When Matthew Meinhold moved to Park City in 1992, he thought it would be a temporary stop on his way to California. He had just graduated from Keene State College in New Hampshire and planned on moving to the Lake Tahoe area to crash on his friends’ couches and take full advantage of the Sierr a Nevada’s ski resorts. But that winter in Park City showed Meinhold the beauty of Utah’s own ski culture and convinced him to stay in the Beehive State for longer than expected. On Sunday, Meinhold retired from his post as a captain and paramedic with the Park City Fire District after a 20-year career with the department. “I think the exceptional people that I’ve had an opportunity to work with over the years are what I’ll miss the most,” Meinhold said about his retirement. “Helping people on the worst day of their life is always rewarding as well, and that’s why I do it, to give back to my community. But the people I worked with were my family.” Meinhold grew up all over the United States, with a brief four-year departure to live in Iran when he was in elementary school. His father, who was a military pilot in the Vietnam War, had accepted a job with Grumman Aerospace teaching Iran’s air force how to fly F-14s. The family left Iran in the late 1970s, when the country started to experience political turmoil. They ended up in New York before moving to Texas and ultimately New Hampshire, where Meinhold attended high school and college. Park City Fire Capt. Matt Meinhold embraces his wife, Bridgette, after being presented with an American flag lowered during his final shift. Credit: Jonathan Herrera/Park Record He was always interested in skiing, though, learning how to shred the gnar from his father, who passed away last year. “I owe it all to him because he taught us how to ski and gave me the bug, and that’s what I wanted to do, so once I graduated from college, I headed out west,” Meinhold said. “I hung around and then got to experience summer in Utah, and that was pretty fantastic. I learned how to rock climb and got into mountain biking, and the rest is history, as far as I’m concerned.” Meinhold spent about a decade working on Main Street at various restaurants, finding seasonal work as a ski guide and even making trips to Alaska to work for an all-inclusive helicopter skiing operation. But after 13 years of working as a ski patroller and guide, Meinhold decided it was time for him to find a job with insurance benefits and a retirement plan. So, he enrolled in the West Valley Fire Academy in 2004. He obtained the necessary certifications and realized he enjoyed it, leading to his first job as a firefighter with the Ogden Fire Department. “Their call volume is pretty high, so every morning that I got off shift, it seemed more often than not I’d have to pull over and take a nap on the side of the road on my way home so I didn’t fall asleep at the wheel,” Meinhold said. Meinhold spent a year with the Ogden Fire Department before accepting a job with the Park City Fire District, where he’s spent the last two decades. “We live and work out of that station for 48 hours, so the men and women I worked with over the years are pretty much like family to me,” Meinhold said. “The experiences that we go through, as far as emergency scenes and that sort of thing, bond you in a special sort of way.” Retiring Park City Fire Capt. Matt Meinhold, center, stands with firefighters Logan Rodriguez, left, and Collin Higgins on Sunday morning. Credit: Jonathan Herrera/Park Record The Park City Fire District offers training and certifications for specialized scenarios, such as trench rescues or hazmat responses, but Meinhold said he preferred to focus on being a structural firefighter and paramedic to ensure he was providing the best care possible to those in need. “The way that it’s currently set up, those guys who are doing specialties do a lot of extra work but don’t necessarily get compensated for that work because it depends on their rank,” Meinhold said. “I just never felt the urge to do that, and I wanted to focus on being a good firefighter and a good paramedic, and all those other certifications took away from me being able to focus on the two things that I see as being the core requirements of being a good first responder.” Meinhold said there was one particular incident in his career about 10 years ago that stood out to him when reflecting on his time with the Fire District: a man who had a heart attack while skiing at Park City Mountain. “They brought him down in a toboggan, and the ski patrollers were doing CPR on him,” Meinhold said. “My crew and myself were waiting at the bottom, and once he got there, we hooked him up to our equipment, started an IV and called a helicopter.” By the time the medical helicopter arrived, the man had experienced ROSC, a return of spontaneous circulation, meaning his heart had started beating and circulating blood normally throughout his body despite the cardiac arrest. He was then transported to the University of Utah Hospital to receive further medical care. “A couple of years later, he happened to be back in town skiing, and he looked me up and came to the fire station,” Meinhold said. “He shook my hand and said, ‘Thank you for saving my life,’ and I thought that was pretty cool. It was a pretty special moment.” Meinhold said he viewed first responders’ jobs as being the calm on scene in an emergency situation. Everyone has a role to play and knows what tools or strategies to deploy, often coming up with a game plan en route to the call. “We are so highly trained, so when we get on scene, that’s our job,” Meinhold said. “We snap in and focus on what we need to do to get the job done. Usually, people in emergency situations get flustered, and it’s a scary thing for them. Our job is to bring order to a scene, so it wouldn’t help people if we were running around like chickens with our heads cut off.” He said he viewed being a firefighter as being a “professional problem solver,” helping people who are having the worst day of their lives because of a medical emergency or structure fire. There are also stranger calls, too, as the department is often called to respond to anything that doesn’t require law enforcement. “I’ve had the cliché cat-in-a-tree calls,” Meinhold said. “But I’ve also gone to gas emergencies, water problems, electrical problems and floods. You name it, and we’ve been on it. When people call us, they expect us to take care of the situation, and that’s what we do.” Retiring Park City Fire Capt. Matt Meinhold is honored during his final shift on Sunday. Credit: Jonathan Herrera/Park Record Meinhold plans to stay involved in the Park City community despite his retirement last weekend, though. He and his wife, Bridgette, are members of the local Elks Lodge, which works frequently with veterans and first responders. He also volunteers for Nuzzles Co., an animal shelter in the Snyderville Basin. The couple also hopes to split their time between Park City and St. George, staying in Southern Utah during the shoulder season to take advantage of the area’s parks and campgrounds but returning to the Wasatch Back for the winter and summer seasons. Meinhold said he intends to continue his work as a ski guide for Ski Utah’s Interconnect Tour, which takes recreators to Deer Valley Resort, Park City Mountain and all of the ski resorts in the Cottonwood Canyons in one day. “It’s bittersweet because I love my job and I love the people that I work with, but I’m also excited for the next chapter of my life,” Meinhold said. “I started late in life as a firefighter and then realized that I needed to buckle down and get a job, and I’m glad I found it because it was a perfect fit for me. I can’t imagine sitting behind a desk every day, and I was out doing what I love, helping people. It was a physical job and sometimes a little bit dangerous, but that’s how I’ve lived my life.” The post Park City Fire District captain retires after 20 years appeared first on Park Record. ...read more read less