In fact, there were relatively few trees in the desert around her childhood home in Tucson, Ariz., and her family wasn't endeared of the outdoors.
“My dad's idea of roughing it was staying at a motel with no boxspring,” she said.
“And who wouldn't want to work for the Forest Service?” she said, smiling. “They've got (fire) lookout towers, Lassie, the cool uniforms.”
McAllister, the deputy regional forester in the Forest Service's Northern Region, will retire in September after 33 years of government service, Northern Regional Forester Tom Tidwell announced last week.
“Kathy brought a wealth of experience and dedication to the Northern Region,” Tidwell said. “Her career is an excellent example of a lifetime of service to a diverse group of stakeholders and natural resource conservation.”
McAllister will be replaced by Jane Cottrell, the forest supervisor on the Nez Perce National Forest in Idaho.
The deputy regional forester is responsible for day-to-day management of the Northern Region office, which is located in Missoula. The office supports national forests and grasslands in North Dakota, South Dakota, north Idaho and Montana.
McAllister's first job with the Forest Service was as a seasonal clerk on the Coronado National Forest in southeastern Arizona while she was attending college in the early 1970s.
She worked on Mount Lemmon in the Santa Catalina Mountains, one of the “sky islands” ranges known for their biological diversity.
“I learned a lot that first summer,” she said.
McAllister continued working summers for the Forest Service on a helitack crew and as a fire prevention technician. After graduating, she worked for the agency as a forester and on the recreation staff in Arizona.
She later served as a district ranger in West Virginia, a Job Corps center director in Wisconsin, a deputy forest supervisor in Missouri, and as the forest supervisor on the Superior National Forest in Minnesota. She became deputy regional forester in Missoula in 1996.
The Forest Service has undergone many changes during the past three decades, from wildfire management to climate change to increased public participation in the agency's decision-making and management, McAllister said.
“Today, I think we have a larger population that has a greater appreciation of our public lands,” she said. “We're more sophisticated as a society in terms of understanding how important our public lands are.”
While more public participation has resulted in better land management, an increase in appeals and lawsuits has cost time and money that the Forest Service often could have spent more effectively in the woods, she said.
“It gets a little frustrating,” she said. “It's not always fun. It's not always easy. But public involvement is what we should be doing. We can't just sit back and throw stones and complain and not get engaged.”
The West's worsening wildfires over the past decade have become a dominant issue for the Forest Service, which now spends nearly 50 percent of its budget on fire suppression.
“As a society, we're still coming to grips with longer fire seasons and smokier skies,” she said. “As an agency, we were dang good at putting out fires and we still are, but we're more thoughtful about it now” - in terms of suppressing fires that threaten people and property and allowing remote fires to burn as a natural part of the ecosystem.
McAllister said her biggest career accomplishment was helping to forge a water compact between the Forest Service and the state of Montana.
The agreement was signed last year after 15 years of negotiations aimed at balancing the needs of irrigation and in-stream flows. It was the first water compact the Forest Service has signed with a state.
Federal reserved water rights are created when federal lands are set aside for a specific purpose, such as national forests, national parks, or fish and wildlife refuges.
While it was intended that enough water be reserved to meet the purposes for which the federal lands were designated, those rights still have to be negotiated with the state.
McAllister, who was the Forest Service's lead negotiator, said water law is the most complex issue she has dealt with in her career.
The water compact meetings were open to the public but attracted few people, which surprised McAllister.
“It's a much more significant issue than the next timber sale,” she said. “Believe it or not, trees grow back, but not to have enough water in our streams is much more devastating.”
McAllister said, good-naturedly, that her second biggest accomplishment was “grooming” the last two chiefs of the Forest Service, Gail Kimball and Dale Bosworth. Both were regional foresters in Missoula before taking the helm in Washington, D.C.
“We put the finishing touches on them here, so they were ready to move up,” she said, smiling.
She said she briefly considered applying for the regional forester job over the years, but decided she was better suited as the second in command.
“I'm better at the day-to-day running of things,” she said. “That's been my role, working with a lot of very good people at the Forest Service.”
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