Meet the Board and Staff

Board of Directors

We have an active and engaged board of directors who represent a vast range of experience and interest. Our board members have one thing in common: a love of the outdoors and a desire for protecting the Inyo region, and helping others find ways to explore the area and to give back. In 2009, the FOI board contributed over 1600 volunteer hours!

James Wilson, President, Bishop

James has spent and forgotten more days working for the protection and preservation of the Eastern Sierra than most of us will ever know. He grew up in the Central Valley working in the agricultural industry – loading trucks, picking fruit and working in peach canneries. James and his wife Kay moved to Bishop, CA in 1977, and raised their daughter Rosanne here. They own Wilson’s Eastside Sports, an outdoor retailer in Bishop, which caters to hikers, climbers, backpackers, cross-country skiers and natural history enthusiasts. James, a founding member of Friends of the Inyo, is also an active member of many local conservation and civic organizations, including the Eastern Sierra Audubon Society and Bishop Rotary. He enjoys chasing birds and the peace of wild places in his spare time.
 

Sydney Quinn, Vice President, Big Pine

Sydney Quinn migrated from the desert of Phoenix, AZ to the San Francisco Peaks of Flagstaff at the age of 17. Fortune had it that she learned to ski in a physical education program at Northern Arizona Univ. in 1968, which began a passion for skiing. Moving to Mammoth in 1970 and an 18-year career of ski teaching began a lifestyle and reverence for the mountains through years of backcountry exploration in winter and summer. “Andrea Lawrence, one of my beloved mentors, was the impetus for my involvement in environmental activism beginning n the '70s. She appointed me to the Mono County Planning Commission in the 1980s. That experience was a valuable education in non-partisanship and commitment to community. [And] the benefits of living in the Sierra far outweighed any monetary gain or professional life--for a while anyway. A bit of panic set in at 40, and I decided to finish my masters in psychology and take a real job.” After 17 years at Mono County Mental Health as a psychotherapist, she retired and settled near Big Pine with her husband, Dennis, a magic dog, two crazy cats and a flock of chickens. With knees sacrificed to skiing and backpacking, she is settling more into a rural lifestyle with a garden of greens at the foot of the eastside of the Sierra Nevada. “Preserving our wondrous backcountry through the opportunities provided by Friends of the Inyo is an honor and commitment that I take seriously.”

Bill Mitchel, Treasurer, Bishop

After working in Human Resources in California’s aerospace industry for years, Bill and his wife Vivian traded corporate life for retirement in Bishop. They really came out ahead on that deal. An avid backcountry hiker and birdwatcher among other interests, Bill is also treasurer of the Eastern Sierra Audubon Society, a volunteer with the local Birds in the Classroom education program and former secretary of the Inyo County Treasury Oversight Committee. He is a not so recent addition to the board of Friends of the Inyo, having joined us in March 2007 and currently serves as treasurer of the organization. 

Margy Verba, Bishop

Margy Verba is a local business owner of Flowmotion Pilates, and she joined the Board of Friends of the Inyo in late 2007. Margy spends her free time wilderness rambling and playing traditional music. She lives in Mono County with her husband Jack, and both have entertained us with their music for many years.

Sara Steck, Bishop

Sara grew up in an outdoor family, eating mountain dirt at six-months of age and picking up trash in Camp 4 in Yosemite Valley during grade school. She traveled the world guiding trekking groups for Mountain Travel, Inc., cooking for a climbing school in the Palisades (Sierra Nevada), earning a Spanish bilingual teaching credential and a master's in environmental education, and teaching elementary school through the lens of environmental consideration. Sara, her husband and her young son moved to Bishop about 10 years ago. Since then, she has been active in the Eastern Sierra Audubon Society, working on environmental programs such as the Eastern Sierra Watershed Program.

Mike Prather, Lone Pine

Mike has lived in Inyo County since 1972, starting in Death Valley National Park (then Death Valley National Monument) in the 1970s, and later in Lone Pine in 1980. "My focus has been on the desert, as well as the Sierra, with particular interests in water and wildlife issues. For many years, I worked on passage of the California Desert Protection Act and the Inyo/Los Angeles Water Agreement with its Lower Owens River Project. Currently much of my energy is directed toward the massive wildlife return associated with the Los Angeles Owens Lake Dust Project, and also possible increased protection of the Alabama Hills through a Federal designation within the BLM’s National Landscape Conservation System. My interests within Friends of the Inyo are seeking sustainability, increasing diversity and spreading FOI’s good works into the southern Owens Valley."

