Growing up in Raleigh, North Carolina, wildfires were the farthest thing from Chapman Warren’s mind. The only thing he knew about them was that they were commonplace in California.
One day, while visiting family friends in Colorado, Warren heard them talking about smoke jumpers and became curious.
“They were telling me how these guys will parachute out of a plane in the middle of the back country and they’ll hit the ground and go fight a fire,” Warren said. “I was like, ‘You’re telling me I don’t have to have a desk job.’ My interest just grew from there.”
While Warren, a sophomore forest resource management major at Clemson University, has yet to experience the thrill of parachuting from a plane to fight fires, he spent this summer as a seasonal worker for the forest service at Pike-San Isabel National Forest in Colorado as a seasonal firefighter type 2, which is an entry-level wildland firefighter responsible for suppressing wildfires and performing fuel management tasks under supervision.
