After Four Decades With The DNR, Peltier Retires | Elk River Star News

Mike Peltier (third from right) with a helitack crew and pilot in Wyoming in 2012.

This 313th Avenue Princeton fire was in May 2001. A helitack crew evacuated several houses. Four residences were destroyed, one residence was heavily damaged and personal property and vehicles were destroyed.

This is a 2010 fire in the Boundary Waters, as seen from a helicopter.

Lightning started this crown fire in pine in Georgia in 2011. Lightning was seen in smoke column which started new fires ahead. This view is as seen from a helicopter.

This is the same Georgia fire as seen from the ground where Peltier was dropped off so a division supervisor could get a look from the helicopter.

Peltier said this was the worst fire behavior he has seen. This was the Blaine, Minnesota, fire in April 2004.

A bulldozer from Zimmerman with fire plow in Texas in 2011.

Logging machines in the Sand Dunes State Forest near Zimmerman.

A parade of fire trucks and vehicles went past Mike Peltier's home to with him a happy retirement, in this screen shot from a video of the parade.

A banner wished Mike Peltier good luck on his retirement.

Mike Peltier (left) was caught by surprise when a parade of fire trucks and vehicles went past his home to wish him well in retirement, in this screen shot from the parade video.

Mike Peltier (third from right) with a helitack crew and pilot in Wyoming in 2012.

This is a 2010 fire in the Boundary Waters, as seen from a helicopter.

Lightning started this crown fire in pine in Georgia in 2011. Lightning was seen in smoke column which started new fires ahead. This view is as seen from a helicopter.

This is the same Georgia fire as seen from the ground where Peltier was dropped off so a division supervisor could get a look from the helicopter.

Peltier said this was the worst fire behavior he has seen. This was the Blaine, Minnesota, fire in April 2004.

A bulldozer from Zimmerman with fire plow in Texas in 2011.

Logging machines in the Sand Dunes State Forest near Zimmerman.

A parade of fire trucks and vehicles went past Mike Peltier's home to with him a happy retirement, in this screen shot from a video of the parade.

A banner wished Mike Peltier good luck on his retirement.

Mike Peltier (left) was caught by surprise when a parade of fire trucks and vehicles went past his home to wish him well in retirement, in this screen shot from the parade video.

Job took him from working in the Sand Dunes State Forest to fighting wildfires all over the U.S.

After 39 years and five months working for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources in Zimmerman, Mike Peltier has retired.

A forestry technician, Peltier spent a significant amount of time working in the Sand Dunes State Forest near Zimmerman, but his job also took him to other states where he helped fight big forest fires.

Peltier estimates that he spent 60% of his time on timber and 40% on fire control and said he enjoyed both of them.

“My work took me many places in Minnesota on forest inventory and timber sales preparation. I worked on fire control all over the U.S. and a little bit in Canada. A big part of my time was spent on helitack, where I was sent to the biggest fires in Minnesota and other states.”

Helitack crews are teams of firefighters who are transported by helicopter to wildfires.

In all aspects of the job, Peltier said he got to see things he never thought he’d see and worked with great people who guided him along the way.

Fought fires from the first day of work

Peltier’s first day of work with the DNR was May 20, 1981, and he fought a fire along the railroad tracks that very first day.

“That was the initiation,” he said.

In the years since, Peltier has fought fires in Minnesota and across the country, primarily in the western and southern parts of the United States in places like California, Oregon, Texas, Georgia and Florida. He said he’s lost count of the number of fires he has fought.

The first big out-of-state fire he helped fight was in the Stanislaus National Forest in California in 1987. The perimeter of the fire ended up being 90 miles around, and the fire burned five fire towers. About 50 bulldozers and hundreds of fire engines were mobilized to help contain the fire.

In 2002, he went on three fires in Colorado, Arizona and Oregon that each burned more than a half million acres.

