Most 18-year-olds focus on deciding what they want to do after high school.

Alyssa Shade already knows.

The Yoder teen already is a certified EMT, a red-carded wildland firefighter and a member of the all-volunteer Yoder Fire Department.

Another 18-year-old, J.R. Ruiz, joined the department only a few months ago. He recently returned from a wildfire-severity assignment in Colorado and, this past week, was helping on the South Fork Fire near Cody.

Behind them is another generation waiting in the wings. Fire Chief Justin Burkart’s 17-year-old son, Jayden, is already part of the department, while his 16-year-old daughter, Maykayla, recently joined as a junior firefighter.

In a profession where volunteer departments nationwide are struggling to recruit younger members, Yoder appears to be on a different track.

How does a town of just 134 people keep producing firefighters sought out and trusted to fight some of the nation’s biggest wildfires?

The answer starts with volunteers investing in one another.

“We’re 100% volunteer,” Burkart told Cowboy State Daily.

Beyond Wyoming

The tiny Goshen County community sits along U.S. Highway 85 south of Torrington, surrounded by hay fields and open prairie.

The Yoder Volunteer Fire Department protects roughly 248 square miles and serves about 700 residents throughout its fire district.

Yet those volunteers routinely deploy across the West, cutting fire lines with bulldozers, staffing engines on major incidents and supporting wildfire operations from Colorado to Virginia.

“We have a reputation of really sending out some professional firefighters to these incidents,” Burkart said. “It’s not a game to us. It’s something that we really take some pride in.”

Burkart joined the department as an 18-year-old in 1999 after discovering federal wildfire assignments could help pay for college.

“I found out it was a good way for me to pay for college,” he said.

Today, the department routinely sends engines, a water tender and two dozers on federal assignments, with about 22 members participating regularly in the federal fire program.

Last year, Yoder firefighters collectively spent about three months helping battle wildfires in California. Burkart said the department paid roughly $1 million to firefighters and seasonal personnel through federal assignments in 2025.

For a department staffed entirely by volunteers, those assignments have become far more than an opportunity to earn extra income.

“They’ll have more contact with live fire over a two-week period than most volunteers would have in a three- or four-year period,” Burkart said.

The knowledge comes home.

Heather Trompke, who serves on a Rocky Mountain incident management team, works in the finance section tracking personnel and equipment time during major incidents.

“We get to bring all of this stuff back,” Trompke said. “We can train and show how to fill out documents properly, and that translates into a smoother fire for everyone else when they go out.”

“There’s always something to learn in wildland firefighting,” added firefighter Bailey Powell. “It doesn’t matter if you’ve been doing it for 60 years or five.”

Growing Firefighters

Like volunteer departments across America, Yoder faces a challenge that has nothing to do with flames.

Recruiting.

“If you look nationwide, the volunteer fire service is aging out,” Burkart said. “The younger generation is not really involved in that.”

Instead of waiting for volunteers to walk through the station doors, Yoder and neighboring Goshen County departments are trying to grow their own.

Robert Shade helps coordinate a countywide junior firefighter program that introduces teenagers to the fire service before they turn 18.

“Right now, nationally, pretty much every trade, every job there is, there’s a lack of young people getting involved,” Shade said.

Junior firefighters learn equipment familiarization, truck maintenance, hose deployment, pump operations and safety procedures before becoming full firefighters.

“They’re the future,” Shade said. “We’ve got to make sure that we get them involved.”

Rather than keeping the program confined to Yoder, departments across Goshen County work together so young firefighters train alongside one another.

“We’re reaching out and kind of working with the whole county,” Shade said. “It helps everyone get to know each other.”

The program appears to be paying off.

Shade started attending meetings as a teenager after encouragement from her boyfriend, who happens to be Burkart’s son.

“I kind of started coming for fun,” she said. “Then I got a true understanding of everything, and it just became really interesting.”

A Family Tradition

Volunteer firefighting isn’t just passed from one generation to the next in Yoder.

It’s often passed around the dinner table.

Burkart’s wife left this week for a federal wildfire assignment in Colorado. Robert Shade serves alongside daughter Alyssa.

“There are families on the department,” Shade said. “Husbands and wives, fathers and sons, fathers and daughters.”

For him, volunteering alongside Alyssa is one of the most rewarding parts of the job.

“It’s a lot of fun to go out with Alyssa and do what we both love,” he said.

The work isn’t without sacrifice.

“When the pager goes off, you could be at a dinner with your family,” Burkart said. “You could be at your kid’s birthday party. You could be at a track event for your kids.”

And the sacrifice isn’t limited to firefighters.

“It’s not only the members that have to make that sacrifice,” he said. “It’s also the family.”

When firefighters deploy on federal assignments, the department still has to answer calls at home.

