The BFTA aims to keep 12 board members who will serve one or two, three-year terms.
Laura Chapman
Board President
First backpacked while serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Nepal, where she designed and built footbridges on rural mule trails. She began exploring local wild lands soon after moving to Humboldt for grad school, and her love for the area grew during many years with the Six Rivers National Forest. Laura and her husband Bob, a fellow Nepal volunteer and English teacher, ran the Eureka High School backpack club for 25 years and introduced hundreds of students to our local wilderness areas; those experiences inspired a number of club members to pursue careers in environmental education, conservation, and natural resource management.
Laura currently works in international disaster management and humanitarian assistance. Although she’s traveled to spectacular places while on assignments, she always feels lucky to return home to the rugged beauty and diversity of our region.
email: laura (at) bigfoottrail.org
Steve Salzman
Vice President
Steve escaped the San Francisco Bay Area, in 1973. He moved to the north coast to attend HSU where (as a gradual student) earner degrees in both the Industrial Arts and Environmental Resources Engineering programs. During that carefree time of his life he did a lot of backpacking, tree planting and stream restoration work with a small, worker-owned collective (NRG), homesteaded for a couple of years in the Mattole, then started a family and built a home, in Arcata. Steve worked as a consulting engineer for 30 years in Humboldt County, 10 of those with his own company, Greenway Partners, which he retired from, in 2018.
As a recovering engineer, Steve still has the need to plan, design, build, and fix stuff. He is an active backpacker and mountain bike rider. As such, Steve welcomed the opportunity to get involved with trail work through the Humboldt Trail Stewards and the Bigfoot Trail Alliance. Steve and his wife (Joan Levy) are active in other local community organizations and nonprofits.
email: steve (at) bigfoottrail.org
Karen Orso
Karen Orso was born and raised in New Jersey, in a household that delighted in the “Great Indoors.” Nevertheless, due to a quirky gene or out of pure rebelliousness, she has always loved being outdoors. She began practicing what would these days be called “intentional hiking” around the age of ten, wandering, exploring, enjoying the orchids, rhododendrons, Mayapples, Jack-in-the-Pulpits and more in the nearby Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge. On arrival in California Karen was so dazzled by the state’s biodiversity she enrolled in classes at Merritt College in Oakland and earned an AA degree in Environmental Studies. In many ways this was a more meaningful achievement than the BA she had received from Wesleyan University years earlier. While attending Merritt College she began her 30+ year association with the California Native Plant Society. Karen commenced volunteer trail work with the Mokelumne Trailbusters in the l990’s and shortly after that also joined the Calaveras Big Trees State Park Volunteer Trail Crew. Her backcountry volunteer trail work began with the Ventana Wilderness Alliance and soon also included trips with the Los Padres Forest Association, The Arizona Trail Association, the Pacific Crest Trail Association and The Bigfoot Trail Alliance. Other outdoorsy activities include working as a guide for Nature Outings, co-leading Coastwalk’s annual Lost Coast Backpack Trip for 10 years and working at the Kirkwood Cross-County Ski Center.
email: karen (at) bigfoottrail.org
Coming Soon
Gabrielle Gopinath
Gabrielle is a writer and educator. Her writing about art explores places where culture, geography, and embodied experience interface. She writes from an ecologically grounded perspective, often exploring works of land art that invite a somatic experience of place. Her art criticism appears regularly in Sculpture magazine. She has also written on art and culture for publications including Art Practical, San Francisco Art Quarterly, the North Coast Journal, and the Oxford Art Journal. She received a Ph.D. in the history of art from Yale University and has taught in art history departments at the University of Notre Dame, the Art Institute of Chicago, and Cal Poly Humboldt. Currently she teaches classes in art history and film history at the College of the Redwoods in Eureka, California. She is working on a longform essay about mountain trails as cultural networks.
Shortly after relocating to Humboldt County, Gopinath hiked a section of the Bigfoot Trail through the Trinity Alps and fell under the mountains’ spell. Since that time she has taken advantage of every opportunity to explore the high country, returning repeatedly to the Alps in addition to hiking and backpacking in the King Range, the Marble Mountains, and the Russian Wilderness. She enjoys reading, writing, and observing the fauna, flora, and fungi of the Pacific Northwest, especially mushrooms and birds. She has been hiking and volunteering with the Bigfoot Trail Alliance since 2024.
email: gabrielle (at) bigfoottrail.org
Mary Kwart
At age 6, her father showed her how decimal points work by using an old metal trail sign that said “Tuolumne Meadows 25.3 miles” while on a family vacation in Yosemite National Park. The trail behind that sign mysteriously disappeared into the woods and started her interest in hiking. Long distance hiking was interrupted by a 30-year career in wildfire management working for various government agencies traipsing around wildfires by foot or by helicopter in 13 western states carrying a shovel or notebook as the job required. She also occasionally helped write land management plans and provide NEPA input to projects and received a degree in Forestry/Fire Management from Colorado State University. After the formal work interlude was thankfully over, she retired and continued to hike around the U.S.—finishing the Pacific Crest Trail in 2010 and the Bigfoot Trail in 2016. She spent a couple years on the board of the American Long Distance Hiking Association-West and is living in Ashland, Oregon teaching backpacking and wildfire education classes for the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute and is active in a local non-traditional age backpacker group.
email: mary (at) bigfoottrail.org
Vic Spain
Treasurer
Coming soon!
email: vic (at) bigfoottrail.org
Ken Mierzwa
Ken recently retired from a 35-year career with global environmental consulting firms, where his specialties included the Endangered Species Act, NEPA, habitat restoration, and project management. Some of his projects included permitting and construction management for trails. He also served on the Ferndale City Council (2003-2016), the North Coast Unified Air Quality Management District Governing Board (2007-2016, including six years as chair), and the board of the California North Coast Chapter of The Wildlife Society (2015-2017). He currently chairs Ferndale’s Russ Park Committee and is on the Mattole Restoration Council board.
Ken has had an interest in amphibians since childhood, later leading to research. Many of his early hiking experiences were to access study sites, first in the Chicago region where he grew up and later in more remote parts of the country. In recent years he has spent considerable time on trails in the Kalmiopsis and a few other wilderness areas in the Klamath-Siskiyou.
Ken currently resides in Petrolia and Ferndale. He is a widely published photographer and is currently working on a series of wilderness landscapes.
email: ken (at) bigfoottrail.org
Coming Soon
Harvey Kelsey
Harvey grew up and attended college on the east coast. In 1972, he enrolled in graduate school at UC Santa Cruz; and the move out west solidified his trajectory to remain in the mountains of the west, where he has day-hiked and backpacked as much as possible.
He has taught in geology departments at Western Washington University, the University of Oregon and has been a member of the Geology Department at Cal Poly Humboldt since 1992.
Participation in several week-long volunteer trail crews solidified his interest in remaining active with the Bigfoot Trail Alliance.
His other service activity is his commitment to the board of trustees of the Arcata Community Pool, on which he has served for the last 17 years.
email: harvey (at) bigfoottrail.org
Thanks to previous board members:
- Emily Sinkhorn
- Gretchen Ziegler
- Mike Splain
- Jacob Shinners
- Dennis Houghton
- Jeff Morris
- Terri Vroman-Little
- Sage Clegg
- Rees Hughes
- Ian Nelson
- Jason Barnes
- Chris Turner
- Mitch Timbanard
