“We need to create a space for women to develop,” said Amanda Stamper, one of the training organizers, who darted up and down the trail to offer help. “They get held back on purpose because of bias. It makes it really hard for women to function well.”

During the first briefing meeting for the three-day prescribed burn in October, Kelly Martin, the fire chief at Yosemite National Park, was floored when she entered a dining hall and saw 35 women staring back at her. “It was just, like, ... stunning,” Martin said. “I needed a moment.”

In more than three decades as a wildfire fighter, she had never seen so many female colleagues in one room at one time.

Women who fight wildfires for the federal government describe their work as isolating and lonely — and scary in a way that has nothing to do with fire. In a male-dominated, hypermasculine discipline that operates like the military, they face discrimination, sexual harassment and verbal abuse.

Nearly 45 years ago, women sued for better access to firefighting jobs. Under court order, the Forest Service's operation increased female recruitment in a region that includes California, where bias against women is some of the worst in the nation, civil rights advocates say.

But when the order expired 10 years ago, the number of women sharply fell because, critics say, the service failed to adequately address a chauvinist culture.

Women hold about 12 percent of the government's permanent wildfire suppression jobs at the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management and National Park Service, and retaining them is a challenge.

A sample of recent Equal Employment Opportunity complaints show why many choose to leave.

Heidi Turpen, a former firefighter for the Forest Service, said male colleagues routinely propositioned her for sex and told her women didn't belong at her station in the Sequoia National Forest.

Alisha Dabney, a former Forest Service wildfire crew member said she was ordered by a supervisor to report when her menstrual cycle started and was placed in a headlock during an attempted rape. She said she was fired after reporting the harassment.

Anda Janik, a former firefighter who settled a claim against the Navy in 2013, was not provided with facilities to shower at a fire station outside San Diego. Janik said in an interview that she was forced to knock on a battalion commander's door each morning to ask to use his office shower.

Other women said they were propositioned for sex, inappropriately touched, stalked, photographed without their knowledge, spied on while bathing and screamed at because of their gender.

Many women said they are speaking out about abuse because of Fairfax County, Va., firefighter Nicole Mittendorff's suicide in April. After her body was discovered in Shenandoah National Park, county fire officials discovered sexually suggestive messages posted about Mittendorff on a website by her co-workers.

The Forest Service, which employs more than 10,000 federal firefighters, far more than any other agency, acknowledges past problems but said it now has zero tolerance for sexual harassment.

The agency said it requires civil rights training for every employee, conducts surveys and has bulked up its contingent of investigators and case workers for a rapid response to complaints.

“We do have positive trends,” said Lenise Lago, deputy chief for the agency's business operations. “Data shows that our cases of harassment based on gender are half of what they were five years ago.”

Critics say many women don't report bad conduct because they're afraid of repercussions.

Before Martin defied the odds to become one of the highest ranking officers in federal wildfire suppression, she was one such woman.

In testimony before a House oversight committee in September, Martin said she was stalked during training early in her career and spied on as she took a shower but kept quiet, as many women say they do, for fear that reporting it would hurt her career.

Martin told lawmakers she finally came forward at “great risk to my career” because recent cases have shown the kind of harassment she experienced in 1984 is still happening.

At a small apartment in suburban Los Angeles, Heidi Turpen held her head back to stop tears from streaming down her face.

Turpen was recalling her six-month stint as a seasonal worker last year for the Forest Service, a division of the Agriculture Department, in Sequoia National Forest. She was excited to have a job doing what she loved with good pay and government benefits.

But just three months into the season, according to her civil rights claim against the agency, the harassment started.

Turpen and another woman on her female crew were exercising with a male firefighter in a gym when another man approached: “When you're done rubbing that (female genitalia) all over yourself,” he said, addressing the male firefighter, “you can come have a beer with us.”

The women, stunned, debated whether they should report it. Turpen said yes; her friend declined. “She wanted to wait to see if things would get better. She didn't want to ruffle feathers. I said, ‘What about my feathers? They're ruffled.'?”

Turpen's report to a supervisor triggered a talk with both men. When she returned to the gym, she was told she was banned. She fought that decision and won. Later, she said, when women were moved to a male barrack from an all-female barrack because of a hole in the roof, she and a friend were verbally attacked by a man within days.

“He lays into us about the cleanliness of the kitchen, saying we're attracting bugs and we're dirty, and we should be washing dishes,” Turpen said.

“Finally he got so close to my face I said, ‘You're coming off a bit hostile right now,'?” Turpen recalled. “He said I was being hostile. Females shouldn't be here.”

The Forest Service declined to discuss individual claims, but Lesa Donnelly, vice president of the Agriculture Department's Coalition of Minority Employees, confirmed that Turpen is one of several women who brought charges against the agency. California is an especially bad place for women firefighters, Donnelly and other women said.

Over the remaining three months of Turpen's stint, she said that a police officer with a drug-sniffing dog illegally searched her room because of false rumors that she sold narcotics.

“I was also approached by male employees asking for sexual favors. A guy started stalking me.”

Her anxiety was creeping into paranoia. “My day-to-day life turned into this fear of what was going to happen next,” Turpen said.

After the season, Turpen switched careers. “I'm never going back,” she said.

Diversity training at the Forest Service tries to cover all the bases — bias in hiring and promotion, sexual harassment such as propositions and inappropriate touching, as well as dirty words about women that fly constantly on the crews.

A 2008 National Report Card on Women in Firefighting showed that 85 percent of women said they thought they were treated differently than men. Women reported being exposed to pornography, requests for sex and hostile language 15 times more often than men.

“There's something about firefighting that seems to make it a uniquely discriminatory environment,” said Debra D'Agostino, an attorney at the Federal Practice Group who represents Janik and other federal employees. “I deal with female law enforcement officers all the time and I don't hear this sort of thing.”

But Stamper and others say the troublemakers are a minority. Some men are trying to help change the culture of firefighting.

One is Travis Dotson, a firefighter who addressed discrimination against women in an essay he wrote in the summer for Two More Chains, a publication devoted to the profession.

“You see crew after crew after crew with no women on them. That's not a reflection of who's applying for these jobs,” Dotson said in an interview, explaining why he spoke out.

WTREX, or Women-in-Fire Training Exchange, electrified female firefighters when it was announced. Ninety people from 12 states applied and fewer than half were accepted for lack of space.

“This is a safe space,” said Lenya Quinn-Davidson, a University of California Cooperative Extension adviser who planned the event. “Women feel more comfortable in this environment.”

And they had swagger. They barked orders. They paid little attention to the dangerous poison oak they walked over to get to assignments. They wanted to demonstrate something too many of their male colleagues doubt - that women can do the work.

But though WTREX might have been a safe space deep in the forest, these women would have to return to their crews.

At the prescribed burn and in the dining hall where firefighters gathered for dinner, they spoke openly, sharing specific instances of discrimination and sexual harassment.

But afterward, nearly all of about 15 women interviewed for this article quietly asked that their comments not be included.

And each one said the same thing: It would hurt their career.