Tamara Antunes

TKO’s Engagement Manager

TKO’s Engagement Manager, Tamara Antunes, first developed a connection to the outdoors while growing up in Brazil. “In my childhood, we had a yard with lots of plants and flowers and herbs that we used to heal our bodies,” Tamara said. “It really soothes me when I think about it. That was my first connection with the outdoors.” 

But it wasn’t until Tamara moved to Maine as an adult that she started getting interested in hiking. “At first it was disastrous, because I didn’t know what I was doing, and I didn’t have any guidance.” To learn more, Tamara joined a hiking group through the Appalachian Mountain Club for people in their twenties and thirties, but she soon transferred to a group of older adults after having a hard time “keeping up” with the younger group. “It was interesting because people were so patient. They would teach me everything from  how to pace myself, to what to bring in my backpack (ten essentials), Leave No Trace principles, how to plan for a hike, or how to measure elevation. They also taught me a lot about gear, which I didn’t know. I had no idea. And that was my first experience with getting outdoor education.” 

From there, Tamara started solo hiking, and before moving to Oregon, she hiked seventeen out of forty-eight of New Hampshire’s 4,000+ foot peaks. Hiking benefited Tamara’s mental and physical health, and she was excited to continue learning about hiking and mountaineering in Oregon, but she was met with roadblocks. “I hit this barrier of education, and affordability of trainings, and, really feeling like I was excluded in those spaces,” Tamara said.

She ended up connecting with a group of Brazilian friends who also loved the outdoors, and they started going on hikes together. After a while, their group started guiding other people on hikes too, and The Brazilian Backpack Project was born. “We saw, just, lots of people coming through the door and asking us to take them somewhere, or where they should go to hike or  backpack and even where to find appropriate gear,” Tamara said. “And that’s when we officially decided that we wanted to guide and we wanted to call ourselves an outdoors group.” 

As it has grown, The Brazilian Backpack Project has partnered with a nonprofit called Loco por la Aventura, which hosts outdoor adventures for Latinx folks throughout the PNW. “They were a big support for us with activities, especially related to climbing,” Tamara said. “It was great to connect with them, and it was also great to feel like we belonged in another group that is part of our ethnicity. Being in a room filled with Latinos is just pure magic, and it brings a lot of compañerismo and friendship and joy.”

In the following years, Tamara went on to earn her master’s in social work from Portland State University, where her education focused heavily on public policy, nonprofit improvement, engaging communities and a strong alignment with Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DEIB). She was drawn to TKO because it was aligned with those DEIB values. “I would only work for a place where I feel like their mission and values align with mine,” Tamara said. “And TKO was aligned with that.”

As TKO’s Engagement Manager, Tamara leads our Trail Ambassador program, which focuses heavily on sharing information with trail users about safety and land stewardship at popular trails and in the backcountry. “I would always encourage people, yes, explore, but also give back. We should keep the land clean, keep it accessible, keep it open, keep it free for everybody, and I think that’s the part that I advocate for,” she said. “Take care of the land that you’re stepping on. That means do not leave your dog poop behind. That means do not leave your trash. Do not pick up that flower just because you think it’s cute, you know? People don’t realize that their impact on nature is huge.” 

Tamara also guides TKO’s accessibility team, a group that heads out to trails and makes note of accessibility considerations, including parking and restroom conditions. “We go to the trail and we look to see if there are any holes where people could fall, or spots that are too cliffy, or if there’s benches and they have big rocks in the way–what’s the point of having a bench if somebody cannot get to it?” Tamara said. These notes on trail accessibility are then included in hiking guides on OregonHikers.org so people with different needs and abilities can decide whether the trail is right for them or not. 

Tamara hopes to expand TKO’s accessibility work to include more information related to mental health, sensory needs, and less visible types of disabilities, which she herself has struggled with. “If you look at me, you cannot tell that I am a person that has disabilities. I started hiking because of my mental health, which means a lot of times I was walking when I really needed to be alone, and I was processing my thoughts, and sometimes people can be very loud, or they can ask weird things on the trail. So that’s another consideration that I would add in there,” she said. “People also cannot tell that I have really, really terrible vision, close to low vision, so I can’t see a lot of things, and people don’t realize that’s an issue when you are on the trail. So I think that’s another thing that comes from my experience, and I would love to see that being expanded to other people.”

And, to Tamara, accessibility also means making the outdoors more inclusive for people from other marginalized identities, including people of color. “I bring a perspective of inclusivity and representativity that really matters for not only my community, but many communities excluded from the outdoors every day,” Tamara said. “To me, being a Trailkeeper means encouraging people from marginalized communities to reclaim the land, because it has been kept from our ancestors for so long, and people were excluded for so long. They don’t even feel like the land is theirs anymore. So part of my work is to show people that they belong to the land, and that they should be part of doing that stewardship.”

Nelson Kline

TKO Crew Leader

TKO crew leader Nelson Kline has deep roots in Oregon. “I’m a fifth generation Oregonian,” he said. “My grandfather was a logger and my dad was a forester, so I grew up camping, hiking, backpacking, rock climbing, skiing–all the outdoorsy stuff.” 

