Amanda has been developing a small, nature-interpretation business. She and husband Tony spend their free time in the great outdoors, enjoying the local mountains, deserts, and rivers when they’re not busy tending the garden, pets, and their own patch of pinyon-juniper woodland and cactus here in the Uncompahgre Watershed.
They have lived on the outskirts of Montrose since 1993, when Amanda began working with the BLM Field Office in Montrose. Once in western Colorado, they realized it was an unbeatable location, and were here to stay.
Amanda and Tony’s two children were raised in Montrose, and are still in Colorado. Their son, Jasper, is a recent CU-Boulder graduate, and their daughter, Edelawit, is a student at UC-Colorado Springs.
Career highlights for Amanda have always involved working outdoors, and usually with water. Whether it was as a Peace Corps fisheries technician in Kenya, researching grazing impacts to willows in Colorado, documenting habitat types in Uganda’s Lake Mburo National Park, or inventorying streams on BLM lands in western Colorado, water has been a central theme. She also enjoyed working throughout this area as an ecologist with the BLM for nearly 25 years, and getting to know it well.
Over the past 15 years, Amanda has been involved in several regional river restoration efforts dealing with tamarisk, Russian olive, and restoring native riparian vegetation, including cottonwoods. She has also advocated for river and stream health and conservation for BLM’s land management plans, along with monitoring and evaluating stream and river conditions. It is these experiences and passions she brings to UWP and their mission of promoting watershed health.
