FPO Training.

Once a year I get to go play in the woods for my job. It’s a tradition that started six or seven years ago.

The Forest Service does an annual training of Forest Protection Officers at the Inn. FPOs are sort of entry level law enforcement. The USFS doesn’t have a large number of Law Enforcement Officers, so they are supplemented, to a degree, by the FPOs. FPOs write parking tickets, enforce campground rules: patrol the forest in general. Often they are the first to see real problems.

On Thursday of the weeklong training, they do scenes that attempt to re-enact situations the FPO’s will actually encounter. My friend Sher, who at the time ran the training, invited me to take part in the scenarios. I jumped at the chance to get out of the office and into the woods. (Granted, it is Wyeth Campground, by the train tracks, but there is no carpeting or file cabinets.)

Since then, I have been a dufus out gathering firewood without a permit, twice I’ve been stealing fire camp equipment, I’ve been a kindly drunk who got his truck stuck in a ditch, had a car accident with a Forest Service vehicle, and had a heart attack trying to get my truck out of a ditch. This year I was a snitch… turning in the neighboring campers for stealing fire camp equipment. Trust me, I knew all the tell tale signs.

Then there was the two years when I was a grower at a major pot farm in the forest. But that was for LEO Re-certification. So it doesn’t really count.

It’s fun, but I hope I help the FPO be safe. As Sher told me once, the FPOs are damn near the only people in the forest without guns.

I do get gratifications by the many times people say “Thank you” to me.

This from 2004... I think I was stealing fire camp equipment, and obviously setting the stage for my future drunken scenes!