Inside the High-Stakes Job of Being the First to Spot a Wildfire...

What happens when the person responsible for spotting the next wildfire is 100 feet in the air, completely alone, and just got struck by lightning for the fourth time?

If you're Trina Moyles, you climb back up the tower the next day anyway.

Trina is an award-winning environmental journalist and author living off-grid in a Mongolian yurt outside Whitehorse, Yukon, with her partner (a filmmaker) and their three dogs. Before journalism became her full-time gig, she spent seven fire seasons working as a fire tower lookout in the boreal forest of northern Alberta… months at a time, totally alone, scanning the horizon for smoke from a hundred-foot tower. She's also the author of three books: Women Who Dig, which took her to eight countries interviewing 150 women farmers; Lookout, her National Outdoor Book Prize-winning memoir on isolation and wildfire; and her newest, Black Bear, about the wild bears she came to know so well at her lookout that she started calling them by name.

In this episode, we get into what it's actually like to be the first person to spot a wildfire before it turns into a disaster, the season she watched a small fire balloon into something four times the size of one of Canada's biggest cities, and the night she had to be evacuated as a nearby community lost homes to the flames. She tells us about the mother bear she watched raise cub after cub, the strange kind of community that forms over a lookout radio when your nearest neighbor is miles away, and why she'd honestly rather be alone in the forest with a handful of bears than out in the "real world" during a pandemic.

We also talk about her time in Uganda, Guatemala, and Cuba interviewing women farmers about land, power, and what it really means to feed a family, plus the caribou story she's covering right now…one that ties back to her own father's life's work.

This one is for anyone drawn to a slower, wilder, more intentional way of living, or anyone who's ever wondered what it actually feels like to be alone with your thoughts for months at a time. Trina doesn't sugarcoat any of it, and that's exactly why you need to hear it!

CONNECT WITH TRINA

• Read Her Work (Website)
• Instagram
• Books (support an indie bookstore or your local library if you can!):
  • Women Who Dig: Farming, Feminism, and the Fight to Feed the World
  • Lookout: Love, Solitude, and Searching for Wildfire in the Boreal Forest
  • Black Bear: A Story of Siblinghood and Survival

FOLLOW ALONG ON OTHER PLATFORMS

• Instagram
• TikTok
• YouTube

KEYWORDS

trina moyles, fire tower lookout, wildfire journalist, black bear book, women who dig, lookout book, off grid yukon, yurt living, mongolian yurt, boreal forest, alberta wildfire, environmental journalism, canadian geographic, the narwhal, women farmers, caribou arctic refuge, gwich'in first nation, indigenous storytelling, human bear coexistence, national outdoor book prize, solo travel podcast, unconventional life podcast, off grid living, wildlife journalist, canada wildfire season, kindred roads podcast, mary goggin podcast, inspiring women, adventure podcast, remote living