This picture here is me standing on the line of the massive Monroe Canyon Wildfire in Utah, July 2025.  I get asked often enough about how I went from studying to become a music teacher in Georgia to a Wildland Firefighter in Montana, that I decided to include these years here.

  I loved going to school for music. I met so many of my close friends, gained performing and teaching experience, and established a musical baseline of theory,  ear training, and practice habits that I still rely on today for my lessons and my own practice. But after 5 years (I switched to music my sophomore year) I felt like I needed a break! My senior year was shaken up by covid and, even though I was excited to have graduated and even to have a few trumpet lessons booked back in my hometown Atlanta, I felt like I needed to explore different sides of myself. After a few months of teaching at an in home lesson studio, I found a random youtube video about a place called the Bob Marshall Wilderness.

The Bob Marshall Wilderness (known locally as "The Bob") is a Wilderness Complex in Montana with 1.5 billion acres of pristine, never developed Wilderness south of Glacier National Park. I had been thinking a lot about what I liked, besides music, around the time that this video scrolled by. I was especially trying to think of something else I had loved since that time before you can really remember. Only one thing really came to mind. I loved the outdoors! Specifically anywhere with trees and woods like the little pockets of undeveloped land my friends and I used to play in where we grew up in the suburbs. I began to wonder what it would be like to go somewhere to live and work in such a remote location. After a little research, I found a job posting online with an organization called the MCC (Montana Conservation Corps) in a town called Kallispell, MT.

I applied and was surprised after a month or so to see I had been accepted as a crew member on the wilderness immersion crew: a backcountry trail crew who's job it was to go into the Bob Marshall Wilderness for about 3 months in order to build and maintain the trail system that hikers as well as mules use to traverse the wilderness (no wheels, no engines allowed!).  Me and 5 other MCC members were based out of a cabin called Schafer Meadows, one of a series of cabins placed throughout the wilderness for seasonal workers to live out of.  It was a summer of hard work, living out of a tent, reading all of Tolkien's books, and experiencing the deepest sense of peace I had ever felt or have ever felt since. There was even a lot of music involved, after most dinners in fact. I carried my guitar into the woods with me on the back of my pack, a young woman who maintained backcountry campgrounds brought her banjo, and a young man who was studying to become a back country bush pilot brought his mandolin. Playing acoustic music 15 miles from the nearest road out by the fire after a 10 hour day of trail work is truly a special experience and for that and many other reasons I highly recommend the program.

I liked it so much that I joined a second summer as a Crew Leader, this time in the High Uintas Wilderness, because the only thing more fun than being on a crew of 5 isolated quite far from help is being IN CHARGE of a crew of 5 isolated quite far from help. But my co-lead was great and with the addition of a fantastic crew the season was another success and another treasured experience for myself.
 
While I was off working trails in the wilderness, a few of my friends had been enjoying their season working as Wildland Firefighters. ​For my last two seasons in Montana I worked for the Forest Service at the Hungry Horse Ranger District on one of their wildland fire engines. The folks that I worked with there were just fantastic and they knew how to push me to accomplish things I would have never thought I could do. I got to see most of the western United States while working on the engine, because we were a federal resource and we would respond to fires around other areas in the western half of the country such as Utah and Arizona. One reason I loved this job was because it taught me the value of hard work and perseverance; the other was that I was in the woods the whole summer so I could save up all my money and spend all winter practicing. In those cold and dark winters of Montana I was so lucky to have the time to average about 5 hours a day of practice. That was the time where I saw the most progress in the Mandolin which is currently my favorite instrument with which I perform with.