The White River National Forest’s Aspen-Sopris Ranger District terminated a “handful” of probationary employees late last week as part of the larger layoffs in the U.S. Forest Service.

A Feb. 13 termination letter sent to at least two employees states, “The Agency finds, based on your performance, that you have not demonstrated that your further employment at the Agency would be in the public interest.” 

The letter comes after Aspen-Sopris District Ranger Kevin Warner notified probationary employees with a phone call in January that they’d be put on a termination list; a Feb. 13 phone call notified them that a termination letter would arrive the next day.

Cole Fournier, 24, was hired by the Forest Service on May 19, 2024. Officially a forest technician, his job was a “front country ranger,” ensuring abandoned camp fires were out, enforcing the 14-day stay limit in the district and removing the remnants of human impact on the land. He could issue tickets and warnings while educating the public on the proper use of “the resource.”

“The entire goal is public service, which I think is a lot cooler than, say, working towards promoting a product,” he said in a phone interview. 

He’d worked as a seasonal employee in other forests before, but those jobs came to an end following last fall’s announcement of a Forest Service-wide hiring freeze. 

Hired as a permanent seasonal employee, he was guaranteed at least six months (13 pay periods) of work annually. Fournier and others in his position get seasonal jobs as baristas, gear pros or other gigs to make ends meet. 

The federal government puts new hires or longtime employees in new positions on “probationary periods,” which allow for easier firing than a fully appointed federal employee. 

The Office of Personnel Management, the federal government’s Human Resources department, states on its website, “In most cases, agencies can swiftly terminate probationers who have not demonstrated their fitness for continued employment.”

For permanent seasonal Forest Service employees, it can take years to move past the probationary period. Two six-month seasons should do it, Fournier said, but if something happens to cut a season short, then it’ll take over two years to surpass probation. It’s a common right of passage for folks looking for permanent, full-time employment with the Forest Service.

The White River National Forest spans 2.3 million acres and is the most-visited national forest in the country. The Aspen-Sopris Ranger District comprises approximately 750,000 acres in the Roaring Fork Valley. The district manages five wilderness areas and the Maroon Bells Scenic Area. 

Reuters reported Friday that the U.S. Forest Service and the National Parks Service cut 3,400 and 1,000 jobs, respectively, at the direction of the Trump administration.

Twenty-five-year-old Gillian Purvenas’ job with the Aspen-Sopris Ranger District was cut last week. She worked as a forestry technician, going up from a wilderness ranger to a wilderness crew lead with a primary responsibility of logging out trails — removing fallen trees. She was hired May 5, 2024, but worked as a volunteer and then intern for the Forest Service for two years prior.

Another probationary employee, she lives in Forest Service bunk-style housing in El Jebel — which runs about $190 a month. Permanent seasonal workers get housing year round. Without the housing, Purvenas said she will move back to New Jersey and reevaluate her career. She made about $20,000 last year from the Forest Service, she said.

Neither knew exactly how many employees in the Aspen-Sopris Ranger District or the White River National Forest were notified of their termination last week, but said their district had about fewer  than 10 probationary employees. 

Not all of them are low-level workers in bunkhouses. 

“It’s not just these lower level employees that are getting laid off right now,” she said. “In my experience, the majority of the people I know are GS-5 … but it depends. It’s forest wide. It’s really across all different agencies and departments.”

GS-5 is a reference to a federal classification and payscale structure, from General Schedule 1 to 15, with 1 being the lowest.

The impact will long outlast a few years of minimized presence on forest land, Fournier said, with less presence on the landscape to enforce sustainability protections and other regulations. 

“The risk of wildfire is going to be higher, definitely in the next few years,” he said. “We have a lot of sensitive areas that take a long time to recover, but damage really quickly, and so a few years of us not managing these places can spell really bad for the next couple decades of what our forest is going to look like.”

Fournier and Purvenas will both lose their housing and their health insurance, though exact timelines for that were not spelled out in their termination letters. They said that they feel like local leadership is doing the best they can to communicate what they know, but information and details are scarce. 

“I know that our supervisors weren’t given a ton of guidance,” Purvenas said. “I think they gave us all the information they have, which in a lot of cases isn’t a ton of information.”

Some of the funding the federal government is purporting to save in this contraction of services is not even federal money. 

Pitkin County, the Independence Pass Foundation and the city of Aspen contribute to funding for one permanent seasonal employee and one summer seasonal employee, totaling $75,000, per Pitkin County Open Space and Trails Director Gary Tennenbaum. The county public works department funds another permanent seasonal employee at $50,000. 

Fournier said his is one of the positions funded by local money and partnerships. His tax return stated about $18,000 in total pay for 2024. 

Both Purvenas and Fournier say neither they nor their peers have poor performance reviews on their record, and to be terminated for a lack of value to the public based on their performance is unfair.

“I always thought (the Forest Service) was a stable work environment, where you could work hard and not have issues, and you can just do your job, protect the resource, and things will be fine,” he said. “But that’s not how this is going, and it’s becoming a lot more political than I ever thought it would be.”

The White River National Forest did not respond to questions and a request for an interview by press time. 

The letter sent to Fournier and Purvenas says they “may” have a right to file an appeal with the Merit Systems Protection Board. Fournier said he wants to file, but he is figuring out the best path forward. Purvenas said she reached out to a union representative from the National Federation of Federal Employees and is waiting to hear back. 

Permanent seasonal employees do not have access to their government email when they are off pay-status, so they did not know if they received the deferred resignation offer pushed out by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. They later found out they were not eligible, anyway.

Fournier said he’s heard rumors about another wave of layoffs for program managers whose jobs were rendered redundant by the most recent layoffs, but the situation remains opaque.