Portland, OR, Female Fire Captain Turning in Turnout Gear to Pursue Adventures

Listen to Erica Nelson recount a few of her thrill-seeking adventures, and at a certain point you can only shake your head.

How else can you respond to somebody who tells you about her two-month bike tour around the Baltic Sea? Or her 14,000-mile motorcycle trip along the Pan-American Highway? Or the weeklong dogsledding excursion that she casually tacked onto the end of a backcountry ski trip in Northern Sweden?

When Nelson, 50, isn’t traveling the world she’s engaged in another kind of adventure: working as a captain for Portland Fire & Rescue – the only woman who currently serves at that rank. But at the end of the year, she’ll be retiring from her job at Station 27, leaving behind a successful, hard-won career in what has traditionally been, and still is, a male-dominated job.

“This career has suited me so well through the years. It’s almost like this job and I found each other,” Nelson said. “One of the beautiful things is the lifestyle it has allowed me to live.”

But, as she tells it, the lifestyle and the job were never that separate to begin with.

ONE OF A FEW

At Portland Fire & Rescue, Nelson is one of a few.

Of the approximately 690 people who make up the Portland Fire & Rescue ranks, only 54, or about 8%, are female, according to department spokesperson Rick Graves. Those numbers are currently fluid, Graves added, as the department is in the midst of a “significant wave of retirements.”

Nelson said she’s heartened to see a number of “really strong, dynamic, smart women” climbing the ladder, with several at the rank of lieutenant and battalion chief. While women have thrived at Portland Fire & Rescue, including former chief Sara Boone who retired in 2023, there remain challenges to working in the male-dominated space.

A 2017 study found that female firefighters face a number of disparities, including harassment, ill-fitting safety equipment and inadequate training. The study, done by researchers with Kansas State University and the Center for Fire, Rescue, and EMS Health Research, linked those issues with recruitment and retention issues among female firefighters.

“This factor is a major public-health issue as females are part of the responders that protect communities all across the U.S.,” the authors wrote.

Nelson declined to speak on the specifics of her struggles in Portland, but was clear on the primary barrier she has faced.

“I always go up against doubt,” she said. “In this job where you can sometimes be doubted because of your gender and size, it is paramount to have this self-knowledge about my own capabilities and confidence.”

STRENGTH THROUGH ADVENTURE

Through all her adventures – the construction work in Antarctica, the ice climbing in Colorado, the three rafting trips through the Grand Canyon – Nelson has asked herself the same questions: “Am I really capable of this? Can I really do this?”

She said she’s driven by curiosity, about what her body and mind can do, as well as about the places and people she meets along the way, but at the end of the day it’s the sheer physical challenge that draws her in.

“What I do out in the adventure world is I’m often pushing my own physical limits,” Nelson said. “I also bring that back to work, and knowing how capable both the body and the mind are to do the work.”

In both her life as a global adventurer and her work as a firefighter, Nelson has faced intense, physically demanding tasks that require impeccable preparation to stay safe. The challenges she faces while, say, mountain biking the Great Divide, have come in handy while fighting fires on the edge of Forest Park.

“It’s confidence. Just self-assurance,” she said. “It’s confidence that I know I have what it takes, that I know I’m capable of it.”

But being a firefighter has proven to be much more than physically taxing. Nelson said it’s often the emotional challenges, an often-unspoken side of the job, that hit the hardest. Being on the front lines often means encountering people at their most vulnerable, and especially as a person who values personal interactions so highly, Nelson said the work has often been a stressor.

“Most people experience one tragic trauma in their life, and it’s something we do many times a month, many times a year,” Nelson said. “It’s truly a gift to be able to witness life in all its fullness, the full spectrum of it, but there’s heartbreak that comes with that.”

For her, the thrill-seeking trips are also mental health breaks, she said, opportunities to get out and take a deep breath (or some really deep breaths). And while she once took a meditation retreat to Bhutan, her follow-up motorcycle trip through Nepal was more her speed.

Upon retiring at the end of December, Nelson will waste no time in transitioning to her full-time life of adventure.

In January, she’ll be surfing in Costa Rica. February will be her annual ice climbing trip to Colorado. March is set aside for skiing and April for mountain biking, then May through July will be a bikepacking trip in the Balkans.

Nelson said she has a spreadsheet with roughly 200 trips she’d like to do, including sea kayaking, long-distance canoeing, wing surfing and telemark skiing. At only 50 years old, she feels like she has plenty of time to tackle the list.

In addition to everything else, she said her travels often prove that women can live this kind of adventurous lifestyle, another arena that’s often dominated by men. As a firefighter, she said she’s always delighted in interacting with girls, paving a potential pathway that may not have otherwise existed in their minds, and on her adventures, she has similar interactions.

“Seeing young girls and young women, their eyes just light up when they see me, because suddenly they’re imagining themselves,” Nelson said. “We have to see more people doing more things: women on motorcycles, women traveling alone, women in non-traditional roles. We need it.”

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