My story starts like most good stories, with a messy apartment and an existential crisis. It was the winter of 2020 when I realized I couldn’t stand working from home anymore. The pandemic made me anxious, isolated, and deeply unsatisfied with the way I was living life. After following a couple of job board leads and getting advice from friends and family, I decided that I was going to move out of San Marcos to work for the Utah Conservation Corps (UCC).

I was assigned to a crew that went backpacking all over the Mountain West building and maintaining hundreds of miles of hiking trails and maintaining our public lands. That year I spent more nights living out of my tent than under a roof. It was a transformative experience that gave meaning to my life. I had projects in the Four Bear Wilderness, the Cache Valley, the Grand Tetons, the Uinta Mountains, and even with the Shoshone Nation. I became like family with my crew members; our lives depended on each other out in the backcountry. My time with the UCC was one of the most important times of my life.

After the season was over, I moved back to Texas near the end of 2021. I wanted to keep the spirit of formative experiences going and ended up as a Crew Lead for the Texas Conservation Corps (TXCC). While working with the UCC was mostly backcountry work, my time with TXCC was more focused on maintaining Central Texas natural areas and doing disaster response. I’ve worked at every park in Austin, a few Texas State Parks, and led a Disaster Response crew in Seminole Oklahoma. The disaster response was a particularly hard job, dealing with tornado cleanups and seeing how disasters destroy people’s lives.

After parting ways with my TXCC crew, I decided to go to college for Environmental Science. But in between semesters in the summer of 2023, I felt the pull once more. I got a job with the Montana Conservation Corps (MCC) to work a full summer immersed exclusively in the Bob Marshall Wilderness. Of all my experiences working on the trail, this was the most special. I lived in one of the last remaining Backcountry Ranger Stations, Big Prairie, for three months, completely off the grid. Food was delivered to us by horseback every other week. Everywhere we needed to go, we hiked. If we needed to bathe, we hit the river. It was like I was living in a story book. It was a summer I’ll never forget.

While I’ve worked at many different places, for many different organizations, the work was very similar. We’d start the day early with a mandatory thirty-minute stretch circle, before beginning a good 8–10-hour workday. This would include using pick mattocks and McLeods to cut new trails, applying herbicides to hardy invasive species, cutting down trees for fire breaks, and even building structures, like bridges, retaining walls, and rock steps. It’s a tough job, but when you’re laughing by the campfire under the most beautiful night skies, it all seems worthwhile.

Every day I work on public land is a reminder of how lucky I am to be alive. It’s a day filled with purpose: To give back not only to the land, but to the community. Caring for the land commands us to care for each other. To recognize the greatness of our earth is also to recognize that we all share the same home. It binds us as one, all siblings from the same womb. Working in Conservation means acknowledging the humanity in everyone, in every creature, and every plant. Today, I am a student at Texas State continuing my education in Environmental Studies, with a focus on Intersectional Environmental Justice. In recognition of our universal home, I’m keen to learn about specific human systems in our environment, and why climate change and climate disaster disproportionally affect the Global South.