‘Pure joy ... being outside’

By DENNIS WEBB

Dennis.Webb@gjsentinel.com

After moving to the Front Range of Colorado a little over a decade ago, outdoor enthusiast and adventure racing veteran I Ling Thompson took a trip to Grand Junction, checked out the Lunch Loops system and fell head over heels, figuratively speaking, for the trails there.

“I was in love and I just said if I could live here, if these are the only trails I could ride for the rest of life, if this was the only landscape I would see for the rest of my life I would be so happy,” she recalls.

Just ahead of the pandemic, she and her husband Tim succeeded in making Grand Junction their home. And after most recently working for the Trust for Public Land, last year she landed a job putting her at the forefront of supporting the public lands so important to her and so many other people locally and across the nation. She was selected the inaugural CEO of the Foundation for America’s Public Lands, the congressionally chartered partner of the Bureau of Land Management.

Still working out of Grand Junction, she has begun endeavoring to build up an organization that will fundraise for and otherwise support the BLM, and work to connect people to their public lands and waters and help sustain these places.

For Thompson, it’s been a “wonderful merger” to be able to live in a place surrounded by the public lands that she loves, and to work to have an impact on them and help support their stewardship.

“I think it’s kind of a dream come true, to be able to be here and to have this place be my home, to have this role, to have a chance to be the first employee of the foundation really, working with so many people who care about public lands,” she said.

“I Ling is a proven leader in engaging communities with the outdoors and has the experience and drive to lead the Foundation in its mission to protect and sustain our public lands and waters,” BLM Director Tracy Stone-Manning said in a new release when her appointment was announced last year. “We look forward to collaborating closely with I Ling and the Foundation as we work hand-in-hand to support the BLM and our nation’s remarkable public lands.” Thompson’s introduction to the outdoors occurred during her childhood, but it took a little while before her career work began to focus on it. Much of the credit for that can be attributed to her having been drawn into the world of adventure racing.

She said her family is from Athens, Georgia, and her dad was a YMCA camp counselor and was in the Air Force, running parks and recreation and welfare programs for military bases. She has early memories of piling into old Volkswagen vans as a kid and heading to some of the places her dad used to go as a counselor.

“He just had a real love of exploring and being outside in nature,” she said.

‘WHAT IS THIS?’

She ended up getting a journalism degree from the University of Georgia at Athens and going into public relations, and then becoming interested in adventure racing when she saw coverage of the Primal Quest race on TV.

“I said, ‘Oh, that looks fascinating, people are riding their bikes and going to the wilderness and using a compass. What is this?’ ” she said.

She said she wasn’t an outdoorsy person at the time, but began doing “weekend warrior” adventure races, the longest being maybe 60 hours long, in various eastern states. She also “really got into 24-hour mountain bike racing solo,” she said.

She said that was a way to train for the long adventure races with teammates, and she also did 100-mile mountain bike rides, “things I had no business doing.” She took up ultra trail running as well.

She loves the team aspect of adventure racing, working together, building on each other’s strengths, asking for help when needed, looking out for each other.

In addition, “I just loved being outside. That was really it for me. I got to stay out all day in the woods and run around the woods with my friends. I walked out of the forest every time amazed what the human body is capable of when your mind said, ‘I’m just going to do it,’ ” she said.

RECORD RIDING

Thompson said she still doesn’t necessarily call herself an athlete, but has loved being outside doing endurance activities, going to places she wouldn’t otherwise see without doing those activities, and being able to do them with people who enjoy them as much as she does. These days she doesn’t race as much, having pivoted to mostly just enjoying spending time outside.

She recently found a way to suffer indoors, however, as part of a group effort in 2019 on the Front Range. She was among 25 cyclists who set a Guinness world record, which since has been broken, for the longest static cycling class, riding for 28 hours.

She with a laugh, “I don’t think I’ve ridden my trainer since then. I figure I rode all my trainer hours for that event.”

Thompson enjoys mountain biking and trail running locally, whitewater stand-up paddleboarding, skiing, and other activities including exploring local public lands with her husband and their dogs. Tim, whom she met in Georgia and is retired from working in residential remodeling, is an avid hunter and angler. Now Thompson is getting into fly fishing and hunting.

“I want to go get a pronghorn this fall if I’m lucky,” she said.

PATH TO CONSERVATION WORK

Thompson said that when she got into adventure racing, “I just fell in love with the outdoors and that pushed me to examine what I was doing with my work life.”

She found a job with The Nature Conservancy and started a career in conservation, motivated by her interest in nature, wildlife and ensuring a healthy future for the planet.

