While Mikaela Balkind was working on her degree at the University of Washington in 2018, she was looking for a way to bridge her two interests in natural resource management and climate science. So when she came across a friend’s Instagram post about a women in wildland firefighting bootcamp, she thought to herself, “Wow, this is perfect.”
Over two weekends in Vale, Oregon, she learned skills like how to dig a fireline and use different tools and equipment during a fire deployment, all part of training she would need for a red card, the main certification a wildland firefighter needs to work.
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