Jason Abdilla, Member

Jason and his wife live in the confused society of the Front Range of Colorado where gorp-munching-yuppies collide with native cowtown-Reaganite American's. Currently, he's chiseling away at an undergrad in Environmental Sciences and works as a research assistant at the University of Colorado Denver. This summer he’s removing non-native invasive plants from the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness with the SCA.

He backpacks and fly fishes year round, slashes the steep-and-deep gnargnar at Loveland in the winter (yeah, brah), and nerds out on entomology and botany while on hikes, which frustrates the goal-oriented pack luggers he's often obliged to explore Colorado's wildernesses with. Jason's ideal climate is some place where it snows six months out of the year, yet rivers remain thaw and salmon run freely. Give me conifers over deciduous, streams over rivers, mountains over plains! Boreal, here I come!

Arne Naess, Gary Snyder, and David James Duncan are the literary mentors who have significantly shaped Jason's perspectives on ecology and society while Hamland Garland and Rick Bass have--at least recently--been the suppliers of fiction, which balances the heavy loads of abstract and monotonous academic pursuits Jason finds himself in at the moment.