SCA alum Chris Hensley dedicated his entire career to forest conservation. After completing two back-to-back programs with the SCA, he immediately took a job with a federal trail crew in Big Sur, California, and never looked back. Today, he’s a wildland firefighter in southwest Colorado.
“Where I live, I’m surrounded by the forest I work in,” he said. “Surrounded entirely by millions of acres of federal public land.”
Hensley learned about the SCA a few short months before graduating from college, where he was working toward a degree in studio art with a concentration in photography.
“I didn’t really have any solid plans leaving college. There was a little SCA booth set up outside the cafeteria, and it had a sign up that said something like, ‘Do you like being outdoors and camping?’,” he said. “I went over, checked it out, and that day I applied for jobs all over the country. I heard back from one, accepted it, and that was it. That was a huge trajectory change for me in life.”
Hensley spent six months building new trails in the George Washington Jefferson National Forest in Virginia, where he learned how to use hand tools, live in the woods and navigate multiple close encounters with black bears.
After that crew experience, he joined another SCA crew working with Friends of Nevada Wilderness.
“We were part of the pilot program for wilderness monitoring,” he said. “We worked with the Southern Nevada Agency Partnership, the first organization of its kind in the country that actually had all four federal land management agencies working together on wilderness specifically.”
Enacted by Congress in 1964, the Wilderness Act defined wilderness as “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain,” formally establishing the mechanisms to preserve and protect these public lands.
Working with staff from the U.S. Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service, and Fish & Wildlife Service, Hensley’s crew participated in documenting the impacts of the Wilderness Act in the 50 years since its passing. This work deepened his appreciation for America’s public lands and gave him the opportunity to network with professionals across federal agencies.
“Those two seasons were a huge catalyst for me in my life and getting me into this work that I wanted to be a part of,” Hensley said. “The SCA got me into conservation and public lands in a way that I didn’t even know existed before. It’s turned into my career and my passion.”
SCA Alum Chris Hensley shakes the hand of Michigan Rep. Jack Bergman outside the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C. (Photo Courtesy: Chris Hensley)
Today, Hensley is president of his local chapter of the National Federation of Federal Employees (NFFE). Over the past year, he’s traveled to Washington, D.C., numerous times to advocate for a long-sought permanent pay raise for federal wildland firefighters that was appropriated in March 2025.
He continues to advocate for the preservation of federal public lands while educating the public and members of Congress about their importance.