Steve McLaughlin, Secretary, Big Pine

Steve is a botanist and retired Professor of Arid Lands Studies from the University of Arizona. Steve's research and teaching focused on economic botany, plant taxonomy, ecology, and biogeography. He worked extensively on the plant life of southeastern Arizona, and also taught and did research in Argentina, Chile, and Honduras. Steve and his wife, Janice Bowers, also a botanist, moved to the Owens Valley from Tucson in early 2007. They have vacationed in the Eastern Sierra since the early 1980s, and now enjoy the great hiking, botanizing, birding and (occasionally) fishing that the area has to offer. Steve also served as the president of the Bristlecone Chapter of the California Native Plant Society from 2008 to 2010.

Dave Herbst, Swall Meadows

Dave has lived and worked in the Eastern Sierra for 35 years and is a research scientist with the Sierra Nevada Aquatic Research Lab (University of California), with a PhD in zoology and entomology. He does research on the ecology and physiology of invertebrates and algae from streams, lakes, and springs of the Sierra Nevada, Great Basin, and coastal central California. A guiding principle has been using results of scientific research to help in habitat conservation and management. Some examples: research on salt lakes in California (Mono, Owens), Oregon (Abert), and Nevada (Walker) to understand how they function and to promite their conservation and science-based management; studies of threats to streams and springs from erosion and sediments, mining pollution, non-native species, livestock grazing, and climate change; developing water quality standards for streams of the Sierra Nevada based on biological indicators (aquatic insects and other invertebrates); restoration ecology of streams and desert springs. Dave has also been involved in environmental education as author of a guide to monitoring stream health and as a past board member of the Yosemite Institute. He lives in Mono County with his wife Katharine and children Anna and Jordan. It's a good life.

Chris Lizza, Lee Vining

Chris is a lifelong resident of the Eastern Sierra who relishes the untrampled public spaces as much as the small social circles locals enjoy. He graduated from Mammoth High School in 1979, where he was elected Student Body President, and went on to receive a BA in Political Science at the University of Vermont, a Master’s from the American Graduate School of International Management in Arizona, and a JD from Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. Although he does not currently practice law, he remains an active member of the California Bar Association. Since 1999, he has been  owner and operator of the Mono Market, a community grocery store in Lee Vining, and works seasonally full time on the Mammoth Mountain Ski Patrol. He is a graduate of the Sierra Leadership Institute of the Sierra Business Council and has chaired the Mono Basin Regional Planning Commission from 2003 until he was appointed to the Mono County Planning Commission in 2011. Chris was chosen to serve as Foreman of the Mono County Grand Jury from 2008-9, is Captain, Training Officer, and Senior EMT on the Lee Vining Volunteer Fire Department and Treasurer of the Mono Basin Historical Society. As a longtime contributor to numerous environmental groups, Chris was invited by the Wilderness Society to lobby representatives in Washington D.C. in support of the Wilderness Bill sponsored by Representative "Buck" McKeon and Senators Feinstein and Boxer in a successful 2008 bipartisan effort. Friends of the Inyo welcomed him as a board member in early 2011. “As a conservationist and a business person, I believe I can bring many diverse interests together to achieve sustainable and sensible solutions to land use issues.”

Staff

Stacy Corless, Executive Director

Stacy took over as executive director in June, 2010, after serving as FOI's communications director for two years. She's lived in the Eastern Sierra for 12 years, and thinks working to fulfill Friends of the Inyo's mission is the ideal culmination of her experience as a journalist, teacher and communicator. In addition to her work for Friends of the Inyo, she worked as an organizer for The Wilderness Society and has an extensive background in marketing and communications. Her name is familiar throughout the region as a prolific contributor to local publications, including Eastside magazine, Mammoth Monthly, and Wilderness Press guidebooks. She is also a former educator, having been a language and literature instructor both locally at Cerro Coso College and at the University of California, Berkeley.  

