Tara Place fits fire into her schedule. She is listed through a national database, and when she’s ready to fight a fire, she usually gets a call within two days. Last September, she was picked up quickly and flown to Oregon to fight the Anvil fire. As a resource adviser, she was assigned to a team and was there for 16 days. “It’s beautiful, right on the coastline, but super steep terrain,” she says. “Every day we worked at about 4,000 to 5,000 feet.”

But Tara is used to it. She has always loved the outdoors, and she decided to follow her passion for forestry. First, it led her to Colorado State University, where she received a degree in natural resource management. She moved to Steamboat Springs in 2005 and began working for the Colorado State Forest Service as a forester and a wildland firefighter. As a female in a male-dominated crew, Tara held her own. “In working with logging crews, they kind of looked at me, like, ‘What the heck do you know about logging?’” Tara says. “You definitely have to have that tough skin.”

Which Tara does: Wildland firefighters are often required to work long hours in challenging and changing conditions such as high temperatures and steep terrain. “It’s an adrenaline rush and I love it,” she says. “It’s super intense at times. You’ve got a lot of aircraft working above you, and you have to constantly know what your safety zones and escape routes are.”

Fighting fire is a physical and mental challenge. Another challenge? Fighting bias and discrimination in her career. Currently, the fire workforce in the Forest Service is about 87% male and 13% female; statistics that Tara describes as daunting, at first. “I think it takes a while, especially being a female,” she admits. “But I think if you have the right personality and you’re confident, then you don’t have anything to worry about.”

In 2010, she signed on with the U.S. Forest Service as a forester and timber sale administrator. “The role of timber sale in forest management, which aids in fire prevention and as damage control for blazes, cannot be discounted,” Tara explains, “especially considering the higher risk of forest fires driven by climate change.” Higher risk paired with the amount of dead trees from the mountain pine beetle epidemic is a perfect recipe for fire. “Any way, shape, or form that we can lessen the fuels on the ground to not get those mega fires, is what we’re doing.” This is especially crucial, as the mountain pine beetle epidemic has affected more than 1.2 million acres of lodgepole pine across the Medicine Bow-Routt National Forest.

In 2017, Tara was promoted to Forest Service representative on the timber sale administration team, but she continues to assist on fire assignments both locally and nationally as a wildland firefighter in a technical specialist or resource adviser role. “It’s a job with many rewards, including the opportunity to work in some of the most beautiful places in the country and create friendships that last a lifetime,” she says.

Well into a career based in the Medicine Bow-Routt National Forest, Tara is still looking for opportunities to expand her knowledge and work within forestry and as a wildland firefighter. She’s now working towards becoming a heavy equipment boss – a single resource type of wildland firefighter. “In the last five years, the U.S. Forest Service has started using logging equipment more on fires, to help suppress fires and put in large fuel breaks,” she explains. “I’ve been working more towards getting certified as a heavy equipment boss – going on fires and overseeing logging equipment, because that’s really where all of my experience is.”

Tara’s work toward the future mirrors that of the forests themselves. “Wildland fire can create many environmental benefits, such as creating natural regeneration of trees,” Tara points out. For example, lodgepole pine are intolerant of shade and thrive in the aftermath of a fire. The species, which is native to Colorado, produce serotinous cones that open in response to extreme heat and release an abundance of seeds. “I think a lot of folks have always had this impression that fires are just a bad thing,” Tara says. “But a fire can be a really good thing for our forest. You come back a year or two after a fire and everything is lush and green and there are new baby trees coming up.