Courtesy Photo Chris Peterson, center, receives the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Unsung Hero Award last year.

ALPENA — For years, Huron National Forest has protected by a man who has spent a lifetime fighting wildfires.

This week, that man, Chris Peterson, fire chief for the Huron-Manistee National Forests in Michigan, is retiring.

For the past nine years, Peterson has trained and built relationships with volunteer fire departments, including those in lower Northeast Michigan, preparing them to respond quickly and effectively to any fire danger in the forest.

Peterson and his crew fight 150 wildland fires per year in the national forests. At least 90% of those, he said, are caused by people burning debris in a burn barrel or brush pile.

Forests need to be preserved for their beauty and wildness, Peterson said, but also because they are increasingly used as home by people who deliberately live in or near the woods, seeking separation from a noisy world in the comforting shelter of evergreen trees.

In a wide-ranging career that took him all across the country, Peterson has worked for federal and state governments, protecting natural resources from the alligator-thick swamps of Florida’s Everglades National Park to fire-blazed hills in Montana to mountain peaks in Idaho and California.

“I got to do things I would never imagine I’d get to do as a little kid in the (Upper Peninsula),” Peterson said.

Growing up in a small U.P. community, a typical Up North boy who liked to fish and hunt, Peterson was always fascinated by fire. At 16, he volunteered with the Michigan Department of Natural Resources to help mop up after fires, he said.

His love of the outdoors grew into a career. As a National Park Service employee, he fought fires on a large scale and also responded to major disasters, lending a hand in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the space shuttle Columbia disaster, and the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Eventually, Peterson found his way back to Michigan, where he has been in charge of protecting our local national forest for nearly a decade.

Last year’s recipient of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Unsung Hero Award, Peterson has turned the Huron-Manistee National Forests into what his colleagues call a model for wildfire management. He has conducted extensive wildfire-operation and firefighter-safety training on the state and federal level, and even spent two weeks in Nigeria in 2019 training forest management officials.

The best way to take care of the wilderness around us, Peterson said, is to educate our youth in the value and benefit of the outdoors.

He grew up in a different time, he said, reminiscing about being outside playing until the street lights came on.

“As soon as the sun came up, we were back outside,” Peterson said. “We didn’t have cable, we didn’t have internet. In the wintertime, you went outside and made snow forts and called it awesome.”

With two techy kids of his own, Peterson is concerned about the propensity of today’s youth to be engrossed in technology, rather than the outdoors.

“I hope we, as adults, can continue to make that a priority for our youth that are coming up behind us, the importance of our natural resources and the importance of our forests,” he said.

In his retirement, which begins today, as soon as he turns in his keys, Peterson will work as a recruitment and retention coordinator for the Northern Michigan Fire Chiefs Association, which includes Alpena County.

He and his wife will also run a motel in a small U.P. community.

The motel doesn’t have internet access, he said. When his kids come to visit, they’ll have to go outside and find something to do.

Julie Riddle can be reached at 989-358-5693, jriddle@thealpenanews.com or on Twitter @jriddleX.