“We do have a lot of members that deploy nationally, but we also have to protect home when they’re gone,” Burkart said.

That responsibility is shared with neighboring departments through mutual-aid agreements.

Last year alone, Yoder firefighters assisted neighboring agencies 26 times, while local farmers and ranchers helped firefighters cut fire lines during large grass fires.

Yoder’s firefighters have built something much larger than a volunteer department.

They’ve built a pipeline to answer the call.

One generation trains the next.

Kolby Fedore can be reached at kolby@cowboystatedaily.com.

Summer is Wyoming’s season for turning over rocks, poking into holes and walking with a perpetual hunch looking for snakes.

Herpalogists, the zoologists who study amphibians and reptiles, are out scouring the landscape and herping, the term used when they are actively flipping rocks and searching stream beds to find Wyoming’s elusive snakes in their native habitats.

Sometimes those finds can be unexpected. The fork-tongued reptiles appear on a trail when least expected. 

Recently, a foot-long “nightcrawler” suddenly moved like a snake and slithered into the rocks, its tail disappearing into the shadows. Rather than a shapeshifter, this was an elusive rubber boa, Wyoming’s tiny constrictor snake that can look like a giant worm at first glance.

These rarely seen creatures are more common in the Cowboy State than most people realize.

“I personally don’t feel that any of our snakes in Wyoming are terribly rare,” said Matt Rasmussen, vice president of the Wyoming Herpetological Society. “However, a lot of them are very rarely encountered because they spend most of their lives either underground or under rocks.”

Rasmussen said most of the secretive snakes in Wyoming only come out at night or when conditions are right — typically warmer, humid times. The rubber boa, for instance, showed up on a day when it had rained and then the temperatures spiked hot.

Rasmussen helped found the new Herpetological Society two years ago to teach others to herp. He said it’s possible to learn more about our state by flipping rocks and seeing what is beneath.

“That’s the great thing with Wyoming,” Rasmussen said. “There is so little known about the herpetofauna — the frogs, lizards, snakes, turtles, etcetera — that live here, and so little known about their distribution.”

He said Wyoming is known for “large charismatic megafauna” such as bison, elk, moose and deer rather than the harder to find animals. As a result, no widespread surveying has been done on smaller non-game species. Wyoming Game and Fish has even asked for community members to help by reporting  rarely seen reptiles and amphibians.

Elusive, Not Rare

While most people think of the more common bullsnake or venomous rattlesnake when discussing reptiles, Rasmussen said Wyoming is home to many harmless snakes.

According to Rasmussen, a few snakes, such as the colorful pale milk snake and rubber boa, could be considered rare in Wyoming. However, he believes they are just harder to find and most people are not aware of them unless they stumble across them.

“There’s the plains black-headed snake, which we really don’t know much about their distribution in Wyoming,” Rasmussen said. “They’re just not studied and have a limited habitat.”

This tan snake with a black head is small and feeds primarily on centipedes and ant eggs. Rasmussen cautions that when found, rather than kill the strange looking snakes that are harmless, report finding them to Wyoming Game and Fish and leave them in their habitat.

In this way, Rasmussen said, herping can be fun. He encourages people to get into the action.

“There are some other really small fossorial snakes like smooth green snakes, which live along creeks in the mountains and eat caterpillars and spiders,” Rasmussen said. “Then there’s the Black Hills red-bellied snake, which is a very small snake that eats slugs, worms and snails primarily.”

People are often surprised that Wyoming is home to such a large variety of snakes. He especially likes to show off a milk snake, which is harmless and eats lizards and even baby rattlesnakes.

“It is a beautiful, almost tropical-looking animal that lives right here,” Rasmussen said. “They are just rarely encountered.”

A New Snake & Frog Society

Rasmussen said the new society is trying to educate the community about these fascinating creatures in the Cowboy State that don’t get much attention, such as the skink, a short-legged lizard. 

“We’re a group of herpetological enthusiasts who would like to spread the word, educate and do outreach about these animals,” he said.

This outreach includes presentations with live animals, field trips and a conference in November. Wyoming’s reptiles and amphibians remain a mystery, Rasmussen encourages reporting sightings on the app iNaturalist.

“Even if you don’t know what it is, post a picture because there are tens of thousands of experts who will identify that animal,” Rasmussen said. “That’s really important, especially for our herpetofauna in the state.”

He also pointed out that some Wyoming snakes are on the protected list, including the midget faded rattlesnake. They made the list, according to Rasmussen, because people were capturing them and they became popular in among owners who like to keep small venomous snakes as pets.

Rasmussen said awareness is the best protection for Wyoming’s elusive reptiles and he is excited to prove to residents that we don’t have rare snakes, only secretive ones.

Jackie Dorothy can be reached at jackie@cowboystatedaily.com.