At the Green Mountain Club’s Annual Meeting on Saturday, June 14, five general seats will open on the board of directors. Directors are elected to three-year terms, with a limit of six consecutive years of board service.
The GMC Nominating Committee presents the following candidates for approval. Read about this year’s candidates, and vote using the form below. Voting closes at 11:59 p.m. on June 1.
Lauren Bierman, First Term
Originally from Connecticut, Lauren has made her home in Addison County since 2004. Her first backpacking trip was with her father in the White Mountains as a young girl, and that sparked her love for the forest and mountains and the freedom that comes with leaving everything else behind while being absorbed by nature. She moved to Vermont with those intentions, and while life got busy with kids and her career, she still looks around with so much awe anytime she’s outside or even just gazing through a window.
Lauren thru-hiked the LT in 2019, has led backpacking trips for adolescent girls, and is a Hikerbabes Ambassador for Vermont. It was on her thru-hike that she decided to open her own psychiatry practice and thus named it Long Trail Psychiatry in honor of how much the Long Trail has benefited her own mental health. In addition to her practice, Lauren opened the Green Mountain Shakti wellness center in Middlebury to fulfill a dream of providing holistic mental health care to her community.
David Hathaway, Second Term
David Hathaway grew up in the Midwest and first came to New England in 1974 to attend Dartmouth College. His first taste of New England hiking came the day after he arrived with a three-day, 52-mile hike on the AT from Hanover, New Hampshire to Moosilauke Ravine Lodge. After two years of grad school in California, David moved to Vermont in 1981 to work for IBM.
He began hiking in earnest in 1990 after moving to Underhill, where he and his wife, Carolyn Greene, still live (a 5-minute drive, or long bushwhack, from Underhill State Park). David joined GMC in 1996 while planning his first Long Trail end-to-end hike, which was intended as a thru-hike, but completed in sections between 1996 and 1999. He was recruited to lead Burlington section outings in the early 2000s by then outings chair Rich Larsen, and has led at least one trip every quarter since then, and at least one a month since 2015 when not prevented by recent pandemic restrictions. David did his second Long Trail End-to-End hike in 2010, again planned as a thru-hike, but completed in sections between June and December.
Upon retiring from IBM in 2014, David became outings chair and webmaster for the Burlington section. He is also a volunteer trail adopter (of Rock Garden Trail on Mt. Mansfield), a corridor monitor, and enjoys getting out with a chainsaw to help clear blowdowns on the trails. He has taught the GMC map and compass navigation class several times. In 2021 he became chair of the GMC Trail Management Committee. He also serves on the GMC Publications and Executive committees. In June of 2024, he spent a week on a Volunteer Long Trail Patrol crew learning to truly appreciate the effort that goes into building every foot of trail. David is Executive Director of the Vermont State Mathematics Coalition and volunteers mentoring, tutoring, and giving talks on STEM related topics in Vermont K-12 schools. David is an Adirondack 46er, and has climbed the AMC New England Hundred Highest Peaks and 19 of the Colorado 14ers.
Nika Meyers, Second Term
Nika Meyers is an artist, educator and thru-hiker who grew up in the hills of Bridgewater, Vermont among fresh produce and hardwoods. After graduating college in 2011 with a degree in Studio Art and Environmental Studies, Nika joined GMC as the VHCB AmeriCorps Group Outreach Coordinator, advising groups on responsible trail use and coordinating service trips and stayed on with GMC as a caretaker and trail crew member through 2015. She fell in love with hiking and the community surrounding the trail.
Inspired by curiosity, she has spent the past decade working with the GMC, teaching the wonders of the North Cascades in Washington, following migratory birds to Costa Rica, making art, and hiking over 10,000+ miles across the United States connecting communities, landscapes and ecosystems.
