Expedition
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Terri Watson
 Leadership Position: Executive Director, LightHawk
NOLS Graduate: 1990 NOLS Instructor
Course
From high up in the air, soaring over the
peaks of Wyoming’s
Wind River Range, most things look a lot smaller — herds
of antelope spread out like a golden carpet, mult-pitch
climbs are deceiving boulder problems, and high mountain
lakes look
like small specks of blue in a granite sea. One thing that
doesn’t look smaller from the sky is the reality
of human impacts on the land. Pilot Terri Watson, a former
NOLS
instructor, is very familiar with how a person’s
perspective on environmental issues changes from the cockpit
of a small
plane.
“As soon as you start flying you see things,” she says. “Some
people fly to get places. I fly to see things.”
Watson is executive director of LightHawk, a nonprofit
environmental aviation organization that flies critical
decision makers
and shapers — everyone from reporters, scientists,
and members of Congress to local villagers and land developers — over
sensitive land-use areas in North and Central America. From
the air, LightHawk’s team of over 100 volunteer pilots
are able to show, in a way no other medium can, the interconnectedness
of our natural environment.
Terri remembers taking a rancher, a developer and a “rabid
environmentalist” up in the same plane a few years
back. She flew the crew over an area that had been developed
by coalbed methane, an area that was undergoing development
by coalbed methane and one that hadn’t yet been developed. “They
all saw the same thing,” she remembers. “They
all gave a bit.”
Watson, a former Army pilot, has flown helicopters, Black
Hawks and other planes all over the world, everywhere
from Egypt to Antarctica, where she was a heli-coordinator
for
the National Science Foundation. Flying over places where
she’s hiked with NOLS, however, remains meaningful. “When
I hike I develop an intense sense of a place,” she
says. “I think you develop your love with a place by
spending time with it. But I think you gain a broader sense
of how it fits into the big picture when you’re in
the air.”
For NOLS students, Terri says, the Winds are a vast,
rugged wilderness where you can hike for weeks without
seeing
other humans. These mountains feel remote, unspoiled,
boundless in every direction. But from a plane, says
Watson, everything’s
different. You can see what lies beyond the mountain boarders
and how little wilderness remains intact.
“You’ll always remember the peak you climbed,” she
says. “Likewise, you’ll also always remember
the flight you took. It leaves an impression.”
Expedition Leadership | Leadership
Types | Leadership
Skills
Leadership
in 30 Days | Leadership
Profiles
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