Todd Vogel, Stewardship Director

Todd has been a resident of the Owens Valley since the late 1980s and is part owner of a mountain guide service, Sierra Mountain Center, and an outdoor education company, Outdoor Link, llc. Much of his work as a guide involves outdoor education with groups from all walks of life, involving activities such as rock climbing and natural history.
Prior to his stint at FOI as the Wilderness Stewardship Coordinator, Todd was a FOI board member. He has been a director of a number of other nonprofits, including the American Mountain Guides Association, the Bishop Chamber of Commerce, and, most recently, he is a founding director of the Professional Climbing Instructors Association. His interests include never-ending home remodels, his wife and family of dogs, birding and photography.

Catherine "Cat" Billey, Membership & Outreach Manager

An avid lover of nature, books and writing, Cat moved to Mammoth Lakes in 2008 to pursue her dream of living in the Eastern Sierra and maximize time hiking and camping in the spectacular high country. Today she has a view of Wheeler Crest from her studio in Sunny Slopes where she lives simply with two small cats, Coco and Natasha, that she rescued from the Inyo Animal Shelter. Cat grew up in Southern California and worked for many years as a legal secretary in the San Francisco Bay Area (where 9-to-5 was built into her psyche) after receiving her degree in English from UC Berkeley. She has written for the Culture and Travel desks of the New York Times from Los Angeles, where she was Bureau Manager for eight years, and about the Eastern Sierra for Eastside Magazine, Sierra Heritage, and MSM. While on the staff of the Mammoth Times, she became familiar with a variety of Eastside voices and environmental groups, thus inspiring her to seek non-profit work at Friends of the Inyo, where she gratefully hired on full-time in the summer of 2010. A highlight of that year was packing into Thousand Island Lake for the first time ever with FOI's EVOLVE program. Cat encourages everyone to make their next trip into the wilderness a volunteer stewardship vacation!

Autumn Bahlman, Finance Manager

Autumn grew up in North Lake Tahoe, where she spent most of her time playing in the woods, catching lizards, and climbing around on granite boulders. Her love for the outdoors eventually led her to the Eastern Sierra, where she traded a giant blue lake for vast wilderness and rocky peaks. Her pastime of catching lizards, and playing in the woods eventually led to a Master's degree in biology at the University of Nevada, Reno. After spending the last several years working a variety of jobs from counting toads in the backcountry to managing a solar installation business, she is happy to have found a great fit with FOI, a place where she can combine her biology background and her peculiar enjoyment of working with numbers and paperwork. She currently lives in Mammoth Lakes with her two inseparable boys Sam and Owen, Cookie a large-poodle (don't laugh, she's a mountain poodle), and Percy, a cat who thinks she's a dog and loves to go hiking.

Drew Foster, Conservation Associate

Hailing from the beaches of Malibu, the redwood forest, the city by the bay, and the Eastern Sierra, Drew has a broad and holistic view of California. He is a lumberjack, a floral enthusiast, professional rock skipper, balloon aficionado, and an avid climber of trees. He has worked on sustainability issues and ecological restoration for several years, and is committed to teaching others about the natural world, and fostering a deeper respect and excitement about the land. His power animal is the pika; favorite color: slate gray; favorite food: strawberries; favorite plant family: Polygonaceae (Buckwheat); favorite plant family to eat: Brassicaceae (Mustard); favorite activity: the deep and profound activity of nothing. So now you know.

Andrew Schurr, Conservation Associate

Andrew is an experienced outdoor leader who organized FOI’s first ever wilderness campsite site inventory in 2009, in addition to leading and assisting numerous wilderness and front country stewardship projects, and managing the Fish Slough Volunteer Patrol. Andrew was an AmeriCorps member with Friends of the Inyo for two years before hiring on as Conservation Associate in early 2011.

Ian Bell, Watershed Technician, Americorps Member

Ian grew up in suburban Los Angeles with regular summer backpacking trips into the High Sierra with his family. Ian's service as the AmeriCorps Member with Friends of the Inyo in 2011 will focus on water quality monitoring and environmental restoration projects. Prior to joining AmeriCorps, he worked in Boise, Idaho as a hydrologic technician for the U.S. Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Station Boise Aquatic Sciences Lab, where he had the opportunity to do field work in eighteen national forests across the West. In his free time, he enjoys rock climbing, playing soccer, growing cacti and succulents, and flying kites.