Winter 2025 Lady Slipper Award Goes to Stratford Douglas
Once every season, we honor an outstanding volunteer with our Lady Slipper Award. This Winter, the award goes to Stratford Douglas. Our Volunteer Coordinator Mary Miller talked with Strat about the great work he does to support Conserving Carolina. Thank you, Strat!
How long have you been a volunteer with Conserving Carolina?
I started volunteering with the Rock Crushers in March of 2021, three months after my wife Jodie and I moved back to WNC from West Virginia. I joined the Board of Directors in July of 2022.
In what capacity do you typically volunteer with Conserving Carolina? How have you volunteered for Conserving Carolina in the past?
I still do trail maintenance whenever I can (not as often as I would like!), but mostly I participate in activities as a member of the Board of Directors. Those activities include chairing the Public Policy Committee, serving on the Stewardship Committee and Executive Committee (since July of 2025), attending CC functions, and some fundraising. I’m also on the Board of Walnut Creek Preserve as a representative of Conserving Carolina, and I serve there as Secretary.
What brought you to Western North Carolina, and what has been your inspiration for becoming involved with Conserving Carolina?
I grew up on Hogback Mountain Road in Tryon on a beautiful 35 wooded acres on the north side of Piney Mountain. My grandfather, Dr. Marion C. Palmer, came to Tryon in 1912 from South Carolina, and my family has taken on various leadership roles in Tryon and Polk County ever since. I spent much of my youth hiking and camping and playing in the woods and streams around Tryon and on my uncle’s incredible 1200-acre cattle farm on Bright’s Creek in northern Polk County. During my late teens and early 20’s I also did a lot of backpacking, mainly in areas around Linville Gorge, Shining Rock, and Grassy Ridge, although some friends and I also did an epic backpacking trip across western Polk County in 1977. After receiving my undergraduate degree from UNC-Chapel Hill I returned to WNC and worked from 1979-1981 as a whitewater raft guide on the Nolichucky River in the summer, and in the ski industry in the winters. (I met my wife Jodie in Asheville in 1980.) While in graduate school 1982-87 I also worked as a raft guide on the New and Gauley Rivers in southern West Virginia. I am sure you can understand that I forged a deep connection to the southern Appalachian region during those formative years.
After receiving my PhD in Economics I worked for three years as an energy economist at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in Washington DC, but my big break came when West Virginia University in Morgantown hired me as an Assistant Professor in 1990. Jodie and I lived in Morgantown for 30 years, and we raised our daughter Jessie there.
While in Morgantown I continued to paddle, hike, and play outdoors, but I also began to take an activist role in conservation. I served on the Boards of two organizations whose missions overlap considerably with CC’s: the Coopers Rock Foundation, which supports recreation and conservation at Coopers Rock State Forest, and Friends of the Cheat, whose core mission is remediating acid mine drainage in the Cheat River basin, but which also has built and maintains river access points and a rail-trail, and has a strong conservation education program.
In 1998 Jodie and I built a house on a few acres contiguous with the Snake Hill Wildlife Management Area on the rim of the Cheat River Canyon, and with the WMA management’s approval I designed and maintained a system of trails there. (Here’s a link to my trail map. Check it out!) Realizing that protecting the WMA for recreation would need strong local support in the community, I started an email newsletter, the Snake Hill Ski Report, that was designed to let people know about xc ski conditions on Snake Hill in real time and encourage them to drive up the mountain from Morgantown to enjoy the place. (See the article below from Highland Outdoors Magazine.)
Sure enough, one morning in February 2014 without warning the Department of Natural Resources started a timber harvest at Snake Hill that ballooned to over 200 acres smack in the middle of my trail system. Big machinery churned up the soil and ripped away the trees, wiping out many of the trails. I went on the warpath, and I embarked on a campaign to get the DNR to restore the trails. The DNR was completely unresponsive, going so far as to deny the existence of the trails we’d been using for 15 years. (“They are not trails; they are ‘linear wildlife openings’.”) A senior DNR official opined in a leaked email that “the WMA is for hunters, not tree huggers.” In the words of The Dude, I thought “This will not stand, man.”
I enlisted the written support of both the Morgantown City Council and the Monongalia County Board of Commissioners, published an article in the Morgantown paper, and went around to talk with local politicians. Eventually the noise got so great that the Director of the DNR decided he needed to travel up from Charleston to walk what was left of the trail system with me. We came to an agreement, and the DNR restored some of the trails they had destroyed and allowed me to rebuild and maintain a new system. Whenever I go back to Snake Hill, I am pleased to see that my trail system still exists, it is still being used, and a cadre of volunteer caretakers have taken my place doing the maintenance. The Snake Hill Ski Report, unfortunately, no longer exists.
All this is a longwinded way of saying that, when I retired and moved back to WNC in 2020 I was ready and able to take on a significant activist role in conservation. I had heard about Conserving Carolina and seen their signs posted on trails and properties everywhere, and I decided that CC was the most effective place for me to put my energy. The more I work with CC, the more convinced I am that this was the correct decision.
What is your “favorite” environmental conservation issue, either facing WNC or in another community?
Free public access to public lands is a cornerstone motivation for all public support for conservation, whether it’s clean air, clean water, habitat preservation, climate change mitigation, you name it. If the people don’t experience it, they won’t support it.
What has been your most rewarding experience in volunteering with Conserving Carolina?
Getting to know you folks on staff and on the Board. Reading your reports on properties, crawling through the rhododendrons with staff naturalists, learning the latest techniques of trail design and maintenance from Max, finding out about the lines of local political power and influence from my fellow Board members, building my own network of motivated conservation professionals and volunteers that I can call friends. My roots in WNC are deep, but Conserving Carolina has made them broad as well.
What are your hopes and/or expectations for Conserving Carolina in the future?
I hope to continue to find ways to make myself useful. And I would like to get out in the field with you guys as much as possible.
What else do you like to do when you aren’t volunteering for Conserving Carolina? Your other interests, passions, hobbies and pursuits?
There are three places where I am completely happy. One is in a boat on a wilderness river, preferably with some decent whitewater. Another is on cross-country skis in quiet rolling country covered with compact powdery snow, kicking and gliding on the flat, struggling up hills, and speeding downhill on cross-country skis. Preferably at night. The third is ambling down a trail checking out the wildflowers.
And I enjoy doing the grunt work that makes boating and xc-skiing and ambling possible for me and others.
Aside from that, I like to cook (omelets, salmon, pizza, Thanksgiving turkey, gravy, mashed potatoes, and apple crisp) and hang out with my family, especially my granddaughter Moira Jo, who is the cutest and smartest baby ever! Also, with a Mark Byington landscaping plan in hand I am slowly working to make my back yard bloom with native plants.
What other interesting, cool and exciting information about you can we share with our readers? Do you have a motto or quote that you try to live by, that has informed your commitment to volunteering with Conserving Carolina?
No mottos. But let’s see, cool and exciting information. I spent four months in 2011 and another four months in 2019 on sabbatical at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. Possibly the best 8 months of my life. If you get a chance, go to the South Island and spend as much time there as you can! Their trails and scenery and conservation ethic are second to none in the world. Instead of dead politicians and weird symbols, their widest-circulation bank note has Edmund Hillary on the front and a penguin on the back. That’s really all you need to know. Go buy your plane ticket.