I get paid to do this?

My experience in fire has been about as broad as it can get.  I started almost 17 years ago working for a municipal department her is Southern California and continued that for a while moving to a couple different departments along the way.  The whole time I was having fun and enjoyed my job, but I had become really interested in the wildland aspect of firefighting.  The more I went on wildland incidents, the more I became aware that I really wanted to pursue it as a full time career and not a collateral side of an all-risk department that I was currently in.

I had made up my mind, I needed to make a turn at the fork in the road, and so I did.  I applied to the San Bernardino National Forest and began my career in the Land Management agencies.  My first crew I worked with taught me a lot about myself and my new choice.

These folks were great, we spent more time together than we did with our own families.  I began to really have an appreciation for wildland fire and what it was capable of doing to the resources it impacted.  One thing that really started to hit me was the beauty and destruction that could happen at the same time.  On October 26, 2006 it hit home.  We suffered a traumatic loss on our forest.  The entire crew of Engine 57 had been burned over during the Esperanza fire.  One of the members were a close family friend of mine.

This will forever be a defining moment in my career.  It was at this point that I decided I needed to become a student of fire so that I could help myself and my co-workers avoid another tragedy like this again if at all possible.  In the years following that day I started paying particular attention to how and why things were happening during a wildland fire.  Studying fuels, weather, topography and environmental impacts, I started to gain a better understanding of the effects of wildland fires on our environment.

I began to look at how we could use fire in a productive way that would benefit the environment.  This lead me to the National Park Service.  My research of the agency showed that they were on the forefront of fire management in regards to using fire for resource benefit.  I decided to apply for a position in the National Park Service and made the jump to that agency.  Since then I have become more involved in prescribed fire and during the last two seasons I have had the opportunity to travel to parks and be part of larger scale resource benefit fire like the one pictured below.

These experiences have once again peaked my interest in the use of wildland fire for the benefit of the environment.  That is what has lead me here.  I am hoping to gain additional knowledge that I can incorporate into my career that will allow me to better manage the land that I have been entrusted to care for.