During a deployment to battle wildfires in Canada, she looked down for blazes burning in peat, waded through freezing mud and was wary of mother bears and their cubs.
"It's definitely different conditions to what you find in Australia," Ms Rhodes, a NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service firefighter, told AAP.
"The fire gets in under the moss, underground and into the peat, so it's quite hard to get on top of.
"It was wet, yet they're in drought, and you're digging to find where the fire is ... otherwise it can keep trickling away even when the snow comes."
Ms Rhodes was one of about 100 Australian firefighters sent to bolster Canadian emergency efforts in June, along with volunteer rural crews from most states and territories.
More than 4000 fires have torn through seven million hectares across Canada in 2025, with hundreds burning out of control in early August, according to data from the Interagency Forest Fire Centre.
With specialist helicopter and winch training, Ms Rhodes is classified as an "arduous firefighter" who can work in remote and challenging terrain.
It was up to her five-person crew to drop in and find fire hotspots, as blazes were hidden under the dense forest canopy in northwest Alberta.
Arriving in late spring, the firefighters wore thermal gear as they worked on the edges of permafrost, before hotter days set in and sent flames running up trunks of towering cypress and pine trees.
The season meant wildlife was also a concern.
"You'd get to your site in the morning and there's fresh bear prints everywhere - you couldn't leave your lunch unattended," Ms Rhodes said.
"They had young cubs with them, so they were a bit more on the aggressive side and you couldn't go off anywhere on your own.
"But they were pretty good, they moved out of your way especially when the helicopter came in."
The 30-year-old, who works as an emergency nurse on the NSW south coast in her spare time, learnt a lot from Canadian, American and Costa Rican counterparts.
A pulaski, a light axe-like tool used by North American crews to dig through tree roots, is her new firefighting weapon of choice.
"We often call on other countries when we have troubles ourselves," Ms Rhodes said.
"It means a lot when we can get the help, so it's good to be able to return the favour."
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese echoed those sentiments after a meeting with Canada's leader Mark Carney in Alberta in June.
"Increasingly, the impact of climate change means that our seasons are overlapping, so that's becoming more and more difficult," Mr Albanese told reporters.
"But it is possible ... that we learn off each other and our firefighters get skills to implement back in our respective home countries."
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