First update...

So, here's the first update/recap. It's long (certainly longer than anything else I'll probably ever write on here) but there's a lot to catch up on and I've been really bad about letting friends and family know what's happening with me!

After leaving NYC in 2004, six months with my parents in Atlanta and two years in Florida with AmeriCorps, in November I packed up and hauled my butt out to Texas for a new job with The Nature Conservancy on a fire crew. We do primarily prescribed fire work with private landowners in an area where their ranches are prime habitat for an endangered prairie chicken. We also do a lot of burning on Conservancy, state and federal land around the region and try to get as many wildfire assignments as we can. We're working on getting included in the local emergency response plans to act as an initial attack agency for local wildland fires, so hopefully that will be just around the corner! If any of you are like my parents you are probably thinking that for me to be working for the Conservancy and out in nature that I have become a crazy hippie tree hugger (like my brother, Johnny...hehehe...). Now I have no problem with crazy hippie tree huggers, some of my best friends fit the bill quite well, but it ain't for me. I'm not looking to single handedly save the planet, I'm just here 'cause they told me I could set it on fire.

One big change for me is that following two years in Florida and now living in Texas, I've realized that all things considered, the heat isn't all that bad. Of course it sucks when it's over a hundred degrees for days/weeks at a time (and you are lighting fire next to you), but at the same time, today it was 73 degrees while the northeast was getting blasted by a snow storm. We've had some awfully cold spells that lasted a few days, but when they are bookended by 70 degree days (even in January) I can handle it. I did get caught unprepared during our one frost of the year and had to improvise a window scraper. Thankfully my roommate is one of them northerners and had a spare scraper, so I'm all set for when we have a frost next year.

We've gotten to travel across the state burning and doing prep work on burn units. This is a pretty amazing state. Last month we spent a little over a week out in the Davis Mountains of West Texas and went from there directly to work with the US Fish and Wildlife Service at their refuge on the coast. I can't say I ever imagined I'd have the chance to burn at 7,000 feet one day and right up to the beach on the coast the next day, all in the same state. The area I live in is pretty blah...no public land to speak of, mostly all private ranches and urban sprawl, but thankfully we spend enough time working in amazing places that it's not too big a drag. I could certainly see moving out to West Texas though if the opportunity ever presented itself. Not many people think of mountains when they think of Texas, but it's damn beautiful out there. And holy cow - do you have any idea how many stars there are in the sky?

I've been promising a lot of people pictures over the last couple years, and in typical Jason fashion have rarely delivered. I'm going to try including a few here and I'll see how it goes. At the moment all I really have to share are fire pictures because that's all I've done is work since I got here, but hopefully I'll be able to branch out with the content a bit. I'll throw in a few good ones from Florida too.

I hope everyone is doing well. I would love to keep in touch with everyone individually, but I know myself well enough to know that it would be a lofty goal never reached. So, this is my attempt to at least get everyone up to speed with where I am now and to hopefully be a bit better at keeping ya'll updated in the future. I look forward to hearing from everyone - yup, that's right, every single one of you! Of course there are probably tons of people that I neglected to send this to, so please be sure to share the blog address if you know someone I forgot!

If anyone cares to get in touch, my address is jasonpahern @ yahoo . com.

Best,
jason.



My camper was home sweet home for my two years as an AmeriCorps volunteer with the Florida Park Service. I spent the first year living (and dodging hurricanes) at Grayton Beach State Park in the panhandle and the second year at 21,000 acre Paynes Prairie Preserve State Park near Gainesville.


Just out to enjoy a day of paddling on the salt marshes at Talbot Islands State Park. The tides changed just a bit faster than we thought they would and gave us the opportunity to spend the next 6 or 7 hours contemplating our tide chart reading skills while we waited for the marsh to fill back up with water. Paddling home after dark while wearing my prescription sunglasses was interesting.



Not only do they let me set stuff on fire, but they give me a big tractor to play with too! We use the tractor for prepping fire lines around the units we burn. First we mow and then disc down to mineral soil. No, I'm not responsible for the canopy being smashed in - that's the way they gave it to me, I swear! (Unless you saw something, you didn't, did you? Really, it wasn't me!)


It's a dirty job. Can you believe they pay me to do it?


It makes me giggle every time.


Every kid should have a drip torch (it contains a mixture of gasoline and diesel). Come on dad, why mow the lawn when you could burn it!


This one almost got away from us. We had fun catching it though and then of course had to snap some pics.

As most people know, fire needs oxygen to burn. Well, when a fire gets strong enough it can actually create its own weather, pulling so hard to suck in the surrounding oxygen that it creates its own wind. Below are a few links to videos of such a phenomenon on a recent fire:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_pVyZ7cpIw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f48CaWQKlnk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1EcifWRZpU