Editor’s note: This is an occasional series focusing on local residents’ interesting, unusual or even oddball occupations. If you know someone with an odd job, e-mail editor@shakopeenews.com.

The wildfire fighters worked fast with chainsaws. If they didn’t, fire could get out in front of their crew of about a dozen, putting them in danger.

Among them was Mike Riker, an 18-year-old Jordan High School football player and wrestler chosen to be part of the North Star Fire Crew in Alaska.

The crew often spent two to three weeks at a time in the Alaskan wilderness after flying into isolation to work 16- to 20-hour shifts cutting wide swaths through the forest to rob a blaze of the fuel to rage on.

Firefighters subsisted mostly on military-style ready-to-eat meals, carrying 50-pound packs, striking camp around three miles from their saw lines.

“Sometime’s the nearest road’s 100 miles away,” Riker said.

Only the physically and mentally tough can make it and thrive in such a crew, where members deal with what Riker called “long hours, little sleep and crappy food.” Some firefighters “broke” and had to be taken back to civilization.

“They’d get sent back,” he said.

Not Riker. This was pretty close to his dream job.

He took a teenager’s sense of invincibility to Alaska in mid-May and returned from the largest state in the U.S. feeling somewhat more finite.

“You definitely take a whole new perspective on the value of life,” Riker said.

Read more in Thursday’s Shakopee Valley News.

Originally Published: October 6, 2011 at 2:48 AM CDT