Fighting fires since 1965, veteran smokejumper Murry Taylor finally retired from his legendary career after last summer-the worst fire season in more than fifty years. After three decades of parachuting out of planes and battling blazes in the vast, rugged wilderness of Alaska and the West, Taylor recounts in Jumping Fire, with passion and honesty, stories of man versus nature at its most furious and unforgiving. He shares what it's like to hear the deafening roar, to smell the acrid burn, to feel the intense heat, to breathe the thick fumes, and to finally run for your life with exploding flames two hundred feet high and a mile wide licking at your heels. Written with a keen eye for detail and a talent for storytelling, "Jumping Fire is a tale of love and loss, life and death, and sheer hard work, set in an unforgiving and unforgettable landscape, that's second only to Norman Maclean's classic Young Men and Fire" (Publishers Weekly).