The Winthrop operation remained at its original location, as North Cascades Smokejumper Base.

In subsequent years, the Ninemile Camp operation moved to Missoula, where it became the Missoula Smokejumper Base. The first fire jumps were made by Rufus Robinson and Earl Cooley at Rock Pillar near Marten Creek in the Nez Perce National Forest on July 12, 1940, out of Ninemile, followed shortly by a two-man fire jump out of Winthrop. In 1942, permanent jump operations were established at Winthrop, Washington, and Ninemile Camp, an abandoned Civilian Conservation Corps camp (Camp Menard) a mile north of the Forest Service's Ninemile Remount Depot (pack mule) at Huson, Montana, about 30 miles (48 km) northwest of Missoula. The base is near six national forests: Nez Perce/Clearwater, Sawtooth, the Boise, Payette, Salmon-Chalis, and Wallowa-Whitman. The McCall smokejumper program was established in 1943 their base is on the Idaho shores of Payette Lake. The first official non-fire jump was made in the Nez Perce National Forest in the Northern Region (Region 1) in 1940 by John Furgurson and Lester Gohler. By 1939, the program began as an experiment in the Pacific Northwest Region (Region 6). Smokejumping was first proposed in 1934 in the Intermountain Region (Region 4), by Regional Forester T.V. Although this first experiment was not pursued, another began in 1939 in Washington's Methow Valley, where professional parachutists jumped into a variety of timbered and mountainous terrains, proving the feasibility of the idea. Earlier, aviation firefighting experiments had been conducted with air delivery of equipment and ' water bombs'.

Prior to the full establishment of smokejumping, experiments with parachute insertion of firefighters were conducted in 1934 in Utah and in the Soviet Union. US Forest Service smokejumpers, based in Deming, New Mexico, 1948

The smoke jumper book summary