In 2025, the administration slashed funding for the US Forest Service, or USFS. This meant big staff reductions in areas you might not expect. USFS employees do everything from campground maintenance, to backroads clearing in rural areas, to fire monitoring, which prevents major forest fires from erupting. It’s a big job with a tiny paycheck.
For this week’s Raise Our Voices, we spoke to a USFS worker in the mountain west. Her interview is honest and thoughtful: she cares about what she does, and works hard at it, so we’re letting her take it from here. What follows is her full audio interview, and a lightly-edited transcript. Most of the photos are hers.
I raised three boys. After that, I decided I wanted to do something for myself. Being raised in the mountains, of course, I loved the mountains, and loved the fact that I wanted to be close to nature and do something that would allow me to be outside. So I decided that the secret to life is to do something that makes you happy, and working in nature made me happy.
After my boys left home, I went back to school. It took me about six years working part-time and going to school to get two degrees, one in forestry, one in natural resources, and then I decided that I wanted to become an employee of the Forest Service and work there as long as I could.I was finally hired as a permanent seasonal employee last year after working four seasons as a temporary. And I was really excited. I was like, “I'm permanent now. I don't have to go through the whole hiring process every year. I'm protected. I can have insurance.”
And then in what's now come to be known as the Valentine's Day Massacre, I was fired. I cried. My heart was broken.
In March, a court order was issued by a federal judge that said that our firing was indeed illegal. However, a couple weeks ago, they sent out another early retirement offer. Of course, along with that is the threat that if you don't take it, they may do a reduction in force. And we would lose our jobs.
I'm an older woman. If I lost my job, it's not gonna be the end of the world. However, some of these people have children and they have mortgages, they have kids going to college. It's just not right. I wanna keep working there as long as I can. I love talking to the public and to have nature as my office. I mean, you can't be any happier than that on the job. My coworker and I, during an average day out, we will put over a hundred miles on our truck, and that's not driving on the highway or on paved roads. That's off on dirt roads in the forest a lot of the time. So it's pretty beautiful office being out in nature.
I maintain recreation sites such as campgrounds, day use areas. My coworker and I cover from the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas all the way to the top of the pass. Some of the jobs aren't so glamorous, cleaning vault toilets and collecting trash, but those are jobs that are necessary to keep these areas sanitary and open.
One of the things that we would do is pick up used toilet paper out in the forest because people use it and throw it on the ground and leave. Then there's the fun parts, like identifying hazard trees and removing them so that they don't fall on the public while they're camping. I can run a chainsaw. I cleared 67 trees from the highway to a campground in two days by myself with the chainsaw.
There was something thrilling about that, you know? I was so proud of myself that day. I got that road open by myself in time for Memorial Weekend. It was really important to me to do the work that needed to be done so that the public could come enjoy the forest.
The whole reason that we have the Forest Services to manage it for multiple uses. Not only for timber and you know, profitable things, but also for the public who deserve to be able to get out there and recreate. The toilets, if left for a day or two, especially after a holiday weekend when you have a lot of people drinking, it's gonna become, pardon my French, a real shitty situation really fast. And I mean that literally. I'm not saying figuratively.
If it becomes unsanitary, we can't keep those campgrounds open. And if you're 15 miles out on a dirt road, and you have an accident and nobody knows you're out there, I may not be there to find you. You may die.
I'm able to patrol for illegal campfires because the conditions are too dry and campfires are dangerous. We found hundreds of hot campfire pits and put them out. I was finding hot coals laying on the ground. That were starting to spread and smolder. I mean, that could have been a huge fire, and this was probably a mile as the crow flies away from homes and businesses, a little community. That's something that we caught and stopped that could have gotten outta hand and could have destroyed life and property.
So if we're not out there working for the public, who's going to be out there doing the things that need to be done to keep the forest safe and healthy for visitors?
I'm much more than just someone who goes out and cleans bathrooms. I organized several volunteer days. I had over 40 people show up to clean up about a five mile stretch of river. We hauled off thousands and thousands of pounds of trash: refrigerators, mattresses, sofa beds thrown off of cliffs. We're like scrambling down cliffs to grab these things, pull 'em up. It's gonna be really hard to replace us.
It's not about keeping the forest for people. They really wanna open it up to unregulated, logging, mining, it's all about filling up billionaire pocket books. Our county is based pretty much on tourism. If we lose that money, our county probably won't survive.
Federal employees right now are living in a state of terror. They're afraid to speak out. The more I watched my friends getting fired, my coworkers, people that I know don't deserve to be fired because this government wants to play whatever games it's playing with people.
I got mad, I got angry and I was like, you know, I'm not gonna just sit quietly and take this. And that's when I decided that I was gonna stand up and speak out.
Why should you care? Because as of this moment, these lands belong to you. These lands belong to me. They belong to my grandchildren, and their children, and the generations upon generations to come after that. They do not belong to Elon Musk. They do not belong to the current administration.
I'm sorry. I have a really hard time getting through this without choking up, so you’re just gonna have to bear with my emotions, 'cause I am emotional.
One thing that really angered me right after I got fired was someone saying that federal employees don't deserve their jobs. Those are not real jobs producing federal revenue. Federal employees do not deserve their jobs, federal employees not do not deserve their paychecks. Well, I'll tell you what, I work really freaking hard out there for the public, and I make less than someone working at McDonald's right now. There's not a lot of people lined up to clean vault toilets for 15 bucks an hour.
I don't do this because I wanna get rich. I do it because the forest is worth it. The public deserves to be able to recreate and enjoy the forest. We need to manage the forest in a way that our children and our grandchildren will be able to go out and enjoy this precious commodity. This land is amazing and future generations deserve to be able to have it.
These lands belong to the people of the United States, and the people of the United States are the ones that are gonna have to step up.
How you can Raise Your Voice:
Share these stories with your friends and neighbors. There is no more effective way to move hearts and minds than making it personal.
Subscribe to this Substack to be the first to hear new episodes, delivered right to your email inbox.
Donate. Raise Our Voices is produced by a team of volunteers as a project of Long Haul Productions, an IRS-registered not-for-profit. You can sign up for a paid subscription here on Substack. Or make a tax-deductible donation to help us unearth more stories.
Do you have a story to tell? Share your personal story, or send a tip /suggestion that may lead us to an important voice.
We look forward to sharing more stories with you, and would love to hear your feedback, in the comments.
