When she graduated from high school, Mariah Choiniere wasn’t sure what type of career she wanted to pursue. Rather than diving right into college, she took some time to determine her path. She through-hiked the Appalachian Trail, and then the Pacific Crest Trail. She worked for different Conservation Corps programs, gaining skills and knowledge along the way. That work turned Mariah toward forestry, and she’s now a junior majoring in forestry at the University of Vermont’s Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources. Recently named a Truman Scholar, Mariah has her sights set on graduate school in the future and a career focused on agroforestry.
I grew up in Franklin, Vermont, which is just south of the Canadian border, on a 300-acre woodlot, kind of surrounded by farmland. We had a couple of ponds near our house, and I was always outside catching frogs and just enjoying the wildlife. My dad taught me and my brother how to hunt. We had a couple of tree stands and ground blinds. I got my hunter’s license when I was 8 and I bagged my first deer when I was 11 and have been hunting ever since. Getting that first deer, helping to provide food for my family, that was a really nice moment. I definitely have limited time to hunt now, but I try to go out a few times a year.
I went to Green Mountain Conservation Camp as a kid, so I learned more hunting skills, fishing skills, trapping skills. I helped my parents with the garden and working in our woods. We cut firewood, so I was always out in the woods with my dad. Growing up, we harvested sap. We just had some buckets out and made a few gallons for our own use. I’ve spent a lot of time in our home woodlot. That definitely influenced my love for the outdoors.
When I was a teenager, I started hiking. My parents weren’t really big hikers, so I kind of just got into it on my own. When I was 20, I thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail, which was a 6-month-long hike. That was a super immersive experience, just spending the summer outdoors. It was also my first time traveling outside of New England. The experience of seeing different ecosystems and getting out of the northern hardwoods was really interesting. I started on my own, and I met people along the way and made some friends out there, and we ended up hiking together for a lot of it.
I’d wanted to do the Appalachian Trail for a long time. One of the counsellors I had one year at summer camp had done it. At that time, I couldn’t even fathom driving to Georgia, let alone walking from Georgia back up north. I had no backpacking experience when I started the AT, other than a handful of short overnights. I just wanted to see how far I made it, and if I made it to the end, great – and if I didn’t, at least I went out there and tried. About 150 miles in I got patellar tendonitis in both my knees, and I thought the hike was over for me. But I loved being out there. I loved hiking. I didn’t want to quit. So I just lightened my load and took a lot of rest days and was able to overcome that injury and continue on.
I did the Pacific Crest Trail in 2018, that’s from the Mexican Border to the Canadian border. I just loved the AT, and I wanted to experience a trail out west. The PCT goes through the desert and into the Sierra Nevadas, then into the Cascades. The AT was a lot harder; it’s more rugged. The PCT is graded for horses, so physically it’s a lot less challenging than the Appalachian Trail, but it has its own set of challenges. It’s a lot longer, and in the desert, water is a huge issue, because it’s sometimes 30, 40 miles between water sources.
I took several gap years before starting college. I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do, and I felt like I should get some real world experience. After I finished the AT, I traveled around the west a little bit and ended up in Montana. I worked with the Montana Conservation Corps doing invasive species management in national parks and national forests. Then I did another Conservation Corps program in Arizona, which was focused on habitat restoration for a couple of species of endangered birds. We did 4-acre patch cuts in a monoculture stand of tamarisk, a tree I believe was brought over for erosion control during the Dust Bowl era, but it ended up taking over the riparian corridors. So we were so cutting that out and replanting native vegetation – cottonwoods and willows.
That work really resonated with me. I loved using a chainsaw and putting in the trees and kind of having it be full circle. That was when I decided that I wanted to pursue forestry. I also did a season with the Conservation Corps of North Carolina, where I led a trail/saw crew. That was really helpful to get leadership experience. I brought people out into the woods in their first season doing the field work. I got to teach them how to be sawyers and how to be safe. I started college at Vermont Tech in 2019 and did a year there. They have a partnership with UVM’s forestry program, so you can make a seamless transfer into the 4-year program. The pandemic accelerated that process for me, and I decided to transfer to UVM after only one year.
During the summer of 2020, between my year at Vermont Tech and starting at UVM, I also spent a season with the Forest Service out west doing wildland fire, in Winthrop, Washington. That was really cool. I’d been wanting to do fire since my time in Montana. During my time with the different Conservation Corps programs, I was trying to gain the skills for that. And the thru-hiking definitely helped with my physical endurance. Fire is pretty tough work, and you need to be in good shape to keep up and be safe.
At UVM, I’m involved in the school’s chapter of the Society of American Foresters and in the Femmes in Forestry club. I was the treasurer for the SAF chapter this year and will be president this upcoming year. Our student chapter meets every week and we get different guest speakers to come in and talk about their research or their organization and what’s going on in the forestry world. We have 8 acres of club-managed land at the Jericho Research Forest, and we have a management plan for our stand. We’re cutting out a lot of the white pine that’s in poor form, and trying to regenerate some oak in that stand. We planted some chestnuts this spring, and hopefully we’ll have some survival of that in our stand.
Forestry is a pretty male dominated field, so Femmes in Forestry is a way for women in natural resource fields to get together and create a community and bring in more female-identifying speakers who are in the field. My friend Daria helped create Femmes in Forestry. I think every year there are a lot more women coming into forestry, which is great. But in some of our classes there are still just a handful of us.
I’m a Pathways intern with the NRCS (Natural Resources Conservation Service). It’s a two-year internship, and if I complete the required hours, I’ll be offered a full time position when I graduate. I work with dairy farmers and private forestland owners, providing technical and financial assistance, getting them funding for different projects that help reduce resource degradation. There are forestry positions within that agency. I will probably stay with the NRCS for a year or two after graduation. And then I’ll probably head to graduate school.
I’m planning to attend the Yale School of the Environment. I want to specialize in agroforestry practices, which is something I’ve become interested in over this past year. I had never heard about agroforestry until I attended the New England Society of American Foresters annual meeting last spring. There was a presenter, who is a researcher at Yale, who talked about silvopasture and the application for that in the Northeast. It kind of connects with the NRCS as well.
Silvopasture is integrating trees into pasture systems. So instead of just having your forages, you’re managing for forages, as well as trees, as well as your livestock. Carbon is such a huge topic right now, getting more trees on the landscape is a huge topic. Vermont’s land base is 70 percent forest, so where can you put more trees? This is one way we can integrate more trees into our agricultural land. It’s also beneficial from an animal health standpoint – having that diffuse shade could be really important as the climate changes, and animals are experiencing heat stress. Up until this fiscal year, Vermont NRCS hadn’t funded silvopasture. I gave a presentation to the NRCS state office about silvopasture, and I think that helped push them to start to fund it.
When I started with NRCS, I’d worked all over the west and down south as well. I hadn’t done a lot of natural resource or forestry work in New England, so I kind of wanted to stay local, and I thought that was a good opportunity. I ended up getting placed in the Franklin County office. It’s been interesting to work in my home community and work with producers and landowners more local to me.
I really love New England. The west is beautiful, but I feel more connected to this landscape, these mountains, these forests. I’d gained all these skills out west, and I wanted to bring that back and concentrate that effort here, in a place that I care about.
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