Eric Balken
Executive Director

Eric grew up in Salt Lake City, building a connection to Utah’s mountains, rivers, and deserts at a young age. In his youth, Eric volunteered with local non-profits gaining experience in public land surveys, membership outreach, and grassroots organizing. Eric has been deeply involved with Colorado River policy for the past decade, helping spearhead multiple research and advocacy initiatives at GCI. Eric has a bachelor’s degree in Environmental Studies and Geography from the University of Utah and serves as an advisory on the Future of the Colorado Group.

Zanna Stutz
Program Manager

Growing up in Portland, OR, Zanna has always loved spending time outside with family and friends. This passion led her to work as a whitewater raft guide in Colorado and Oregon, and then to Utah as a ski patroller and river restoration technician. Zanna came to GCI in 2024 after graduating from Dartmouth College where she studied Geography, Public Policy, and Spanish. Specifically, her research in school focused on how understandings of climate change influence the environmental politics and conflict surrounding dams.

Anna Penner
Development Coordinator

Anna returned to her hometown Salt Lake City in 2024 to re-connect with the landscapes she grew up exploring. She had spent the previous years at Amherst College, where she earned her degree in Environmental Studies and History. In her studies, Anna focused on the political development of water in the West. During the summers, she has worked as a river guide on the Idaho’s Salmon River for Middle Fork River Expeditions. Anna came to GCI after working for the Wasatch Mountain Institute and ENYO Renewable Energy.

Richard Ingebretsen, MD, PhD
President

Rich founded Glen Canyon Institute in 1996, with the help of legendary conservationist David Brower. Rich first visited Glen Canyon as a young boy scout and developed a great love for the canyons that would later be destroyed by the floodwaters of Lake Powell reservoir. For the past 15 years, he has dedicated his life to restoring the natural health and beauty of Glen Canyon and the Colorado River. He is a physician and faculty member at the University of Utah School of Medicine and Department of Physics, and the founder and President of Utah Wilderness Medicine. He also serves as vice chairman of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance and is the President of Riverbound Adventures, an educational river-running company. His love for medicine and the environment has taken him around the world to places such as Ghana, Kenya, Ethiopia, Guatemala, and Paraguay. He enjoys hiking, running, spending time with friends and family, and especially, running the white-waters of the Colorado River. He lives in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Scott Christensen

Since 2003, Scott has led conservation programs throughout the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Prior to his time at the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, he worked for several political campaigns and nonprofits in Salt Lake City, Utah. He was named the Coalition’s executive director in 2020. Scott grew up in Idaho and Utah, spending his youth chasing trout and exploring the hidden corners of the Colorado Plateau. He holds a bachelor’s degree in environmental studies from the University of Utah and a master’s degree in public administration from Montana State University.

Scott has extensive experience building effective campaigns, piloting new, innovative approaches to conservation, and raising significant private and public funding. This includes successful efforts to pass federal legislation protecting rivers and public lands, launching a new program focused on Indigenous conservation priorities and partnerships, and raising millions of dollars for conserving wildlife migration corridors. Scott is the recipient of a Hero of Conservation award from Field and Stream Magazine and since 2015 has been involved with supporting new national parks in Mongolia. Scott and his wife Celia have four children and live in Bozeman, Montana.

Wade Graham, PhD

Wade Graham, PhD. is a historian, journalist, and landscape designer based in Los Angeles. He is the author of books on landscape, urbanism, and environmental history, and many articles, including for The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Los Angeles Times, Perspective (UK), and other publications. He has been on the GCI board since 1999.

Ed Dobson, JD

Ed is one of the founding trustees of Glen Canyon Institute. Now retired from legal practice, he served nine years as a Montana Water Master, judging water rights disputes.  He served 17 years with Navajo Nation Legal Services including as director of the Navajo Low Income Taxpayer Clinic and as their principal U.S. Tax Court litigator.  Ed has served as a commissioner on the San Juan County UT and Town of Bluff planning commissions.  He has served as a commissioner on the Navajo Nation Labor Commission.  Earlier he served twelve years with David Brower as a field representative for Friends of the Earth.  Ed wrote Montana’s Initiative 84, passed in 1980, forbidding uranium mill tailings and other large-quantity radioactive waste. He also served four years as a member of the Sierra Club national board of directors. He lives in Bluff, Utah.

David Wegner

Dave is one of the founding trustees for the Glen Canyon Institute. The issues at Glen Canyon Dam and a love of history were the stimulus for a career spent looking at the management of the Colorado River Basin as a system. From 1996 through mid- 2009, he served as Science Director for Glen Canyon Institute while establishing his own business, Ecosystem Management International, which specialized in studying the effects of climate change on large landscapes, river basins, and species both nationally and internationally. Previously, he spent over 20 years with the Department of the Interior, including time as lead scientist for the Bureau of Reclamation’s environmental impact studies of Glen Canyon Dam. He has also been a private consultant and expert on western water, endangered species, river restoration, the application and use of science, and adaptive management. He serves as a board member of the River Policy Network of Japan, Good Dirt Radio, Animas River Task Force, La Plata County Water Commission, the Durango Parks and Open Space Strategic Planning Task Force, and Animas Riverkeeper. He currently works and lives in Washington, DC, and Durango, Colorado, near the “River of Lost Souls”, the  Animas River on the edge of the Colorado Plateau.

