Denise Joi is a wildlife pilot and conservationist who’s taken her passion for the outdoors to the skies. Denise works alongside biologists to research, survey, and transport species in an effort to protect biodiversity. Her job is incredibly challenging and takes a lot of planning. But for Denise, it is beyond worth it.
Denise Joi is a wildlife pilot and conservationist who’s taken her passion for the outdoors to the skies. Denise works alongside biologists to research, survey, and transport species in an effort to protect biodiversity. Her job is incredibly challenging and takes a lot of planning. But for Denise, it is beyond worth it.
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Denise Joi:
So I used to tell people that I started flying because I took a lesson when I was 17 or 18 and I got hooked and I just couldn't stop thinking about it, and it was actually a lie. I actually started thinking about flying when I was eight. We didn't have much growing up, so nature was my playground. It was my solace.
Shelby Stanger:
That's a clip from Fight or Flight, a short film about Denise Joi. Denise is a pilot and conservationist who's carved out a career for herself as a wildlife pilot. It's a job I didn't even know existed. Wildlife pilots work closely with biologists to support research, survey and transport species, and preserve biodiversity. When Denise flies, she has to get as close to the ground as possible, avoiding obstacles like power lines and towers. Her job is incredibly challenging and takes a lot of planning, but for Denise, it is beyond worth it.
I'm Shelby Stanger, and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living, an REI Co-op Studios production brought to you by Capital One. Denise Joi, welcome to Wild Ideas Worth Living. I'm really excited to speak with you today.
Denise Joi:
Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here.
Shelby Stanger:
Yeah, so you've had this really wild career becoming a wildlife pilot, which I didn't even know existed. Could you just tell those of us who, like me don't know, what is a wildlife pilot?
Denise Joi:
Gosh, I didn't know it existed either. So wildlife pilot is one that flies for wildlife conservation, wildlife management, a lot of wildlife pilots are also biologists. And once I saw this sort of niche work, it was really important for me to be involved in it because, I mean, nature has been such a healing place for me. It's been such a grounding place for me and just to feel like I could be working with something that I was so passionate about. I've really wanted to work with conservation in some aspect of my life more.
Shelby Stanger:
Yeah, it's really cool. You have these two passions, wildlife and flight. It's incredible that you've been able to combine these into a career. A career that, like we said, didn't know totally existed at the time. Makes sense what you do now. I completely understand it now. I'm like, "Oh yeah, I've seen those guys flying overhead." That's who those people are. Amazing. But even for a young woman to become a pilot at a young age, talk to me about how you decided to become a pilot.
Denise Joi:
I started when I was young, 17, but I thought about flying when I was a child. I had a lot of adverse childhood experiences, and so for me, flying was just sort of therapeutic. The idea of flying. I remember pushing and pulling on the swing as hard as you can. You know how you can go so far you start to kind of, there's that little microsecond of freeness where you're not on the suspension of the chain of the swing anymore. If you push high enough, too high, you start to free float. Do you know what I mean? On a swing?
Shelby Stanger:
Yeah. I loved pushing it up there, but I was terrified every time.
Denise Joi:
That was my first flight experience as a kid. I would do that at recess every day, just push as hard as I could to get a little bit of flight. And it was just so fantastic for me dealing with my history just to get out of tunnel vision of my own life and my own problems and realize how small I am and how everyone else has their own story. And that was really healing for me too.
The perspective gave me, I think, freedom from my story and myself. And it wasn't until later in life that I actually got to take those lessons, but I didn't know anyone that flew. I didn't have a family member or an aunt or an uncle or a community. So I think the hardest thing was finding a community and finding a mentor because it's so expensive. And once I found a mentor in a community though with aviation, then it just started to really accelerate. But I mean, it started when I was 17 and I didn't get my licenses really until I was like 26... was my first license that I got. So it was a long road.
Shelby Stanger:
It's still pretty young to have gotten your license and it's more common now, but I mean when you did it, first of all, there's probably no other 17 year olds taking flight lessons, let alone women, I'm guessing.
