Last summer, while most student athletes took classes, worked on conditioning, hung out with friends and family or worked, sophomore javelin thrower Shasta Wilson was putting out fires…really!
 
She was one of several hundred fire fighters working on an eight-fire complex called the Clark Fork Complex, which covered nearly 16,000 acres on the border of Idaho and Northwest Montana.
 
From Thompson Falls, a picturesque farming, lumber and tourist town of about 1,300, an hour north of Missoula, Mont., it was Wilson's second summer working for the U.S. forest Service in the mountains surrounding her home. Her actual job was to mark the mostly Ponderosa and White Pine and Douglas and Grand Firs to be protected from logging…"old growth or really nice trees you want to keep for reseeding."
 
But when there's a fire, everyone gets called to help. The first summer, Wilson saw limited fire duty on small blazes. 
 
2015 was exceptionally dry and she spent much more time on fire lines.  She'd already been pulled into fight a small fire. "We were up at 7 a.m. and going to go back out and finish putting a line around the fire we were working on when we got the call to go the bigger fire".
 
She remembered the moment as being filled with a combination of excitement and nervousness. "Get ready to go. Focus! There's a lot of adrenalin running when you get into a big fire", she said. "You do a lot of things you didn't think you could do…like packing a heavy weight up a steep slope and you're thinking 'I can't do this', but you have to keep going because there are other people relying on you."
 
It's hard work. People fighting these fires put in 16-hour day for two weeks, then have two days off…if they're lucky, sometimes it's just one day off, Wilson said.
 
"You're so exhausted. It's miserable. You try to keep your mind going, keep an upbeat attitude. Mornings are the worst. Everyone is crabby, you're looking at a day that is going to be just as bad as the first day was," she said. One thing, the Clark Fork fire was in her home station, so Wilson was able to sleep in a bed at night. "We were really lucky, the local people could go home, but on the smaller fire, we were just camping out. This was a huge luxury."
 
And it's always dangerous. "I wasn't in any seriously dangerous situations, but the big thing is, you have to watch out, keep your head on a swivel is the way they describe it, so that burning trees don't fall down on you."
 
Perhaps the most dangerous situation is to find yourself surrounded by fire. "If there's wind involved, we get weather reports two or three times a day. We can call any time for a report. If there's a lot of wind, we back out," she said.  
 
Wilson spent four weeks on the fire before having to report to PSU for her second year.
 
Besides good pay ("we do get a regular salary, but then there's hazard pay and tons of overtime"), there can be another upside to working in the woods all summer.
 
Besides being a district champion in the javelin her sophomore year and a two-time all-conference selection in track and field while a junior and senior, Wilson was an all-state volleyball player at Thompson Falls High School. She was named her team's MVP as a junior and first-team all-conference as a senior.
 
She was a somewhat undersized (at 5'6") outside hitter in volleyball. "But, I could jump really high. I'd wear really heavy boots all summer. That's like having weights on your feet for three months. So, when I went back to volleyball, I could jump a whole lot higher than before I went," she recalled.
 
Still, when it came time for college, Wilson was afraid her height wouldn't cut it at the Division One level in volleyball. And, she really didn't think much about throwing the javelin in college until her senior year in high school. She finished high school with a 4.0 cumulative GPA and was class valedictorian, however, so her road to a higher education wasn't dependent on her talent as an athlete.
 
Wilson's brother Chalis is a senior at the University of Montana. He also has spent summers with the U.S. Forest Service and could decide on a career there. She got involved there "because I love where I live and I wanted to be able to explore places people often don't go. I wanted to be able to hike around the woods all day."
 
Though she loves the outdoors, Wilson decided in high school that she wanted a career in dentistry…as a dentist or an orthodontist.
 
"I'm interested in teeth. As a junior in high school, I had braces and it was about the same time my mom (Mindy Wilson) went back to work as a dental assistant (currently, she works in an elementary school). My orthodontist left a big impression on me and I thought teeth were interesting. Having good teeth is important. Smiling makes people happy. It's so sad when people don't have a good smile or have gaps in their teeth," said Wilson.
 
And that's how she ended up at Portland State.
 
"There's no medical school in Montana. People asked me why I wasn't going to stay in Montana. But, so many medical schools have regular undergraduate schools where they get most of their students. OHSU gets a lot of students from PSU and PSU trains people well to go to OHSU," she said.
 
Upon arrival in Portland, she still felt she had something to prove in track and field.
 
"I didn't throw well in the conference meet my senior year. I knew I could do better, but the coaches here had never seen me throw," she said. She talked to the PSU coaching staff. "They said go ahead and come for three weeks. That'll be your tryout period. They saw my work ethic and let me continue."
 
Event coach Javier Olivas agreed.
 
"She's made tremendous strides. With the javelin, people think muscle-head, but throwing the javelin takes agility, mobility, strength and coordination. You have to be very athletic and Shasta has made tremendous strides toward becoming a better athlete," said Olivas, who added that he thinks she'll qualify for the Big Sky meet before she's finished.
 
That's one of Wilson's goals for this year. She only participated in three meets last year, but she improved each meet, ending with a personal best of 120-03.75 (36.67 meters) at the Mt. Hood Track Festival last May. Her goal is to throw close to 140 feet this outdoor season, which begins in March.
 
This coming summer, she plans to give firefighting a miss to concentrate on finding an internship in a dentist or orthodontist office. She's currently carrying a 3.6 cumulative GPA in biology and pre-dentistry, so she's on track to fulfill her dream.
 
Still, the woods do beckon. 
 
"There are a lot of people who get to travel all over the US as a firefighter. I know that being in the Forest Service would open opportunities for life. It will always be there if I decide I want to go back to it. It's kind of funny when I tell people here what I do in the summers. They are always shocked and amazed. Back home, it's just no big deal. It's what a lot of people do. I guess it isn't that common around here and people especially don't expect it from a little blond girl," Wilson said.