Carla Scheidlinger

Carla earned a BA in Biology from Swarthmore College and Harvard University, and completed an MS in Ecology at San Diego State University. After a short stint of conducting research in plant ecology centered on vernal pools, chaparral ecosystems, and closed-cone conifers in San Diego, she moved to Bishop, California. There, she continued her work in ecology with a 10-year period of teaching part-time at Deep Springs College, and consulting for local Native American Paiute tribes in the Owens Valley regarding their water rights. She served as the president of the Owens Valley Committee, a non-profit group dedicated to environmental conservation and water management. That organization was successful in levering influence requiring the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) to implement the Lower Owens River Project, which has been of huge benefit to the environment and economy of the region. Carla also began a consulting career in land and habitat restoration, working with the Great Basin Unified Air Pollution Control District on dust control measures on the Owens Lake playa to comply with the State Implementation Plan for management of PM-10 emissions. Her vegetation and shallow flooding measures were adopted by LADWP for large-scale implementation. When she relocated to San Diego, she joined Wood Environment and Infrastructure Solutions, Inc. to create a practice in habitat restoration. After 13 years with Wood, she retired, leaving a highly successful practice in place working throughout the region.

Carla has been involved with GCI since 2013.

Michael Kellett

Michael co-founded the New England conservation organization RESTORE: The North Woods in 1992. He developed the proposal for a new Maine Woods National Park, directed campaigns to list the Atlantic salmon and Canada lynx as endangered species, and oversaw programs to protect the Allagash Wilderness Waterway, White Mountain National Forest, and other public lands. Previously, as the Northeast regional director and Michigan representative of The Wilderness Society, he helped to pass the Michigan Wilderness Act of 1987 as well as legislation establishing Grand Island National Recreation Area and authorizing the four-state Northern Forest Lands Study. He has visited more than 230 National Park System units in 46 states and territories.

Michael has been involved with GCI since 2006.

Jack Schmidt

Jack Schmidt is the Janet Quinney Lawson Chair Emeritus in Colorado River Studies and the Director of the Center for Colorado River Studies at Utah State University. He has worked for nearly 40 years to understand river processes and seek solutions to fundamental problems of river management, particularly in the American Southwest. He has served as Chief of the Grand Canyon Monitoring and Research Center, the primary science provider for the Glen Canyon Adaptive Management Program.

Mike Sargetakis

Mike grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah and has spent much of his life exploring the Wasatch mountains and the Colorado Plateau in Utah. Mike received a bachelor’s degree in urban planning from the University of Utah in 2011 and a JD with a certificate in Natural Resource Law from Lewis & Clark in 2017. He worked as the project and office manager for GCI from 2012-2014. Mike is now a natural resource and environmental attorney practicing in Portland, Oregon. In addition to his education and work history, Mike enjoys fly fishing, hiking, and spending as much time as he can in and around rivers and mountains.

Jana Quilter

Jana has always craved spending time in the outdoors, and fosters a deep respect for the beauty of the natural world, and is passionate about preserving it. For most of her life she has wrestled with the great injustice of wild things and wild places not having a voice. One of the greatest injustices she struggles with is the “damn” dam, imposed upon the Glen Canyon area. She is a graduate from the University of Utah and earned her Masters degree in mental health counseling. She currently runs a private counseling practice in Park City, Utah and encourages her clients to experience the healing effects of nature. She is also a board member for Park City Leadership alumni and enjoys spending many hours outside with her family and her dog, Steve.

Tom Strickler

Tom grew up hiking in the Adirondack mountains of upstate New York where he became a 46er at the age of 13.  Tom is the co-founder of Endeavor, the world’s largest talent and literary agency which went public on the NY Stock Exchange in 2021.  In 1996, Tom joined with Kris and Doug Tompkins (founder of North Face and Esprit) to purchase a large ranch (190,00 acres) in the Chacabuco Valley in the Aysen region of Chile. In 2019 the lands – now 752,090 acres – were donated to the people of Chile to become the Patagonia National Park.  Tom lives in Venice, California and graduated from Harvard University near the bottom of his class.

David Kizer

David grew up in Park City, Utah and from an early age had a love of the outdoors. David received a B.S. in Finance from the University of Colorado and an MBA from the University of Utah. David’s carrier has involved working at startups and in his current role of COO at Owlet Baby Care, he helped take the company public in 2021. Outside of work, David focuses his efforts on growing environmental education and restoring ecological diversity through work with local and national organizations. Throughout his life living in the West, David has been drawn to water and began exploring the mountainous rivers and deep desert canyons on his white water raft several decades ago. During his free time, David enjoys sharing his passions of skiing, mountain biking, and rafting with his wife and two young daughters.

Andrew Moore

Andrew is a brewer, archaeologist, ultra endurance bikepacking racer, and an author. His brewery, the Intrepid Sojourner Beer Project won local and international acclaim before closing in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic. He now writes science fiction and fantasy novels. His first book, Children of Solo, was published in April 2025 by World System Books. Through his position on the Karis Foundation board of directors, he is actively engaged with conservation efforts across the western and midwestern United States, where he advocates primarily for water and wildlife conservation. He earned a M.A. in Classical Archaeology from CU Boulder in 2012. While there, Andrew participated in archaeological digs in Turkey, Greece, and Jordan. He published articles on trade and piracy in the ancient Mediterranean, while teaching at Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design. He currently lives in Denver, CO and writes and races full time.