This story is part of a series highlighting the contributions women have made to the Forest Service. If you’d like to nominate someone to be featured in a HerStory piece, please contact Patricia Burel.

COLORADO—Meet Sara Brown, program manager for the Fire, Fuel, and Smoke Science Program at the Rocky Mountain Research Station. She began her career with a Youth Conservation Corps trail crew in Oakridge, Oregon, in 1996—a career that has mostly been in fire or fire-related research. Even that early in her career, Brown recalls the confidence boost she got from having a female squad boss. “That was really important to have a female mentor, because if she could do it, I could do it,” she recalls.

During college, she held a position on a Type 2 fire crew, also out of Oakridge, and following graduation fought fire for the National Park Service with the Zion Helitack Crew in Utah.

Encouraged to apply to become a smokejumper by her crewmates, Brown was picked up by the Boise base but didn’t pass rookie training. Instead, she worked with the Snake River Hotshots before passing rookie training the following year as a Forest Service smokejumper out of Redmond, Oregon. She jumped to fires during five summer seasons and spent the winter months pursuing her master’s degree in environmental science at Washington State University.

A severe smokejumping accident took Brown off the fireline and into research, a process that guided her in an evolution from firefighter to fire advocate. During a brief step away from federal service, she completed her doctorate in ecology at the University of Wyoming. Brown took a professorship at New Mexico Highlands University before finally landing with the Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station Office of Learning, later known as the Innovation and Organizational Learning Research, Development and Application Group.

In 2019, after several years working on issues, including fatal and serious accidents and ultimately serving as acting director, Brown accepted a post directing the Fire, Fuel, and Smoke Sciences Program at the Missoula Fire Sciences Lab. Of her current position she says, “It’s been a very good fit. I get a chance to use a lot of my science, I get a chance to use a lot of the background that I learned as a professor, as a teacher, trying to communicate science.”

Reflecting on the agency’s evolution from her perspective as a woman, Brown sounds a cautious note. She shares that early in her career, while people were aware of problems, there was little discussion. Today, while the agency has not progressed as far as she might wish, “we are now talking about the problems, which is an early first step.”

From that first crew boss with the YCC to her supporters on the Zion Helitack Crew, Brown has drawn inspiration from those around her, especially in her early career. “I’ve been really fortunate that I have had lots of role models along the way, both female and male,” she notes.

Thinking particularly of the fire ecologists whose work helped her take the next steps in her career following a devastating accident, Brown says, they “showed me a way forward: that I could take my past experience and parlay it, along with science, into helping the agency move forward, and hopefully shift to a new paradigm where we stop having to suppress large fires and someday use fire as a tool instead.”

Brown’s story is available at the National Forest Service Library.