Colorado hockey community mourns fallen firefighter Emily Barker
Eagle firefighter was killed while working the Snyder Fire on June 27
Courtesy image
The Vail-area women’s hockey community is reeling from the loss of wildland firefighter Emily Barker, an Eagle resident who played defense for the Downvalley Divas, one of several Eagle County women’s teams.
The Vail area is home to one of the country’s most robust women’s hockey communities, shaped by women like Barker, 38, who was killed Friday fighting the Snyder Fire on the Colorado-Utah border.
She was one of the league’s best defenders, a role that symbolized her commitment to her teammates, who formed a close-knit group both on and off the ice.
Remembering Barker this week, friends from the Downvalley Divas shared a lot of tears, but a lot of laughs as well, reminiscing on the decade or so they got to spend with Barker playing hockey here in Eagle County.
Natural leader
When Barker arrived in Eagle County from Summit County in 2014, she moved in with Eagle resident Sarah Brubeck, who had taken out a classified ad for a roommate. The two immediately bonded over hockey.
“When she was moving in, she had a hockey bag,” Brubeck said. “I said ‘We play on a hockey team — do you want to come and check it out?’ So she came, and it very quickly became her second family.”
Barker had moved to Colorado from Michigan, where she was born and raised and attended college, studying ski area management, snow science and fire science. She found a career as a snowmaker at Vail Resorts, where she rose through the ranks to become the resort’s first female crew leader in snowmaking. She then turned to wildland firefighting in the summers, where she spent many years working as a BLM engine captain stationed out of Dubois, Idaho.
“She had a subtle confidence and an ability to lead, and I think that came from the fact that she cared about people,” Brubeck said. “She was always looking out for people and what they needed.”
In between her career roles, Barker dedicated the remainder of her time to passions, like snowmobiling and dirt biking, and to her friends and teammates on the Downvalley Divas. Team captain Erin Jarvis said Barker stood out in an environment where extraordinary women are the norm.
“I don’t know how she would manage her schedule,” Jarvis said. “She would come to practice on a Friday night, and then go do her overnight snowmaking.”
The hockey season starts in October each year, and oftentimes, Barker was still on active fire duty during the first few games.
“She would figure it out and drive in from Idaho just in time for our first game,” Jarvis said.
One of Barker’s closest friends on the team was fellow defender Kat Ruark, who grew up in Eagle County but met Barker at a hockey tournament in Nevada.
“I was put on a d-line with Emily that weekend, and she became my favorite defensive partner of all time,” Ruark said. “A few years later, I moved back to Eagle County and joined the team that she was on, and we were paired up a lot — she was No. 12, and I’m No. 11. The two of us would have fun and giggle, and she always had good little one-liners for the other team when they were in the crease, challenging our goalie.”
She said at a tournament in Breckenridge that Barker broke her glasses at one of the games, so she taped them together and added a mustache and furry eyebrows, playing “in disguise” for the rest of the game.
‘More like sisters’
The team was close off the ice, as well, traveling together and being there for each other during special moments — “job changes, breakups and different life events that we experience together,” as Brubeck described it. “We became more like sisters.”
A few years ago, the group planned a team trip to Honduras to enjoy a vacation in the sun. Barker was flying in from Idaho a couple hours ahead of the rest of the team, which was coming in from Colorado.
“Her plane ended up landing heavy and broke the tarmac, and all of us got rerouted, so it became a running joke that Emily broke the tarmac and shut down an entire airport,” Jarvis said. “She was sending us pictures the whole time of her having a cocktail by the pool saying ‘got the whole place to myself!'”
Back home, Brubeck said Barker would often watch firefighting documentaries in her free time. Brubeck said Barker was well studied on the details of the Storm King incident and Colorado’s terrible history of wildland firefighting deaths.
“She was very picky about which documentary she would watch — anything that was slightly inaccurate she wasn’t into,” Brubeck said.
Ruark said she didn’t realize how extensive Barker’s career had been until Barker began working on a transfer from Idaho to Colorado, and they started working on her resume together.
“It was stressful for her, so she came over to my house, we had a glass of wine and sat down on the couch, and she got out her calendar,” Ruark said. “I started writing down all that she had done. She had years and years and years of experience on so many different fires.”
Ruark’s career is connected to wildland firefighting, as well, as she works for a nonprofit that helps distribute funds for wildfire mitigation and restoration. She took a class recently about community wildfire mitigation best practices in Glenwood Springs.
“I met two firefighters from Idaho who had worked with Emily,” she said.
While Ruark said Barker was deeply knowledgeable about the science of wildfire, it was the adrenaline of the job that kept her returning each summer, never knowing how many nights she would spend in a sleeping bag on the fire line.
Brubeck said the adrenaline rush was what also attracted Barker to her passions — hockey, snowmobiling and dirt biking — and the same went for her other career in snowmaking, as well. The early morning hours out on the mountain working amid the loud noise, the pressurized water lines creating the intense spray out of the gun — it’s an exciting job, despite its difficult nature.
But it also takes a toll, and Brubeck said in recent years Barker had stepped away from it.
“She worked such hard shifts, in both of her lives — she would work all night long, all winter long snowmaking, and then she would go to fire and had these long, two-week stints fighting fire, and I think both jobs kind of burned her out a little bit,” Brubeck said.
Barker pivoted to working in retail at the North Face and Patagonia stores in Vail, and — after a few late night sessions working on her resume with Ruark — she got a job with the U.S. Forest Service’s Rifle Helitack crew, based in Rifle, which she hoped would cut down on the travel across the West.
With the extra time, she was able to commit to her friends in an even deeper way.
“She house sat for me when I was on vacation in November,” Brubeck said, “and when I came home, she had stocked the fridge, cleaned the house and made fresh banana bread.”
And in that commitment to her friends, she seemed to know exactly when to be there, Brubeck said.
“She has shown up at more than one appointment when one of us had to put our dogs down,” Brubeck said. “She was always there when we needed a friend.”
When Barker was traveling, Ruark said she and her dog, Gordie, could always count on receiving a postcard.
“At the end of every one, she’d write ‘Give Gordie a scratch behind the ear for me,’ or ‘Rub Gordie’s belly for me,'” Ruark said. “So now I’m reading those postcards and giving him one more scratch, from Emily.”
A memorial fund has been set up for Barker’s family at gofundme.com/f/support-for-travel-after-wildfire-heros-loss.
Original reporting from vaildaily.com
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