Denise Joi:
I definitely was the only one. So the first school that I went to actually closed. And so unfortunately a lot of my money went along with that program. So when that flight school closed, I actually decided, "Well, I'll just go to Alaska. I don't need to go to school here in New Hampshire."
And so it was in the middle of the winter and I fly to Alaska and I didn't call anybody ahead. I just took a bus from Anchorage Airport to Merrill Airport, which is sort of the local airport there. And I showed up and I walked in and I said, "Hi, I want to take some flight lessons." And it was December. It was the worst weather and the worst time of the year, and I was incredibly naive and I just literally just showed up.
And even as I'm an adult right now, I can look at those times when I was young and I could have said, "Wow, that was so, again, naive. Why didn't I call people ahead? Why didn't I make arrangements? Why didn't I prepare myself?" And I didn't really have a lot of executive function to be had with that situation. But also I think sometimes as an adult, we're sort of waiting for us to be a hundred percent ready for a change, whether that be changing a relationship or changing a job or changing where you live, I think I'm never going to feel 100% ready. And I almost feel like if I wait until I'm 100% ready or 100% comfortable with something, like the ship might've sailed. I think there has to be a little bit of, "You know, I'm ready enough. I don't have all the answers. I don't even know what this is, but I know that somebody does."
Shelby Stanger:
When it comes to following a wild idea, it's pretty easy to get caught up in paralysis by over analysis. Sometimes you just have to start before you're fully ready. Denise did her best to not let fear or self-doubt hold her back. In Alaska, she learned to fly in the back country and she was exposed to its vast landscapes and exceptional beauty. She also witnessed the realities of climate change.
I'm guessing you could have become a commercial airline pilot and worked for Delta or United or Air New Zealand, I don't know, any airline, and you decide to become a wildlife pilot. How did you decide which career path to take?
Denise Joi:
You see everything as a pilot, and that's when I started to really become more involved in conservation because companies pay a lot of money to hide what happens to the extraction of resources or to the development of just how we raise our animals that we eat, how we farm our food. And so you see all of that as a pilot. You see mining, you see clear cutting, you see the fields and fields of methane and fracking and just what's happening, especially over 20 years being a pilot.
But I went into this school because I had a mountain flying course and I worked five or six summers up there in Denali National Park and St. Elias Wrangell Park, and it was in Denali when I was working up there one summer. They have park service pilots, they have wildlife pilots, essentially. It's one of those jobs where you need the experience before you get the job, but you don't really get the experience until you do the work. So I ended up volunteering for a couple of years with organizations. One was LightHawk. This is an organization that works with nonprofits who don't have airplanes because they're expensive and there is nothing better to talk about conservation than by flight, getting an aerial picture of our dry river beds or an aerial picture of a clear cut forest or an aerial picture of ranches or land use or you name it.
And the industry is so small. So for me, it was about contacting as many people that I knew in the industry, and so I really had my feelers out in different organizations or states that I knew might open up a position someday. These positions are so few and far between that you sort of wait for somebody to retire. And so once that position opened up in Colorado, I flew back and I applied for it. That's one of the hardest jobs I ever applied for, to be honest. It was a really strong pool of aviators and it was a really long day. We had to fly three hours with each pilot just doing scenario-based flights on... a lot of it was decision making, what kind of judgments you would have in the aircraft for different scenarios. I am the first woman that was hired for parks... And I should say was. I actually just recently left Colorado Parks and Wildlife, but-
Shelby Stanger:
You're the first woman they ever hired. That's badass.
Denise Joi:
Yeah. I was the first woman and there were some people on the team that were concerned about my strength, if I was able to do it. But then there was one person who fought for me, and if that one person didn't fight for me, I wouldn't have been hired, to be honest.
Shelby Stanger:
When we come back, Denise talks about what her day-to-day work looked like as a wildlife pilot in Colorado and the impact flying has had on her life.