Also memorable was the drought in Texas in 2011 and the resulting fires. Peltier spent time fighting fires there using a bulldozer with a fire plow that had been transported to Texas from Minnesota. Day after day, the temperature would be over 100 degrees.

“We’d go home for two weeks and then we’d go back down there for two weeks,” Peltier said.

It was in Texas that he had a close call. While pushing over trees, the bulldozer ended up trapped on top of a pile of logs. “The dozer couldn’t move and the fire was right there, right in the pine trees,” Peltier said. The fire began burning under the bulldozer until a helicopter came and dumped water on the area.

One of the things Peltier enjoyed about fighting fires was being in a helicopter that was using a machine called a Premo MK III to set back fires. The device injects ethylene glycol into Ping-Pong-sized balls containing potassium permanganate as they are ejected from the aircraft. The chemical reaction starts the balls on fire in about 30 seconds, igniting a fire in the designated area where they are dropped.

“We would use those to get ahead of a fire,” he said. They would burn an area by a highway or a bulldozer line, for instance, so when the fire got there it was already burned black, preventing the fire from escaping.

Oak wilt, forest inventory part of job

When not fighting fires, Peltier not only worked in the Sand Dunes State Forest but also became the forest health specialist for the Cambridge area. In that role, he worked on controlling oak wilt from St. Cloud to Wisconsin.

Peltier said the first oak wilt in Sherburne County turned up in 1984 by Elk River.

One of his other job responsibilities involved forest inventory at sites all over the state. One particularly memorable job was in the dead of winter near Jacobson, Minnesota.

“One day we went out and all the mercury was in the little ball in the bottom of the thermometer,” he said. “We never knew how cold it was.”

But it was so bitterly cold that no vehicle or snowmobile would start so, despite the cold, he and his colleague walked four miles into their work site, then four miles back out once they were done.

On another forest inventory, they came across a strange scientific phenomenon. He and his work partner were on an island in a swamp where they drilled into a tree to get a core sample to see how old the tree was. Normally, Peltier said the core has to be extracted, but this core shot out of the tree and hit his colleague in the neck.

They discovered there was methane gas from a bog on the island that was coming out of the tree, creating the pressure that propelled the core from the tree.

“Nobody will believe it,” Peltier said.

At Sand Dunes State Forest, Peltier has been with the DNR long enough to see some of the pine trees he planted being thinned out so the remaining trees can grow larger, faster. The trees that are thinned out can be used for pulp wood or for wood chips for landscaping or energy purposes. The trees left behind eventually grow large enough to be harvested. Peltier said 80 to 90 percent of the larger pine trees harvested in the Sand Dunes State Forest are used for 2X4s and 2X6s.

Love of nature from an early age

Peltier grew up in Stevens Point, Wisconsin. His family went camping every chance they got and he enjoyed nature from the time he was young.

His interest in forestry gained momentum when he was in Boy Scouts.

Peltier, who is an Eagle Scout, said when he took his forestry merit badge he learned that forestry was sustainable. Trees are harvested, almost like an agricultural crop, and then the area is reforested and the cycle goes on and on and on, he said.

“I really liked that idea,” he said.

He went to college at the University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in forest management with a minor in soil science.

He worked for the U.S. Forest Service and a logger before going to work for the DNR.

Early on in his career with the DNR, Peltier and his family lived in a house at the forestry station in Zimmerman.

“There wasn’t any place to rent,” he said.

He and his wife, Peggy, have three sons and two daughters.

In retirement, Peltier said he is looking forward to doing some camping and traveling in a RV, including out west so his wife can see things like the giant sequoias and the redwoods that he saw while there fighting fires.

His last day of work was Oct. 1.

Shortly after he got home that day, a long line of fire trucks and vehicles containing colleagues and friends began driving past his house located between Zimmerman and Princeton to wish him a happy retirement.

Peltier said the retirement parade was a huge surprise.

“It was just amazing. I couldn’t believe it,” he said.

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