Meet the all-female fire crew tackling California’s wildfires

A Walmart cashier, a lemonade vendor, an aspiring fashion designer and a graduate with a degree in native plants. These are some of the eclectic back stories of the first-ever, all-female wildland firefighting crew of the California Conservation Corps (CCC).

Inland Crew 5 from San Bernardino are a cheerful, wise-cracking and gritty band of 14 young women who have stepped up to the daunting challenge of fighting the state’s worsening wildfires.

The crew is part of the CCC, or “Cee’s” as it’s often dubbed, America’s oldest and largest conservation corps. Since the mid-Seventies, those aged 18 to 25 (or up to 29 for military vets) have joined its ranks as “corpsmembers”, where they train in an array of skills related to environmental work, fire protection, land maintenance, and emergency disaster response.

Inland Crew 5 is one of more than 20 fire crews acting as an informal pipeline for state and federal fire agencies who are trying to bolster numbers in the wake of longer and more extreme wildfire seasons.