Nika thru-hiked the Long Trail in 2012, her first true backpacking experience. It kicked off a deep love of long-distance hiking and trail running; today, Nika is a Triple Crowner (having hiked the Pacific Crest Trail, Continental Divide Trail, and Appalachian Trails). To reconnect with the Long Trail in a different way, in October 2019 Nika set the first women’s unsupported fastest known time hiking the Long Trail in six days, 11 hours, and 40 minutes. (The record today is held by fellow Vermonter Mikaela Osler, who broke Nika’s time by a mere 7 minutes in 2021.) In 2021 to connect deeper with the Colorado landscape, she set a new self-supported female FKT record on the 500 mile Colorado Trail in 9 days, 14hours, and 13 minutes.
Nika has been creating a life in Aspen, Colorado for the past 4 years where she is a Nordic ski coach, artist, and naturalist. She is thrilled to continue to be involved with the Green Mountain Club Community!
Marc Vincent, First Term
Marc was born and raised in Paris, France and moved to the Philadelphia area with his family in his early teens (he holds dual citizenship). He received his BA in Archaeology from Haverford/Bryn Mawr colleges and his MA in Art History from New York University. After earning his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, Marc taught art history at Baldwin Wallace University, in Berea, Ohio (a suburb of Cleveland), from 1995 until his early retirement in 2016 when he, and his husband Alex, moved to Shelburne, Vermont.
In Shelburne, Marc has been a mentor at Shelburne Community School, a member of the town’s Historic Preservation & Design Review Commission, and a guide/volunteer at the Shelburne Museum. Marc has also written book reviews for the Shelburne News and contributes articles to the newsletter of the Alliance Française of the Lake Champlain Region, headquartered in Burlington.
Marc’s love of nature was undoubtedly fostered as a cub scout in France and a boy scout in the United States. Today, Marc enjoys hiking, horseback riding, kayaking, and snowshoeing. He joined the GMC soon after moving to Vermont (he is a Ridgeline Society member) and has enjoyed being a volunteer at the Barnes Camp since 2023. Marc is fluent in French and almost-so in Spanish, and he loves interacting with visitors of various backgrounds and nationalities at the Barnes Camp. As an immigrant and a gay person, Marc welcomes–and hopes to contribute to–the GMC’s efforts to make the outdoors known and accessible to people from all walks of life.
Philip Werner, First Term
Philip Werner, based in Bristol, Vermont, is an active hiking leader with the Bread Loaf Section of GMC. He enjoys hiking, backpacking, Nordic skiing, and Tenkara fly fishing, especially in remote mountain streams.
Philip’s first exposure to GMC occurred in 2007 when he attended a Wilderness First Aid Class at the Waterbury headquarters before section hiking the Long Trail in 2008. Completing the Long Trail sparked a love of hiking and backpacking and a sense of humor about hiking muddy trails in the rain.
Since then, he has section-hiked 1400 miles of the Appalachian Trail, hiked all 620 trails in the White Mountains National Forest twice, summited each of the 48 White Mountain 4000 footers every month of the year, and backpacked coast-to-coast across Scotland twice. Currently, he’s hiking the Long Trail side-to-side list and beginning to section-ski the Catamount Trail.
Before moving to Vermont, Philip served as a volunteer four-season hiking leader with the Appalachian Mountain Club, mentored new leaders, and taught courses in map and compass navigation, winter hiking, and Leave-No-Trace wilderness ethics. He also served as Treasurer of the AMC’s Boston hiking and backpacking committee, has been a volunteer trail maintainer for the US Forest Service, a Master Educator for Leave No Trace, and was a professional backpacking guide in Andrew Skurka’s outdoor school.
Philip retired from the software industry in 2010 after 22 years overseeing software development, data center operations, product management, marketing, and customer service organizations. He is currently the founder and chief editor of SectionHiker.com, a popular hiking and backpacking website, now in its 18th year. He is also the author of a forthcoming book titled Hiking Over 60: A Hiking and Gear Guide for Active Adults.
