ONE FOOT IN THE BLACK
AN OFF-SEASON JOURNEY
BY SILVIE FOJTIK
I work a seasonal job in wildfire; generally, this covers the months of February through October in the Northern Hemisphere.
In the off season, while some lock into their skis and patrol the local hill or undertake rites of passage on their respective journeys to self-discovery through recreational foreign adventures, I kept one foot in the black.
The winter of 2024-25 was particularly fruitful, with an organic unfolding of fire opportunities in Latin America that kept me busy until I stepped back into my regular position in Smithers, British Columbia, as a wildfire assistant – an officer role – for the Cassiar Zone, the furthest northwest region of the province, its borders abutting Yukon and Alaska.
My venture south began in Mexico, where I participated in the first Latin American WTREX (Women in Fire Prescribed Fire Training Exchange). I later went to Costa Rica for a couple of training events for local wildland firefighters. I ended the trip witnessing the tail end of a historic fire that threatened the town of El Bolsón, Argentina.
In 2023, largely due to my intermediate proficiency in Spanish, I was tasked as liaison to a contingent of 100 Costa Rican firefighters deployed to British Columbia and various single resource fireline roles in conjunction with Mexican Unit Crews. That experience and growing frequency of inter-agency resource sharing emphasized the benefits of better understanding fuel, terrain, and operations in Canada’s visiting partner countries, not to mention continuing to improve my Spanish.
These trips were of a personal nature, not funded nor representing my employer.
The following is a photo essay chronicling my travels to Latin America from November 2024 through February 2025.
Mexico’s WTREX
Nov. 4-15, 2024 | Jalisco, Mexico
Women-in-fire Prescribed Fire Training Exchange is under the same auspices as TREX, typically a two-week event combining in-class and field portions related to prescribed burning and forming collaborative experiential training around good fire. TREXs are managed under the arm of Fire Networks, largely coordinated by staff from The Nature Conservancy, Watershed Research and Training Center, University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources and United States Department of Agriculture Forest Service, now taking on international reach with events across the globe.
This was the first WTREX delivery in Latin America with more than 35 participants from 11 countries, spearheaded by Yesica Garcia, based in Jalisco and inspired by her participation in the 2023 South Africa WTREX. Garcia was the incident commander whilst being, impressively, eight months pregnant.
Lenya Quinn-Davidson, University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources’ Fire Network and lead on Fire Network’s WTREX, attended the first half. We had technical officers from Mexico, Spain, Chile, the United States, and Ecuador; operational staff from Portugal, Costa Rica, Argentina, and Honduras; and a high official from Peru working on establishing his country’s wildfire management program.
The primary base for the event was Agua Brava training centre, near Guadalajara; during my stay I found out it was the defining training grounds for a visionary, longstanding partnership between the Mexican state of Jalisco and Canadian province of Alberta. In the mid 2000s, Jalisco firefighters were embedded in Alberta’s provincial fire crews for the duration of the season; some were further trained in operational single resource roles. Several of these participants now undertake critical agency representation (AREP) roles while on deployments to Canada with high proficiency in English and a deep understanding of Canadian fire operations. The program was paired down to a regular resource sharing agreement around mid 2010s.
1st SINAC Women’s Wildland Firefighter Camp
Jan. 16-19, 2025
Cabo Blanco Absolute Nature Reserve, Costa Rica
I was invited as speaker and instructor to Costa Rica’s first women-devoted firefighting camp. In a rare occurrence, the camp was held over three days in one of Costa Rica’s national reserves closed to public. The event was funded by the Canadian embassy through the Canada Fund for Local Initiatives.
The nation’s is mostly characterized by surface fires as the predominant deciduous stands drop their leaves by summer’s heat. Some introduced coniferous stands do exist.
Costa Rica is building a growing contingent of skilled select individuals across several agencies; many are being trained specifically for the prerequisites necessary for Canadian deployments, some having as many as three back-to-back seasons in Canada’s boreal under their belts.
There are a select few wildfire trained personnel among the structural firefighters in Costa Rica.
The country’s administrative body responsible for conservation areas, SINAC (Sistema Nacional de Áreas de Conservación), has crews comprising regular park staff and local volunteers, both generally responding within their designated jurisdictions.
The Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Center (CIFFC) made a reconnaissance visit to Costa Rica in 2019 and a memorandum of understanding and operations plan were signed on Oct. 19, 2021, with SINAC.
The third main player in the wildland sector in Costa Rica, the engine behind the dispatch and organizing of the deployments, is an NGO closely tied to SINAC called Pro Parques, nimbly able to mobilize finances and resources rapidly.
A joint effort between Carolina Orozco, a SINAC officer and member of the first contingent to Canada in 2023, and Pro Parques executive director Rocío Echeverri, helped to spearhead this first women-specific fire training event.
It was an honour to also be in the presence of Costa Rica’s Luisa Alfaro, a powerhouse I had the fortune to meet. For decades, Alfaro has been a lead consultant to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in emergency management in Latin America; she started a mission 24 years ago to knock on every country’s governing office to establish the incident command system (ICS) Latin America wide. A 2017 post by USAID celebrated Luisa’s contributions and boasted about the more than 20,000 firefighters trained by Luisa!
Ade Brica Volunteer Brigade
NWCG S-190 – Intro to fire behaviour
Jan. 25, 2025 | Tamarindo, Costa Rica
With a week off between events, Renee Jack, one of the instructors at the SINAC women’s camp rounded up an opportunity for a volunteer fire brigade – led by the fierce born and bred local, Natalia García – to experience a day of basic fire certification. I supported García’s instructional minimally and largely captured photos for her reporting needs. I first met Nati at the WTREX in Mexico, earlier in November, and again during the women’s camp – another example of the immeasurable benefits of these international events.
