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

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

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

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

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

Dave Herbst, Swall Meadows

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.  

Brooke Pace McKenna, Operations Director

Brooke knows she has at least another decade before she can consider herself an Eastside local.  Growing up recreating in the wilds of Idaho, Brooke has a deep appreciation for the great outdoors. Since moving here, she has been very involved with the Eastern Sierra nonprofit community and is dedicated to volunteerism. With her background in business administration and nonprofit management, Brooke is feeling quite at home with Friends of the Inyo. Having recently relocated from Mammoth to Bishop with husband Mike, son Jack, their old dog Amelia and very energetic kitten Dory, Brooke is enjoying the more relaxed pace of life in Inyo County.  She encourages everyone to drop in and say hi.

Catherine Billey, Communications & Administrative Assistant

A second generation Angeleno and passionate outdoorswoman, Catherine grew up in the San Fernando Valley and fell in love with the High Sierra on her first camping trip to Yosemite National Park with her father in the early 1970's. A graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, she returned to Los Angeles after 14 years in the Bay Area to work as Bureau Manager for the New York Times, where she also freelanced for the Culture and Travel desks. Two years ago, she relocated to the Eastern Sierra to work as a staff writer for the Mammoth Times and fulfill her dream if living near the mountains where she loves to hike and camp. As a writer, she became familiar with a variety Eastside voices and environmental organizations, thus awakening another longstanding dream - to be directly involved in preserving California's remaining pristine places. After becoming a member of Friends of the Inyo during a Pokonobe event on beautiful Lake Mary, she hoped one day become a full time member of the team and welcomed the opportunity to come on board in July, 2010, in a perfect marriage of her communications and administrative skills.

Todd Vogel, Stewardship Coordinator

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.

Wano Urbonas, Conservation Director

Wayne “Wano” Urbonas drifts west to FOI from the Rocky Mountain region, where he has been entrenched in environmental health programming for Montana and Colorado communities over the past 14 years. Serving constituents in tourist-based economies including Steamboat Springs, Durango and Bozeman, Wano introduced aggressive environmental programming that minimized the negative impacts of coal-fired power plants, coal-fired locomotives and coalbed methane production (notice a trend here?). In terms of “significance levels” (a term used constantly by the regulating community), Wano poses the question “How much is too much?”—in terms of pollutant thresholds, visibility impacts, watershed degradation, soil contamination and, ultimately, quality of life.
Working at both the county and state levels, Wano’s creative approaches to pollution prevention (P2) have included Developing Remedial Sewage Utilization Systems (DrSus), drafting Air Quality Management Plans, developing watershed “liquid linkages,” enabling citizens to take responsibility and providing stewardship potential for local and regional air, land and water resources.

A brief stint with the Hawaii Army National Guard’s Environmental Division honed Wano’s environmental assessment/NEPA skills and gave him a deeper appreciation of biodiversity and ecosystem protection. Yet he and his wife Linda yearned for a return to four-season normalcy that includes snow, fall foliage and wildlife viewing (without a snorkel). Having been a frequent recreational visitor to the Eastern Sierra as well as being an avid trail runner, Wano jumped at the opportunity to apply what he refers to as his “environmental leadership, fellowship and followship skills” in the nonprofit arena for Friends of the Inyo. 

Andrew Schurr, Americorps Member

Returning for his second year as an Americorps member, 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.

Drew Foster, Americorps Member

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.