Jon Stich

1 month ago | sierraclub.org | Lindsey Botts |Jon Stich

When I was a teen in Jacksonville, Florida, a minister taught my youth group how to rock climb. First he took us to West Virginia and then to Linville Gorge in North Carolina. That’s when I fell in love with the mountains. I moved to the Asheville area after graduating college in 1984, the same year I started volunteering with the Sierra Club. We’re very lucky in western North Carolina. The Pisgah and Nantahala National Forests are managed as one unit, covering 1.1 million acres.