Our Crew
WMC Staff and Personnel
Gabby Markel, Executive Director
Gabby Markel was raised in Girdwood Alaska and still calls it home in the winter when she is not at the WMC. She came to this role after dabbling in many others, including, but not limited to, backcountry cheffing, community organizing, nonprofit programming, trail building and film shoot logistics. She loves listening to birds, petting glacier mice, running around outside, making art of many mediums, and connecting with people and places. She fell in love with the WMC at her first ever Word Jam, and is motivated to continue and expand the organization's history of creating impactful experiences for people and the communities they are a part of. Gabby loves living in and learning about Alaska and is motivated to create work that makes it a better and more just place to live for all.
Audrey Brown, Programs Manager
Audrey joined the WMC in Summer 2025 as an Operations Intern and now serves as the Programs Manager. In this role, she helps plan and coordinate the WMC’s summer programming, ensuring meaningful, well-run experiences for participants, staff, volunteers, and community members alike. Audrey is passionate about expanding access to equitable education through hands-on learning and community-building rooted in a connection to the natural world.
Tamara Egans Harper
Administrative Assistant
Tamara joined the WMC in 2012 as coordinator of events at the Kennecott Recreation Hall, which WMC manages. She's worked for WMC since then, assisting with various administrative tasks, including maintaining the WMC’s database of donors, keeping track of all of our wonderful supporters and partners.
Tamara and her husband have lived in McCarthy since 2003 and she enjoys gardening, birdwatching, skiing, biking, hiking, cooking and welcoming guests to her tinycabin bed and breakfast during the summers.
Joey Boots-Ebenfield Program Coordinator, Field Studies Program
McCarthy rests beside a receding glacier, and as the climate of northern regions continues to warm rapidly, the wider Copper River Basin faces growing erosion, thawing permafrost, increasing wildfires, and vegetation community shifts that are implicated in the changing ranges and numbers of animals like caribou that have long been crucial to culture, landscape structure, and customary and traditional resource use. In this landscape change is always occuring, as can be learned from listening to these places and the people who call them home. Ecological, geophysical, glacial, and social processes have been interplaying here at incredible timescales, forming a system much greater and more complex than the sum of its parts. I focus on the roles that living organisms play in broader stories of change in landscape structure/process. Climate, people, policy, vegetation, and wildlife are all bound together in stories of ecosystem change. The Wrangells are a fascinating region to experience and learn from, and I’m excited to do so alongside our students this summer.
Kristin Link /
AIR Program Coordinator,
Field Studies Program Instructor,
Instructor for Field Sketching and Journaling Workshop and Community Group
Kristin Link is a fine artist, science illustrator, and educator who lives on the Nizina River just outside McCarthy. She works with the WMC as an instructor and facilitates the Meg Hunt Artist Residency Program. She has worked with the WMC in various capacities since 2010, including stints as Program Associate and as Executive Director. You can learn more about Kristin’s work on her website: www.KristinIllustration.com.
Ben Shaine
Field Studies Academic Coordinator
Ben has taught with the Wrangell Mountains Center’s college programs since their inception and provides a link for the Center with the academic community. His novel Alaska Dragon (Fireweed Press 1991), set in the Wrangell Mountains, explores the contemporary significance of wildness. He co-authored the Center’s Community and Copper in a Wild Land, an overview of the McCarthy area published in cooperation with the National Park Service. During congressional consideration of legislation designating Alaska parklands, Ben handled Wrangell-St. Elias issues for the Alaska Coalition. His master’s thesis evaluated management alternatives for the Wrangells and his PhD is in environmental studies. Ben and his family developed their homestead on the mountainside near Kennecott, where he lives, writes, wanders and wonders about the power of the Wrangells revealed in its details.
benshaine@gmail.com
George Wening, Field Studies Program Fellow
George first came to the Wrangells as a student with Wrangell Mountain Field Studies in 2024, and instantly fell in love with the Wrangell Mountains and its people. He’s returning for his second year working with the Wrangell Mountains Center, assisting with running the Field Studies program.
He’s a student at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota where he’s studying Geology and Physics with a focus on ice, snow, and glacier physics. He’s worked as a guide in New York’s Adirondack Mountains, all across the northern Midwest, and the Wrangells. He teaches and coaches rock climbing, and loves sharing his passion for outdoor sports with people, especially with people with limited access. He also loves learning new art forms - recently, he’s been making stained glass art, and playing guitar and fiddle.
A Peek back at WMC Staff and Friends
Video by Dave Sarbell