There are less than 50 wildlife pilots in the US, and Denise Joi is one of them. Denise flew for Colorado Parks and Wildlife for nine years. While she worked there, her job consisted of many components like surveying animals and birds and restocking fish in high alpine lakes. There are many different types of professional flying and working as a wildlife pilot requires a particular expertise. They have to fly close to the ground, which can be really dangerous. And it's important that they're extremely focused on each descent.
There's these alpine lakes, which I've always been like, "How did fish get up here? Okay, it's people like Denise, I guess, who are dropping them out of their planes." Do you just fly over and there's some sort of bucket that comes out of the plane and you drop fish? How does this work?
Denise Joi:
So these alpine lakes, we stock about over 400 of them in the Rockies. And if you imagine someone taking a scoop in these hillsides, like these high 14,000 foot alpine mountains on the base of them right below, that's like if you take a little scoop of ice cream out. Someone sort of described it like that once to me. There's a lake there. And so we put, if you can imagine, I guess a metal cube, essentially. It holds fish and then it comes down the center of the aircraft through what looks like a grain silo with a hopper on the bottom like a flap. And so we fly over, we have to maneuver the aircraft into these areas of the mountains and fly over at about 150 feet to release the fish on top of the lake. And that's probably one of the more high-risk operations that we do because we really have to get inside of the mountain really low level.
And it's interesting, when I first started flying in the mountains when I got my private pilot's license is interestingly instructor is like, "Well, you don't go in these areas." You always want to have outs as a back country pilot. If you lose an engine, if you have an emergency, whether that be an engine emergency, electrical emergency, there's different systems on the aircraft, fuel, you want to have time to manage the emergency. The closer you are to the ground, the less time you have to manage your emergency. So it can be a really high stressful job because your nervous system is constantly in fight or flight, but your nervous system can't constantly be on that way. You can't constantly be on this sort of cortisol rush of like, "Everything's going to fail." And I've had to really train my nervous system to be really healthy and elastic to go in and out of that.
And so I really am very much a conservative pilot because we fly lower than most other aircraft. I really respect that because you are thinking about, again, this high level awareness of, "Okay, I have to think about my aircraft not running into power lines, not running into towers", but then I'm also thinking about the animals. I'm moving the animals, they're walking away, they're running away. I try not to startle them. I'm thinking about, "Okay, where are they going to be pushed towards?" Are they going to be like, I have to look at gullies, I have to look at barbed wire fence. I have to look at deadfall. I have to look at making sure that I am maneuvering in a way that they're not going to hurt themselves. And so there really isn't a lot of time to be like, "Wow, this is such a great flight. I'm having so much fun." I'm only really excited about the work that we do when we come back home.
Shelby Stanger:
Even though conservation is at the heart of Denise's work, she says her top priority is making sure the animals and humans that she transports land safely. If you want to see exactly what her job looks like, it was captured in a beautiful film called Fight or Flight. In the movie, Denise gets vulnerable about her upbringing, her experience as a pilot, and how flying brought her a sense of perspective and peace.
This beautiful movie came out about you, Fight or Flight, that tells your story in a very real visceral way, and some of it, of your story has been hard. I'm curious what the reaction has been like and what you think of it because it's been out for a little bit now.
Denise Joi:
Gosh, yeah. I was terrified making it and just quickly, that was almost like a healing journey in and of itself because at first I wanted to just highlight women in aviation, there's 20% private pilots. It was only about 5% in the workforce still. So I really wanted to lift females in this industry, but I really wanted it to be more than surface level. I wanted it to be more than my job, and I had to reach out to my mentors and my friends and my colleagues. I'm like, "What do I share? What's too much?"
It's my experience. That's what happened to me. That's where I came from, but that's not how I identify myself anymore. And just how do you talk about childhood trauma when it's very taboo in our industry? And so there was a lot to kind of touch upon in the 14-minute film, and I think it was done really well. I've only gotten really positive response, and I think we connect through stories and it's through connection that we heal. And so I think you always, when you share vulnerable sides of yourself, you're trying to help people that feel alone, feel stuck. And so it's so great to feel like people have reached out to me and said that they relate to my story or thanked me for sharing, and it wasn't comfortable. It was a very uncomfortable process the whole way through.
