In the ensuing years, he taught school in Southern California, worked on mountain rescue teams and did counterintelligence for the Los Angeles County sheriff's department.
But he never forgot the rush, the camaraderie and the sense of accomplishment that came with smokejumping.
He was sitting at a campfire in the mountains of southwest Montana, one of nine former jumpers and associates who'd hiked into the proposed Italian Peaks wilderness area the day before to do trail work.
It had been a gradual climb, but not an easy one. At 8,200 feet, the camp was about 7,800 feet higher than Hensley's home in West Hills, Calif.
Five days of trail work with pulaskis, saws and shovels loomed ahead and Hensley, 71, was feeling the effects of a serious accident he suffered a few years ago. But he was exactly where he wanted to be.
“It is about recapturing your youth,” he said, reflecting on his smokejumping days out of the Missoula base in the late 1950s and early '60s. “Fortunately, the country doesn't change, most of it. It's nice to be back here.”
July means a working vacation in the Rockies for Hensley and other ex-smokejumpers from around the nation, most of them in their 60s, 70s and even 80s.
They travel on their own dime to Missoula to work in the National Smokejumper Association's Trail Maintenance Program, which is marking its 10th year of existence.
On July 12, coordinator Jon McBride of Missoula sent crews of six to 10 men and women on weeklong projects to seven sites in the Bob Marshall Wilderness, the Seeley Lake area, and three national forests in Idaho.
Last Monday, six more crews went to work in the Bob Marshall, the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, at Seeley Lake, and on the Continental Divide Trail in the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest.
Earlier, the program had single projects in Utah on April 27-May 3, on the Iditarod trail in Alaska May 30-June 2, in Colorado in late June, and in the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho earlier in July.
For the first time, crews in September will work on trails in the Boundary Waters Canoe Wilderness in Minnesota and on the Western States Trail in California.
The 23 projects are a record for the program, McBride said, up from 21 last summer. The program has grown from 18 volunteers in 1999 to an anticipated 209 this year. These days, several jumpers sign up for more than one project, so McBride said he counts those people more than once.
The trail maintenance program got its start in 1998, when McBride and Art Jukkala, a fellow ex-smokejumper from Missoula, saw a news story about the new Bob Marshall Foundation, now the Bob Marshall Wilderness Foundation.
The story talked about the disappearing trails in the Bob. Where there were nearly 4,000 miles in the 1930s, only 800 remained as the Forest Service's budget for trail maintenance dwindled.
“We're simply not getting to 25 percent of the trails,” Carol Eckert, district ranger at Spotted Bear, said at the time. “And, of course, that limits access. If we don't clear a trail every five years or so, we seriously risk losing that trail.”
“We got talking and we felt that was totally unacceptable,” McBride said. “I think Art expressed to me, how can the Forest Service profess to manage land that they cannot enter to look at and see what has to be managed? What it meant was most of the wilderness was inaccessible.”
Maybe, Jukkala and McBride decided, the old smokejumpers could do something about it.
“There were lots of guys who jumped with us who know how to open up trails, big time,” McBride said.
They contacted Carla Cline Belski, executive director of the Bob Marshall Foundation, and “she made it very clear to us she would be glad to have us work under the auspices of the foundation.”
The men led the first crews into the Bob Marshall in July 1999, McBride in the northern end at Spotted Bear, Jukkala in the south on the Blackfoot Divide out of Montour Creek.
On July 12, the second afternoon out, Jukkala and his crew returned to camp after the day's work. It was an extensive climb out of the Spruce Creek trail, McBride said.
“Art was sitting on a log waiting for dinner. He probably had a cold beer in his hand, and he kind of laid over and he was dead,” said his longtime friend.
It kicked Jukkala's fellow jumpers in the gut. But their response didn't surprise McBride.
News of Jukkala's death was reported in the National Smokejumper Association's quarterly newsletter, “so the entire smokejumping community, both active and former, was informed within a matter of weeks,” he said. “I probably had 25 or 30 people telling me, ‘Let's keep this program going and I'll volunteer next year.' ”
Twenty-seven did in 2000, and they completed five projects. The next year the numbers rose to 43 and eight. In 2002, 79 volunteers worked on 10 projects in three states. The rapid growth rate has slowed, but “we've not had one year that wasn't bigger than the year before,” said McBride.
“Ever since that first project the emphasis became that much stronger, I think in reaction and in remembrance to Art and what he saw needed to be done,” said Paul Tevis.
Tevis was program director for the Bob Marshall Foundation when Jukkala and McBride came knocking in '98. He recently became its executive director upon the retirement of Belski.
The foundation coordinates between 45 and 50 projects in the Bob each summer, many of them with a focus on youth volunteers and individuals. But six are reserved for the smokejumpers.
“I see the same guys year after year, and it's great to see,” said Tevis. “It's also great to see some older guys doing this type of heavy work that is required out there. It's not just going out and catching up with old buddies and having a party out in the woods. They're real focused on doing a lot of good volunteer work.”
The program expanded from the Bob Marshall, where the smokejumpers work under the coordinated auspices of the wilderness foundation and four national forests, to include other forests in Montana, Idaho and elsewhere.
And while opening and improving often remote trails remains a focal point, the smokejumpers now have drive-to projects to work on. Hensley and Richard Trinity, a retired general surgeon who grew up in Missoula and lives in Iowa, spent the week before the Beaverhead project helping fix up Double Arrow Lookout near Seeley Lake so the Forest Service can rent it out.
Their camp was at the ranger station in town, the same base for another crew last week that worked on restoring the old ranger station nearby. It's especially close to their hearts, because Seeley Lake was site of the first training base for smokejumpers in the late 1930s.
While the bulk of the volunteer force remains ex-jumpers, more and more “associates” are pitching in. They are nonjumpers who “have the same feelings and objectives that we do about wilderness areas,” and join NSA to help out, McBride said.
The jumpers have probably opened 1,000 miles of trail in 10 years, McBride said, but it could be more. Often, they complain they aren't given enough work to do.
“We always have to caution the Forest Service to give us three times the amount of work that you think we can do, because we invariably get through our assignments on Wednesday or Thursday,” he said. “If they believed us that we really do a lot of work, then we could probably get more done for them.”
Jukkala remains the only fatality on a smokejumper trail crew, and serves more as an inspiration than a deterrent.
“You know, the guys are not concerned about dying up there,” said McBride. “I've had so many tell me, ‘I just wish I could die the way Art died.' What a wonderful way to die, in wilderness as opposed to dying in the hospital. That's why I think they keep coming. They don't care about that aspect. There's no fear.”
And their work is as important as it was a decade ago.
“In talking to a lot of people, it's apparent that if we don't encourage people to visit the wilderness and have a means that they can visit the wilderness - meaning trails that are open and passable - then we're not going to have any defenders of the wilderness in the future,” McBride said.
“A lot of the greenies who I'm at odds with would like to close the trails. They don't want people in the wilderness, and I can't understand why. I think they only want themselves out in the woods. By doing that you lose people who know anything about the wilderness and people who will stand up and be activists and speak up and defend it.”
Reporter Kim Briggeman can be reached at 523-5266 or at kbriggeman@missoulian.com.
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