out.”

The University of Idaho is renowned for its wildland fire education and research. Harris says her professors and job experience this summer are preparing her well. She isn’t worried about the physical requirements, confident in her track and field background, and believes she’ll grow stronger physically and mentally on her path toward becoming a smokejumper.

“I felt a kind of change in myself,” Harris said, “but in a good way; better than I was back at home when I didn’t have a lot of confidence … I have more discipline now since I’m on my own and I’m advocating for myself.”

Her first year in college wasn’t easy. There were the typical challenges: being far from home, trying to find a new friend group, and the disappointment of not making the university’s track and field team. But on top of that, when she sat down in her wildland fire management class she didn’t see a single other Black woman.

“I was kind of shocked,” she said. “My dad, he was like, ‘Well you’ve got to expect this. You’re at U of I.’”

Harris’s neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago has fewer people than Moscow, Idaho, home of the University of Idaho. But Calumet Park, with just over 7,000 residents, is 89 percent Black as of the 2020 Census. Of the 28,596 people who live in Moscow, just 315 are African American.

Heather Heward, who taught Harris’s wildland fire management class, said it was the first time in her 12 years of teaching the course that a Black woman had taken it. “She saw a gap and she saw a space within this field that has not been filled by someone like her,” Heward said. “As a competitive person, she sees that as a bit of a challenge.”

The first female smokejumper, Deanne Shulman, made history in 1979 in McCall, Idaho, where many smokejumpers go to train. Smokejumping is still a male-dominated field, but Heward says Shulman paved the way for more women to shoulder the chute.

According to an article published in The Hill in 2021, only about 12 of the 400 smokejumpers at the time were women. In 2018, the International Association of Wildland Fire reported that within all firefighting agencies, including the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, National Parks Service, Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, women made up just 12 percent. 

Diversifying the workforce comes incrementally, Heward says. She compares it to track and field at the Olympics: A world record can be shattered if athletes push the bounds of what’s possible. In doing so they show others a path.

When she took the position with the U.S. Forest Service, Melody Mobley didn’t think about being the first Black female forester. It was just the job she wanted. At first, she didn’t even know she was first.

“To find out two or three years in that I was the first Black female forester, it was shocking to me,” Mobley said. “I thought, ‘Here we are in the ‘70s and there aren’t any other people like me? In the whole agency?’”

Being first came with assumptions, namely that she couldn’t compete with her white male colleagues. She described being constantly tested. Colleagues asked where she went to school, what classes she took, what grades she earned, if she had any fieldwork experience. She didn’t notice other foresters being asked those questions.

In 2021, Mobley wrote a second article for Mountain Journal outlining ways the Forest Service could better support people of color, which included multicultural training, inclusion from the top down, and mentorship. On a phone call in early May, Mobley gave Harris two key pieces of advice: First, find a mentor. Second, always document inappropriate behavior and keep it safely stored off work property.

Harris listened. She began creating a support system in Idaho, and the first person who was integral to that system was Randy Brooks.

Brooks, a forestry professor at U of I, did what all parents want from the college application process: he picked up the phone. Assuring Harris’s dad that he was committed to his fire students, he said that part of his process is asking freshmen what they want. Harris told him she wanted to be the first Black female smokejumper. Brooks said, “OK, let’s figure out how to get you there.”

Brooks describes Harris as a hard worker with guts and determination. She’ll need to finish her degree and have several seasons of working in wildland fire before she can start smokejumping, perhaps as early as 2028, but he wants her to get there.

“Regardless of your sex, your race, everybody deserves a chance. So if you can do the job, then you can do the job,” Brooks said.

That job is changing for reasons beyond race and gender. And it won’t look the same when Harris is ready to jump her first fire. Climate change is causing temperatures across the American West to increase, along with drought, and snowpacks are melting earlier in spring causing vegetation to dry out faster. It’s a recipe for longer, more extreme wildfire seasons.

But those across the field of wildfire see diversity as one way to tackle the challenges ahead.

“The issues that we’re facing today are the most complex issues we’ve ever had to face,” Mobley said. “In order to get the best solutions and alternatives we really need the brightest minds from the world … to address things like global climate change, wildland fires that are like nothing we’ve ever seen … We need everybody not only to just have a seat at the table but to be given a voice to speak and be heard.”

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