Shelby Stanger:
Recently, Denise made the brave decision to leave her position at Colorado Parks and Wildlife. In many ways it was her dream job, but she knew that it was time to move on and explore new frontiers. As we were working on this episode, Denise was heading to Africa to help with conservation efforts and poaching prevention.
When did you decide to leave Colorado Parks and Wildlife?
Denise Joi:
July.
Shelby Stanger:
Okay, so you just left. Let's talk about that.
Denise Joi:
Yeah. I think with wildlife management and conservation, the job isn't really done. You're just continuing the work. And I never wanted the job to change my identity. I never wanted my work to become my identity because you have to be really careful with that. But it did. And so as I left Colorado Parks and Wildlife, I feel like I stayed a little bit too long. We talked also too, about not being a hundred percent ready. I knew it was time for me to learn other things and to grow in other areas, but my identity was a wildlife pilot. And so I got great advice from a couple of my friends who were athletes. One of them was a triathlete, and she got diagnosed with MS, and she's in a wheelchair now. And unfortunately, there's no way back for her.
And I think identity can be helpful, and I think it can be harmful too. I think sometimes what you do can really uplift you and tell your story, and you can relate to that, and it can be empowering, but it also can sometimes put you in a box, and then when you lose that part of yourself, you lose your whole self. And so I got into being a wildlife pilot, and I wanted really hard to be separated from it, but it became me. And so now that I'm no longer "a wildlife pilot" full-time, I'm going to be doing it part-time. It's been a struggle, but I'm also at an age where I'm really okay with not being about what I do for a living. My self-worth is not that story. It's really interesting. I haven't really fully formed the words yet. I think there's two things that are really, my mentors have talked to me a lot in aviation, complacency, when you're not learning and when you're not growing.
And I think people always talk about good pilots have good judgment. I think the best pilots have humility, which I think also encompasses good judgment, but it also recognizes your humility to always seeking a better way, your humility to always wanting to do better. There was definitely a feeling of like, "I've learned this. I've got this." I hadn't had any incidences, a flat tire. I just had an impeccable safety record, and I was really proud of that. And I learned how to do the job really well and really safely.
But then I really noticed that complacency happening, not in the sense I was forgetting things or I was becoming lazy, but just like I was plateaued, right? It's like, this is where it is, and this is all it's ever going to be. And that's kind of a, I wouldn't say a red flag being a pilot, but it's really important to be challenging yourself and learning, because once you get really comfortable, your skills start to really kind of shrink, and you kind of constantly want to be pushing against your comfort zone a little bit. Learning, being challenged. And I guess I just really wanted to just challenge myself even further.
Shelby Stanger:
What has the art and discipline of flying given you personally?
Denise Joi:
I think the empowerment of being able to be pilot in command, not in an ego sense, but just having my own voice and I think that was, it's really healing. And then I also think too, it gave me a huge sense of awareness on conservation and wanting to be a part of that.
Shelby Stanger:
If you want to learn more about Denise's story, watch her short film, Fight or Flight. It's one of the most beautiful short films we've seen this year. We'll link to it in the show notes. To find out what's next and see some videos of her flights, follow her on Instagram at denise.joi. That's D-E-N-I-S-E dot J-O-I.
Wild Ideas Worth Living is part of the REI Podcast network. It's hosted by me, Shelby Stanger, produced by Annie Fassler, Sylvia Thomas, and Sam Peers Nitzberg of Puddle Creative. Our senior producers are Jenny Barber and Hannah Boyd. Our executive producers are Paolo Mottola, and Joe Crosby. As always, we love it when you follow the show, take time to rate it and write a review wherever you listen. And remember, some of the best adventures happened when you follow your wildest ideas.