Pathways Newsletter

It was during an afternoon devoid of moisture at the top of an ashen hill when my friend, Mallard, asked me if I was interested in coming back to MCC as a crew leader the following year. We’d traveled to California after completing our training on MCC’s Women’s Fuels and Fire Crew to work with the Wyoming BLM. We now walked the line, watching smoke plumes rise from the remnants of the Chaparral Fire in the hills above San Bernardino. The slope below us was peppered with the skeletons of charred trees. Tangles of blackened sticks and thickets of thirsty leaves were divided by neon pink lines of flame retardant dropped from planes flying low to fight the flames. 

Last April, Mallard and I arrived in Montana from opposite ends of the country to spend a summer living and sawing alongside ten other people in the canyons and desert valleys of Wyoming. It was a three-and-a-half-month lifetime. Everything we had experienced together as crewmates had culminated in the view from the hill we now sat on. Our soles boiled in the southern California sun as biting silver beetles crawled in and out of our sleeves. Mallard’s question was one I already had an answer for.

Before joining MCC I hadn’t considered touching a chainsaw. I didn’t know that the cambium layer of a juniper tree, once separated from the bark, tastes like bubblegum. I definitely didn’t know that the gas station in Meeteetse, Wyoming has t-shirts with cowboy ferrets on them and that I would someday own multiple. What I did know is that the West has a smoke season. That wildfire has patterned the world’s forests for millennia. That humans and fire are, through natural regimes and purposeful suppression, permanently connected. And I knew I wanted to help solve a problem alongside people who wanted to build trust with one another.

In partnership with the Wyoming BLM, our crew completed chainsaw projects related to wildfire mitigation, water retention, and habitat improvement for sage grouse and migratory elk. We passed through stands of quaking aspen whose trunks I could barely wrap my arms around, hiking up and down the rippling red-bluffed canyons to cut softwoods in seas of sagebrush. Through the training and active stewardship of my 2021 season, I found my connections with others extending far wider and deeper than I anticipated. I felt seen in the workplace by staff and celebrated on the saw by former strangers who now traverse the states as firefighters.

This season, I returned as a crew leader with Mallard to infuse our shared gratitude back into the program. We entered into the MCC Leadership Development Program in February and began leading our crew in May. We wrote a mission statement together in order to center our shared vision: “a collaborative and compassionate crew community that provides the structure and support necessary for all participants to safely develop complex field skills, enjoy a sense of novelty in everyday shared experiences, and allow themselves and others space to explore their identities, strengths, and the field of wildfire.”

Just a few weeks ago, we got stuck in the mud returning to a site we had called home exactly a year prior. It was a random pin on a canyon map most other people would never think to look for. Our spinning tires beneath the fingernail moon felt familiar and real, the landscape serene. All I could see and hear were smiling faces in rolled-down windows, waves, and jokes tossed with echoed voices. Silliness and adaptability, wonder and resilience. The community we are creating together completely transforms the experience of sharing a five-pound bag of gummy bears in a cow pasture while scraping the gunk out of a chainsaw into something purely magical.