A Nature Lover's Career-A Decades Long Journey!
Part 2
By the summer of 1993, I was thrilled to score the opportunity of a lifetime to work for the National Park Service at Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore in Chesterton Indiana as a Seasonal Biological Science Technician. The Dunes is a place where I, as a young boy, spent a family summer vacation camping at the adjacent Indiana Dunes State Park. The Dunes area is a natural wonderland that parallels the southern shoreline of Lake Michigan and includes miles of sandy beaches, large sand dunes sprawling marshes, inland ponds, prairies, and oak woodlands.
This place left a huge impression on me as a child. Now, here i was, 14 years later as an adult given the opportunity to work at one the most memorable places form my childhood. How cool is that? During the summer ’93, while working for the Resource Management Division, I was introduced to the field of Ecological (ecosystem & habitat) Restoration for the first time.
Compared to other traditional conservation science based fields (i.e. Forestry, Wildlife Biology, etc.), which has been around since the late 1800’s, this one was still in it’s infancy and was becoming more prominent amongst the professional land and resource managers. The Park Service was implementing a new approach to combatiing the rapid advancement of invasive plant species that were threatening our native prairies, wetlands, and woodlands. The Dunes area seemed to be ground zero for invasive plants. The small crew of men and women whom I worked with that summer were taught all the skills and techniques needed to fight the invaders and eradicate them.
And so it began, I discovered a new field of work that I was absolutely excited about. Rather quickly, that excitement for work developed into a passion to pursue more knowledge and skills in the different components of the Ecological Restoration process. The direct, hands-on field experience with several prairie, woodland, and wetland restoration projects including work on the critically endangered Karner Blue Butterfly that summer really inspired me and led me to further pursue this career path.
During the winter of 1994, I was offered a seasonal crew leader position to return to the Dunes. I was all in and began my 2nd summer season at my new favorite place on earth. That summer of 94 continued my advancement in work experience, knowledge, and skillset. Our main goals were to manage and restore several ecologically damaged and degraded areas of the Lakeshore.
Our go to toolbox for this line of work included chainsaws, brushcutters, chemical herbicides, and fire. Fire, obviiously wasn’t something you could pull out of a toolbox but rather it’s used as a land management tool. We would use it for such things as burning brush piles and conducting prescribed burns in prairies and woodlands in order to suppress invasive plants and invigorate native plant growth. In addition, that summer I was blessed with another awesome opportunity as a Dunes, NPS employee. I was provided classes and training to become a wildland firefighter for National Park Service.
Low and behold I passed my training, written exams, and physical fitness tests. I was now a certified wildland firefighter. In August of that summer, I put all my new firefighting training to good use when I was deployed to Montana for 21 days working in a 20 person NPS fire crew on battling several huge forest fires in the rugged mountains of NW Montana. Most, if not all, of my crew members were ‘flatlanders,” slang for Midwesterners and none of us were acclimated to the terrain and the mountain elevation.
We were all physically fit but being flatlanders made it especially challenging. The Kootenai National Forest and the Cabinet Mountain Wilderness seriously attack (fire suppression), and mop up work (extinguishing fire hot spots). It was the hardest and most challenging 3 weeks of my life but I loved it!
Working shoulder to shoulder with a crew of fellow, hardcore nature lovers (both men and women) and being able to wear the classic NPS field uniform and firefighter gear was truly a privilege and an honor. I was living the dream! I loved working at “the Dunes” so much that I stayed employed, working seasonal positions there from ’93 until the summer of 1996. Those 3+ years took me on quite an adveturous career journey. Everything about this time in my life was truly a priceless experiernce.
To be continued………..
Submitted by: Scott Rebholz
