It is hard for a forest fire fighter to do his/her job when it rains every day. Our bosses are doing their best to find us things to do since we simply cannot go training every day. Morale at the base is still good, but it wouldn't take a whole lot to send everyone into a downward spiral.

So I got really lucky and was assigned a lead position in the making of a fire management plan for the islands on Eagle Lake. A majority of the islands have red and white pine on them, but years of fire suppression have made it difficult for these populations to remain viable. In an effort to counter this trend, we are writing a separate fire management plan for the islands which would allow us to decide which islands could be left to burn should a fire start on one of them. The official name for this is a Prescribed Natural Fire or PNF for short.

The fun part of this job is getting to go to some of the islands in order to survey them so that we can build a database with information on each of the islands of the lake. Did I mention that there are over 700 islands on the lake? Yeah, so we're going to get out there lots!

So I guess if I can't fight fire, planning to have fires burn is pretty much the next best thing!