Education Is a "Burning" Question for UMC Alum Becky Seifert

The allure of fire seems to be inside us all.  People love candles and campfires.  And who doesn’t remember getting caught playing with fire as a child! 

Playing with fire has become a career for Becky Seifert (right), a 2001 graduate of UMC’s natural resources program, although what she calls playing seems like a significant amount of work.  That’s probably not an issue, though, for someone like Seifert, who loves the outdoors and who has “FIRE BUG” on her license plate.

Seifert is a fire effects monitor at Yellowstone National Park. In November she returned to UMC to speak to current students enrolled in natural resources and to relate her experiences of working over the past three summers for the National Parks Service. She also offered tips on applying for state and federal jobs in natural resources. Later that afternoon, current students began work on fire effects monitoring techniques at the Natural History Area near the UMC campus with Seifert as a consultant.Eight months a year Seifert is based at the Fire Headquarters near Mammoth Hot Springs in the north part of Yellowstone. The crew she belongs to is comprised of ten permanent employees and eleven seasonal staff members. The crew’s main responsibilities are to conduct fire suppression and prescribed burning."We even have a fire engine," says Seifert, "but to be honest, it’s just there for looks, since most fires don’t happen conveniently near the roads." Much of the firefighting is done using helicopter. "We also talk about ‘natural ignitions’ or fires started by something like lightning and ‘fire use fires,’ which we may start to manage larger fires or to be more proactive and prevent problems later on," she says.But fighting fires isn’t the only thing the crew does. Seifert and the others also focus on the after effects of the fires on the environment. In fact, that monitoring of how the fires affect Yellowstone’s resources is the main objective.

This involves detailed observation and note taking of area prior to and after a fire event. Things like observing tree canopies, analyses of the forest floor in various locations, conducting wood moisture tests, and developing models of flame length, flame height, and rate of spread of fires all come into play. "It’s fascinating to see how fire behaves in different ecosystems or in comparable ecosystems under different conditions," she says. She says she’s also involved in observing burn severity and with satellite groundwork and mapping of sites at regular intervals, "so the work we did at UMC with GPS and GIS systems really comes in handy."Observation is an important aspect of the job. "We take a lot of notes," she laughs, "so it does remind me of college." These detailed notes are important, too, as they play a role in the long term story of a site’s recovery. The job also involves a great deal of hiking and canoeing 10 to 30 miles from any roads. She estimates that much of her time is spent traveling to and from the various sites she works with, "which is great since I love hiking and canoeing," she adds. "Experience is everything in this job," says Seifert, "and so it is in any job working for the National Forest Service. My advice to people interested in this type of work is to get all the experience they can. Take part in the field trips offered at UMC and volunteer for everything!"During the winter months, Seifert lives in Bozeman, Montana, and spends time skiing and recharging for another fire-filled summer. Sometimes she’ll even make it back to UMC or home to Wahpeton, North Dakota. But when spring arrives again, she says she eagerly anticipates getting back into the thick of things in the forests.

"Even though it means getting back to sometimes 80 to 100 hours a week at the height of the season, I really love it," says Seifert. Apparently you can take the bug out of the fire, but not the fire out of the bug.

Written by Andrew Svec