Shouldering 85 pounds of gear, the 5-foot-3, 115-pound Sgt. Tara-Lyn Baker skied up the snowy slopes of California’s Mount Shasta and jumped into a hole cut into the ice of a frigid lake.
“It was part of the training. It was 15 degrees with a 40 mile-per-hour wind, and we had to ski with our packs on into the lake and show that we could rescue ourselves and our gear,” the 25-year-old Benton graduate remembered. “For me, that was better than the hypothermia lab.”
It was all in a day’s work for Tara-Lyn — who has become the first female Marine to graduate both the summer and winter Mountain Leaders courses — a grueling six months for Baker which will allow her to function as an instructor position for Marines in the program.
“This is super important because it is knowledge the whole Marine Corps doesn’t have,” she said. “It blows my mind that I achieved that dream. I set my mind to it and accomplished it. Everybody is freaking out about me doing this, but to me, it’s just my job.”
It’s an accomplishment not lost on Tara-Lyn’s father, Wes Baker.
“It is amazing it took this long for them to find a woman tough enough to endure it,” he said. “Now things become a little less daunting for the next woman. I couldn’t be prouder of her and all she’s accomplished.”
Central Pa. roots
Long before tackling hypothermia labs — where Tara-Lyn had to sit in the bottom of a frigid pond for up to 15 minutes until she got hypothermia and then needed to revive herself as part of the winter training — she could be found playing in the forests of Columbia County.
“I was always out in the woods, playing in the creeks and hunting with my pap,” she said. “I was holding a weapon by the age of three. Some of my favorite times were being out there with my dad.”
Tara-Lyn Baker
Those moments were memorable for Wes, as well.
“I taught all my kids rappelling. We’d spend a lot of time on the rocks in the mountains,” he said. “Tara is very tough and very beautiful — a father’s worst nightmare!”
Wes served in the Army — he was stationed in Germany when Tara-Lyn was born. She has seven younger siblings, including a brother who is currently in the military. A cousin and one of her grandfathers also have been involved.
“I was always proud of the military members of my family, however I never thought I’d go into the military myself,” she said. “My passion was missionary work. Pretty much right after high school, I went into ministry with Youth With a Mission (YWAM) based in Montana and went all over the world, traveling and doing missionary work.”
Missionary becomes Marine
During that time, she felt a desire to really challenge herself, and was drawn to the military.
“I decided to enlist with the Marine Corps because it is the hardest,” she said, joining early in 2014 and leaving for boot camp by October of that year.
“I hated boot camp — it was such a stark contrast to the calm, loving environment in YWAM. I really felt out of my element,” she said. “Surprisingly, when I got to combat training, I fell in love with it.”
She felt that was because in boot camp — you need to focus completely on yourself to survive each phase. In combat training, it is about taking care of others, something Tara-Lyn attributes to her faith-based passions via missionary work.
“I became a squad leader without ever really trying to be one, and it was a big responsibility I enjoyed. I also loved the competition and learning the technical issues of what combat is,” she said. “I grew up playing paintball, and through combat training, I got to ‘play’ war.”
Tara-Lyn was then sent to specialty school to be a heavy equipment mechanic, servicing John Deere, Caterpillar and other pieces of heavy equipment affiliated with the Marines. Three months later, she was transported to Okinawa, Japan, for one of the Marine’s most grueling experiences — jungle warfare training.
“It was pretty wild. I was rappelling down into the jungle and sleeping on the jungle floor where even the smallest of lizards can be very poisonous. It was an experience I’ll never forget. My favorite part is that there is this algae there that glows at night — it’s like looking at the stars on the ground,” she said.
Mountain leaders experience
Tara-Lyn was accepted pretty quickly — partially because so few want to commit to a program so remote in the California back country, according to Tara-Lyn.
“Some call it the base where careers die because it is so far out there in the middle of no where surrounded by mountains and woods,” she said. “But it didn’t phase me. Thanks to growing up like I did in central Pennsylvania, I learned to really appreciate being out in the country like that.”
The summer mountain leader course was something Tara-Lyn said she loved — it was full of climbing, hiking, rappelling and crevasse rescues. Nearly every part of that session is testable, including knot-tying sessions — “they’d tell us to tie a butterfly knot blindfolded in 30 seconds and then we’d move onto the next” — and performing different cliff-side rescues off Mount Shasta, including rappelling down a cliff with “just two ropes” and minimal gear.
“I loved climbing in the summer. I found I was really good at it being so tiny and flexible. Some of the guys had long arms that helped them with climbing, but I was able to come up with some creative ways to get up the mountain,” she said.
“One night, it got so cold, a lot of the guys got dropped from the training due to getting hypothermia. A group of us were huddled together and we could hear them calling in people to evacuate them,” she said. “We talked, tried to keep warm and were careful with how we dressed in layers. At one point, a little frog hopped up and was trying to get into our sleeping bags because it was so cold.”
The winter mountain leader training course was different for Tara-Lyn.
“While everything is testable in the summer course, the winter session is one you have to survive through,” she said. “I wanted to do the summer course for myself, but the winter course I did because as I got to know the other Marines, our base is really tapped out. The men instructors would go out on a course of 15-20 days in the mountains away from their families. I wanted to help out so they weren’t so strapped and needing to sacrifice so much of their family time.”
Gender ignored
Tara-Lyn admitted that participating in these courses as a female can be especially challenging.
“The realities are that those packs are not created to be carried by shorter people and our hips aren’t made for this. I had to learn to adapt in a variety of things — even simple things like going to the bathroom or female hygiene issues that men don’t have to consider,” she said. “But with these courses, for the first time, there was completely nothing separating men and women in terms of expectations. It wasn’t expected that I’d be weaker — I had to hold my own. If you can’t cut it, you’re out.”
Being the first female Marine to complete the course was part of what drew Tara-Lyn to the experience, but she learned that tackling the challenge involved something more.
“I am proud of being able to push myself through this. There were definitely moments where I wanted to and almost gave up, but others in the group would step up and lift me up just like I would do for them when they were struggling,” she said. “I learned I was doing this for me — to prove to myself I could do it. Along the way, the ripple effect has impacted other areas.”
Among them, her faith.
“I decided to do the Marines thing without really factoring in His plans for me. During a really tough hike in the summer course when I felt miserable and was questioning myself and my life choices at that moment, I really felt God say: ‘I have been with you through all of this, and you haven’t even leaned on Me once. You’ve done all this so far on your own. Imagine how much more we could accomplish if you learned to lean on Me.’”
Tara-Lyn’s time with the Marines runs until August of 2020, at which time she plans to return to the YWAM missions program, using what she’s learned from these courses to help get supplies and God’s word to those in the most remote areas of the world. She is also been involved with a group called Life Leadership, which recently has made its Life app free.
“People can get immediate savings at the majority of the locations that they already shop at,” she said. “We already have contracts with a vast amount of name brands, businesses and restaurants all over the United States.”
As for breaking a barrier for women, Tara-Lyn and the Baker family aren’t newcomers to pushing the envelope. Her younger sister, Vayle-Rae Baker, was one of the state’s best high school wrestlers and has gone on to win five national collegiate wresting titles.
“I’m just so proud of all they’ve accomplished,” Wes said. “I was talking with a friend recently, and told him I was starting to think I had helped raise two out of the toughest women to come out of Benton. Someone else was quick to say, maybe the toughest in the whole state!”
Wes Baker, Tara’s father
