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Whatsapp Leo Contziu in action during a wildfire

Joel Pecotich and Leo Contziu have known each other since high school. In Sydney they're normal twenty-somethings with average jobs, but they spend half of each year fighting wildfires out of helicopters in the remote Canadian wilderness. Alex McClintock reports.

At home, Joel Pecotich is an arborist; Leo Contziu is a university student. But for five months each year, the Sydney friends work as professional firefighters in a remote region of Alberta, Canada.

You fly around in helicopters chasing lightning storms, you get to see big raging fires, get paid very well for it and have a blast out in the bush.

Working from a base six and a half hours north of the provincial capital Edmonton, the pair are part of an Alberta Department of Agriculture and Forestry 20-man response team. Their job is to travel by helicopter to new forest fires and get them under control as quickly as possible.

So how do two Australian friends end up fighting fires in the remote Canadian wilderness?

'Four years ago I was travelling and I met this really friendly dude at a hostel in Vancouver,' says Pecotich. 'We got chatting, he'd just finished his fire season. I figured I'd do it the next year.'

A photo posted by Joel P (@boredwithadd) on Nov 4, 2014 at 7:00pm PST

Before he got the job, however, Pecotich had to pass a battery of physical tests, including long-distance runs carrying 30 kilo pumps and hose packs, and get through an interview process. This year 1,100 people applied for 90 positions.

When Pecotich came back to Australia at the end of the season, Contziu was intrigued.

'It sounded like this insane job,' says Contziu. 'You fly around in helicopters chasing lightning storms, you get to see big raging fires, get paid very well for it and have a blast out in the bush.

'I was still studying. I realised I'll probably be starting a career in the next five years. This is the kind of thing I'll never get another chance to do.'

So in 2015 Contziu packed his things and headed for Canada.

'Any time there's a fire started by a quad bike or a lightning strike we go straight out and we try to supress it, whether it's a single tree or it's a 500,000 hectare fire like Fort Mac,' says Contziu, 26.

'Fort Mac' is Fort McMurray, the northern Alberta town of 61,000 that was evacuated earlier this month in the face of an enormous and fast-moving blaze. While that fire is still burning, there's hope that cooler conditions over the past few days will help fire crews keep it away from the region's oil production facilities.

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Whatsapp The crew battles with a dust storm

Contziu and Pecotich are currently fighting a different, though still enormous fire.

'We're fighting a fire that started in British Columbia about two weeks and it crept up and crossed the Alberta border and blew up,' says Pecotich, 27. 'It's threatening a bunch of cabins and oil and gas industry infrastructure, so we're out there trying to cut this thing off.

'The province is really jumpy at the moment because of what happened in Fort Mac. Resources are stretched and they don't want another incident.'

And despite the temporary respite in the weather (temperatures range from minus three degrees at night to 26 during the day), the pair anticipate a long, difficult season.

'Two years ago we were standing in snow at this time,' says Pecotich. 'This year we haven't had snow for two months. It's been drier than hell up here. My first season we had 21 fires, last year there were over 200 fires, this year it's been every day.'

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Whatsapp Pecotich and Contziu

Though they've been in some sticky situations together, Pecotich says he's not worried about the danger.

'The thing I tell people is that firefighting up here in Alberta is like firefighting with cheats on in a video game. You have unlimited resources; things that no other country or province would ever have.

'There's huge helicopters that work logging; if you want bulldozers they're just waiting; there's caterpillar trucks; there's heavy machinery used for oil and gas during the winter. You call them, they'll be there.'

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Whatsapp Firefighters Joel Pecotich and Leo Contziu in Alberta

Though the pair don't share a cabin at their base near the town of Manning, they spend a lot of time together and have a tendency to finish each other's sentences.

'On our days off we just take road trips,' says Contziu. 'This last day off…'

'...we went to a bar,' supplies Pecotich, 'the closest pub with girls I guess you could say, which is two and a half hours away.

'The longest we've driven for a day off is 17 hours north. We spent a lot of time in the car but we really wanted to get as far as we could, so we drove to Dawson City…'

'…in the Yukon,' says Contziu. It's wild…'

'…and we could have gone back to Alaska,' finishes Pecotich, 'but someone didn't have their passport.'

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Whatsapp Things can get a bit lonely nine hours north of the US border

Though the isolation is clearly a challenge, both men say they wouldn't trade it for anything.

'We see bears and elk and moose; we get to get right up close,' says Contziu. 'We get to see giant storm systems rolling across Albertan plains…'

'... you see lightning strikes, the northern lights, you see 40-foot flames,' offers Pecotich.

'I don't think I can work indoors anymore. It's kinda screwed me over in that respect.'

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