Renee is a fire program specialist for United States Forest Service international program; her gentle poise reflects her multi-decade career in fire from smokejumper to high-level operational roles, through to the international realm of training and emergency response.
Nati’s father established ADE Brica to address a gap in response coverage in the community and, notably, an area more prone to fires, as the northwest finds itself drier than the rest of Costa Rica. Impressively, most Saturdays are dedicated to the local volunteer brigades; some days were spent cutting and digging a fire break for the community of Tamarindo or training, like on that one January weekend.
Historic WUI Wildfire “Confluencia” 3’892ha
Feb. 14-24, 2025 | El Bolsón, Argentina
On Jan. 30, 2025, a historic fire ignited north of El Bolsón, taking a nine-kilometre run west through the neighbouring community, burning more than 1000 hectares the first day. Despite united efforts among farm landowners with slip tanks, structural engines, and wildland firefighters, the fire advanced for the next 72 hours, resulting in one fatality, 200 structures lost and 900 people evacuated. SPLIF, Rio Negro’s provincial wildfire agency, coordinated mutual-aid response.
After two days without sleep, navigating airports and red-eye flights, I arrived in El Bolsón. With no time to spare, by morning, I was immediately integrated into a local squad, finally getting a chance to join the fireline with friends I made the previous year, learning their techniques, fuel types, and fire behaviour, and attempting to infuse some fresh energy to an already exhausted crew.
The Confluencia fire was on the heels of several multi-thousand-hectare fires that had been burning in and around neighbouring provinces. By the time I arrived on Feb.13, the flashy pressing flames had abated due to some favourable weather and many outside agencies had begun to disperse. Significant work remained in buttoning up the perimeter of Bolsón’s almost 4000-hectare fire.
For some, this fire had meant 23 days straight on this fire alone (some had been supporting neighbouring fire incidents and were quickly diverted to defend Bolsón), not to mention several 20- to 30-hour shifts at its inception. In addition to agency fire crews, various military entities and structural fire crews mobilized from across the country.
Argentina has a robust wildfire management program at three levels of administration with a framework established for both prevention and suppression at each agency level.
In the early 2000s, the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) – now dissolved and part of Global Affairs Canada – funded a multi-year program to bolster Argentina’s wildfire management program, primarily in prevention. Canada’s fire weather indices (FWI) was adopted.
The senior officer at the local base recalls two Hercules landing from British Columbia filled with suppression equipment. Imprints of this 25-year-old collaboration are still present in the people I met, and equipment found on the fireline.
I crossed paths with a Canadian faller who recalled the time a group of Argentinians came to shadow his crew while he was a supervisor for BC’s Trailblazer Unit Crew. The BC hallmark Mark 3 pump red toolboxes can still be found in Argentina’s national park inventory and on the line.
Some anecdotes point to the introduction of Douglas fir in the 1950s in the province of Chubut, but a more concerted national push for the introduction of lodgepole pine, Ponderosa pine and Monterey pine occurred in the 1970s with associated subsidies in an ironic effort to build an effective logging industry under the auspices of saving the native species.
These conifers proved to be far more aggressive, exhibiting more impressive growth than in their local habitat. Far more alarming is the trees’ immediate dense colonization post fire, exacerbating the situation. The confluence of changing climactic conditions (drought and increased frequency of lightning) and loaded landscape-scale invasive pines is forming a dire situation in Patagonia, requiring an aggressive adaptation to the devastating ecological impacts and increased wildfire urban interface threats.
WTREX Quijota April 13-24, 2026 | Castilla-La-Mancha, Spain
María Ángeles Romero and Gloria Sánchez López (see photo below) lived a transformative experience as participants of the Mexican WTREX and dedicated the last 1.5 years organizing the inaugural Spanish WTREX: WTREX Quijota, in the arid landscape dotted with wind mills that inspired Cervantes’ classic novel Don Quixote.
Fifteen countries were represented (Spain, Brazil, Bolivia, Mexico, Canada, the United States, Peru, Costa Rica, Switzerland, Colombia, Ecuador, Argentina, Chile, Honduras and Guatemala) in an immersive two-week event filled with workshops, presentations, multiple prescribed burns of pine-oak forests, and cultural visits from vineyards to cheese makers.
Spain was a perfect backdrop with its widely established prescribed burn and prevention programs in addition to suppression, international emergency response reach, and leader in technical innovations. The presence of local experts smoothly facilitated both the training and burn operations.
The WTREX model transcends a typical sanitized public confluence to break barriers and build a stronger, more intimate team of diverse individuals, boosting confidence and flow of insights and learnables. The impacts are continuous and immeasurable in a world with expanding need for international collaboration.
Born to Czech parents in Switzerland, Silvie Fojtik’s family emigrated to Canada when she was two years old. Thus began her eclectic, diverse exposure and multidisciplinary life into arts, sciences, engineering and outdoor adventure. The latest explorations coalesced into a trajectory in wildfires, starting in 2017, bouncing between contracting companies, provincial and National Park fire crews and currently single resource roles for BC Wildfire Services. Covid restrictions prevented furthering Fojtik’s scuba diving certifications; with an unknown end date, she invested her savings into her first mirrorless digital camera system instead. This event unearthed a deeply seated, buried passion for the creative arts.