“Honestly, the pure joy I got from being outside, you can’t put that in a bottle. It fed me in every way professionally and personally,” she said.

In her new role she traveled the world, working with communities on ecosystem projects and restoration efforts.

Thompson then took a job with the Outdoor Industry Association, where she spearheaded what at the time, in 2012, was a novel effort to quantify the economic impact of outdoor recreation, both motorized and nonmotorized.

“I tried to merge my love of outdoor recreation professionally. All the economic numbers around outdoor recreation that we see today, I worked on that back in 2012 and really sort of launched a three-year effort to elevate the importance of outdoor recreation as an economic sector,” she said.

She then returned to The Nature Conservancy, where she has held jobs including managing director of global communications. She said she was working to drive the organization’s global agenda and it was great work until she wearied of being away from home so much.

“I was working on global issues and I felt like there was a lot to do close to home in the places that I really love and I wanted to find a way to have that kind of impact,” she said.

She was able to do that working first for the Trust for Public Land, where she worked as executive vice president of strategy and engagement. That organization puts a focus on putting parks where people need them and protecting public lands. Thompson worked for the organization after her move to Grand Junction, and one of its focal areas has been Clifton, an example for the organization of a community that can be surrounded by public land but still be an area where opportunities exist for providing improved local access to the outdoors.

Thompson’s work with TPL included working to raise its profile and build its brand. It involved the kind of teambuilding and teamwork she had been involved with earlier in her career, and for that matter in her adventure racing, and now she’s putting such skills to work with the Foundation for America’s Public Lands. She’s been focused initially on staffing up and building a national advisory council for the foundation, which also is overseen by a board.

COMING TO BLM’S AID

She said as the foundation gets up and going, it has something of a roadmap to follow thanks to foundations that already exist to support entities such as the National Park Service, U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Thompson said the BLM faces lots of challenges managing its multiple uses and trends such as increased visitation, and its staff are busy managing the land and don’t have the capacity they need to build partnerships and fully engage with communities and stakeholders. That’s where the foundation can help.

She has been spending a fair amount of time in Washington, D.C., in her new job, and some of her staff will be based there. But she said it also will be helpful for her to be based in Grand Junction, now the location of the BLM’s western headquarters, and it will be important for the foundation to have a western footprint, with staff located throughout the West.

The foundation’s focus will be improving awareness about the agency and the many multiple uses of the lands it manages, working to add more public access to BLM land, and addressing stewardship needs such as trails maintenance and the problem of dumping on public lands.

“BLM doesn’t have the capacity to really engage with the public in the way the public in many communities wants. We want to raise resources to really help bring more people in to care for these lands,” she said.

Chris Herrman, executive director of Colorado Canyons Association, which works in support of three local BLM national conservation areas, said he has gotten to know Thompson and her husband a little bit since they moved to the area. He loves that she is now able to play the role she is playing while living in Grand Junction and enjoying its outdoors.

He said he looks forward to seeing what Thompson and the foundation might be able to accomplish, given the tens of millions of dollars similar foundations have raised in support of federal lands.

“We’re hopeful that she can be really successful and get more funds to help with the stewardship of BLM lands because they certainly need it,” he said, citing the BLM’s limited budgets and challenges it faces addressing issues such as increased recreational use and climate change.

Said Thompson, “This is one of those lifetime career opportunities to do some real good for public lands and our public waters. I just hope more people really realize the scope and scale of the wonderful places, the important economic impact

that BLM has.”

Foundation for America’s Public Lands CEO I Ling Thompson poses for a portrait at the Lunch Loops Trailhead in March. Thompson fell in love with the Lunch Loops trails during a trip to Grand Junction a little more than 10 years ago and that spurred her and her husband to eventually move to the Grand Valley.

LARRY ROBINSON/ The Daily Sentinel

I Ling Thompson pauses in the Gateway area during a ride from Grand Junction to Moab. Cycling is one of the ways Thompson gets to enjoy the outdoors. That love of the outdoors continues in her job as CEO of the Foundation for America’s Public Lands, where she works to connect people to their public lands and waters and help sustain these places.

SPECIAL TO THE DAILY SENTINEL

I Ling Thompson rides the Lunch Loops trail system, her go-to local biking spot. Biking has been a part of Thompson’s life for quite a while, since she saw coverage of the Primal Quest race on TV while she was living in Athens, Georgia. Thompson took up adventure racing and did that for a time before turning her focus to just enjoying spending time outside.

SPECIAL TO THE DAILY SENTINEL

I LING THOMPSON

CEO of the Foundation for America’s Public Lands on being able to live in a place surrounded by the public lands she loves