Alison grew up exploring the pastures, creeks, aspen groves, and mountains in a small ranching and farming community in Nevada named Paradise Valley. She was raised with a reverence for the land that has supported her family’s ranching operation for six generations. She would spend hours playing at “The Creek” that ran behind her family home and organized a very official nature club when she was about six, which included meetings in her treehouse high up in a cottonwood tree.

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As a young adult she began her career with the Forest Service and then the Bureau of Land Management working as a wildland fire fighter and then dispatcher. In the off seasons she completed an Associates of Art degree, worked as a massage therapist and traveled the world. Her adventures found her working on farms and bottling wine in Argentina, working as a baker in Antarctica, hiking part of the Inca Trail in Peru, and buying her first (who knew there were more to come?!) minivan in New Zealand to explore the south island.

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She eventually moved to Boise, Idaho, where she was working as a dispatcher and volunteering with an amazing organization called the International Rescue Committee which, among other things, was helping to resettle refugees in Boise where she taught English as a Second Language classes. That year she came to Alaska for the first time on a dispatch assignment. She fell in love with the state and returned the next year for a permanent job. There she met and fell in love with her husband and they have been year round residents ever since! The longer she is in Alaska the more she loves it and feels she has found her forever home here in Fairbanks. She is proud to be raising three small Alaskans! Their passion for nature led her to seek out Kinderwoods Forest School when it began. She quickly recognized how special the forest school was and was ecstatic to become a Kinderwoods teacher for five sessions. Alison is looking forward to continuing to offer a forest school model program to the families of Fairbanks with Small Forest School.