Unlikely career path
Lex Scanlan chauffeurs Smokey Bear at the Toledo Summer Festival and Logging Show near the Oregon Coast on July 15, 2023. (Photo courtesy of Lex Scanlan)
Growing up in Chicago, a career as a wildland firefighter felt as distant to Lex Scanlan as the vast mountains and giant…
oregon, women firefighters
Seventy Years Could Not Erase the Memory of a Wildfire Hero
It’s been a busy few months for the Triple Nickles, the U.S. Forest Service’s first African-American smoke jumping crew. On Aug. 6 of this year a member of the crew who was the first recorded death of a hot shot wildland firefighter was posthumously honored at his gravesite that was recently found after a long search.
Deidra McGee holds the award she was given by the Triple Nickles Association…
555th Parachute Infantry Battalion, forestry, FS, Malvin L. Brown, maryland, oregon, pennsylvania, smokejumpers, triple nickles
Inner city youth protect an ancient Oregon forest wilderness
Inner city youth helped protect an ancient forest wilderness in the Siuslaw National Forest by spending a day removing invasive tansy ragwort.
High school students from the Inner City Youth Institute in Portland, Oregon, arrived in the Drift Creek Wilderness near the Alsea River, where Douglas fir and western hemlock make up the largest stand of old-growth rainforest in the Oregon Coast…