Prescribed Fire Training

Working individually and with partner organizations, we have created and delivered practical hands-on prescribed fire trainings & workshops to cover the strategies, tactics, and tools to be safe and successful with prescribed fire.

• Burn Planning (Intermediate-Advanced course): covers potential site assessment, formulating goals & objectives, fire environment (fuels-weather-topography) assessment, fire behavior predictions - fire effects & controllability, prescriptive parameter determination, equipment & staffing needs, contingency planning, mapping, and mop-up/patrol standards

• "Learn to Burn" (All Levels): mentored hands-on, live-fire training for private landowners in all aspects of burning, from the test fire to mop-up, our experienced leadership teaches and guides folks serving as supervised trainees in experience-appropriate roles (Crew Member, Crew Lead, Burn Boss)

• Spot Fire Workshop (All Levels): a hybrid offering consisting of 4-6 hours of virtual classroom lecture and roleplay exercise, followed later by hands-on, live-fire training within a specially-prepared prescribed burn unit, supervised by experienced staff.

• Prescribed Fire Refresher Training (All Levels): This web-based virtual refresher will cover important "Lessons Learned" from recent prescribed fires and mishaps, analyze upcoming climate and fuels trends to inform what upcoming burn seasons may look like, and includes discussion/Q&A time to get you mentally prepared for the upcoming fall/spring burn seasons.

• Fire Behavior for the Prescribed Firelighter (All Levels): COMING SOON! You need to understand fire behavior thoroughly to be a successful, safe Crew Lead/Firing Boss/Ignition Specialist and/or Burn Boss. In the Federal Wildland Fire world, prospective Burn Bosses spend almost a month total in 3 formal fire behavior classes (on top of about a decade of full-time fire experience and other trainings) before being allowed to take the "RX-300 Prescribed Fire Burn Boss" class OR a trainee Burn Boss role on a live prescribed burn. Everyone else - private landowners, NGOs, state employees (non-NWCG), doesn't have that kind of time. This course seeks to pare down and distill the core knowledge from those 3 weeks of fire behavior training, into an easy to understand and use framework that will train you to better predict fire behavior, so you can understand and write better prescriptions for burns, and make better strategic and tactical decisions on burns.

• Operational Leadership for Prescribed Firelighters (Intermediate-Advanced): COMING SOON! Leaning on a rake or dragging a drip torch is one thing - leading and directing others, or running the whole burn - is a different beast entirely! Currently, nobody outside the Fed Wildland Fire world offers training on the nuts and bolts of moving up to a Crew Lead/Firing Boss or Burn Boss role, it's all "school of hard knocks". We're going to change that. In this course you'll learn the fundamentals of fire leadership, how to organize and brief crews, give clear instructions and communicate by radio and face-to-face, crisis management ("what to do when things go wrong"), and have an opportunity to use and develop these skills in a supervised trainee capacity on a live prescribed burn.