Nelson was born and raised in Salem, and he’s passionate about caring for trails in the Central Valley. He started out volunteering as a crew leader for Portland-focused organizations like the Forest Park Conservancy, the Nature Conservancy, and Friends of Trees, but he wanted to make a difference closer to home. “I was looking for projects in the Central Valley areas that I recreate in, so up to Santiam Canyon and out towards the coast, and so I connected with TKO in 2019.” 

Nelson has been leading TKO projects in the area since 2021. Part of his work has been focused on the Oregon Coast Trail, with projects in the Siuslaw National Forest and near Cascade Head. He also leads trail crews in the Santiam Foothills and throughout the Central Valley. Shellburg Falls stands out as a particularly meaningful project for Nelson. “I was working on building one of the bridges there the day before my dad passed away,” Nelson said. “There are certain trail moments or places that have memories like that.” 

In recent years, one of Nelson’s favorite trails to work on has been the North Rim Trail at Silver Falls State Park. “It was pretty cool because it was brand new start to finish,” he said. “We roughed it in; we graveled, we built a fifty-five foot fiberglass bridge. So it took years to do that.” 

For Nelson, Trail Parties offer a welcome change of scenery from his day job working in I.T., and they help motivate him to spend more time outside. “Trail Parties sort of force you to get out there,” Nelson said. “So even if it’s a bad day, if you were going to hike on your own, you might say, ‘Nah, I’ll skip it.’ But if you have, five volunteers signed up and waiting for you in the parking lot, then you just throw on your rig gear and go.”

Living in Salem also gives Nelson the opportunity to stand up for trails in another way–through advocacy work. He frequents the State Capitol to support bills that protect Oregon’s public lands, wildlife, and trail systems, often working with the Oregon Trails Coalition to lobby, testify, and write letters. “We’re trying to get everybody together who are trail stewards,” Nelson said. “You’ve got snowmobilers and horseback riders, and mountain bikers. Sometimes it feels like there’s sort of a turf war on some stuff, like, ‘That’s our trail,’ or ‘Oh, the darn mountain bikers, or the horse people,’ or something like that, but what we all have in common is we want to take care of the trails, and we want access to them. So that’s been a big passion of mine, is just trying to get everybody on board with taking care of this resource.”

When asked what being a Trailkeeper means to him, Nelson said, “It’s stewardship. My sense of identity is very Oregonian, having been here my whole life. But that’s the best commonality that I think people can and should get behind, is taking care of our state, and the things that we have access to–public lands.” 

Debbie Asakawa

TKO Donor & Volunteer

This spring, TKO volunteer and donor Debbie Asakawa went on a hike with her eight-year-old grandson in the Eastern Gorge. “I was expecting a short maybe thirty minutes or something like that…he was out on the trail for five hours with me!” Debbie said. “His enthusiasm and excitement were off the charts. I’ve never seen anything like it. He kept saying, ‘This is perfect, Mimi, take a picture!’ We had to walk to the top of every knoll because he knew the views would be best there and we had to sit next to every creek. Every time we came to a junction, he wanted to take the longest option; he did not want the day to end.”

Watching him run up and down the trails, searching for the best views and the longest trails, Debbie was reminded of why her work with TKO is so important. “He’s now my legacy, and he’s as excited about the outdoors as I am; maybe more so. We live in a place of incredible beauty, and TKO builds and maintains access to all of that beauty. So I’m grateful that I have had an opportunity to support all those efforts.”

Like her grandson, Debbie first got her start in the outdoors from a young age. “My earliest memories were in Phoenix. I think I’d hiked the Grand Canyon three times by the time I was six or seven,” she said. That passion has stayed with her throughout her life. After going to college in California, Debbie headed north to Oregon in the 1980s, and she’s been here ever since.

“Every day I feel grateful that I’m here. I love the forests, the mountains, the lakes, the rivers, the desert, and the stunning oak savannahs of the eastern Gorge. What I can go and do in one day is amazing and every time I look at a landscape, I’m aware of the million little miracles that create that landscape. I’m grateful that TKO is building, restoring and maintaining access to it. TKO is connecting me to all those beautiful places.”

Debbie’s love for Oregon’s natural places inspired her to start a women’s hiking group called Trailmix. “We started twenty years ago. Now we’re mostly in our sixties and seventies, some are in their eighties, but it’s a wonderful group created for community and the natural world, with an understanding that we need to steward what we love.”

The group first got involved with TKO after the Eagle Creek Fire. “I was on the board of Friends of the Columbia Gorge and aware that TKO was really ramping up,” Debbie said. Trailmix came together to raise money for TKO. With their combined efforts, they surpassed their goal of $5,000 and raised closer to $9,000. This started a yearly Trailmix tradition of fundraising for TKO. “The next year I thought maybe we could raise $10,000 and I think we raised $18,000, and then every year it’s gone up and up and up, and so last year we raised $100,000 for TKO. We like to support matching grants, so I think we’ve helped to raise $400,000 over the past four or five years.”

Debbie described her motivation as paying it back as well as paying it forward: stewarding trails and public spaces so they’re around for future generations, while also giving back to the trails they’ve been hiking for so long. “We have had free access to trails for decades and never thought about what went into them…we’ve taken it for granted for too many years. The trails need our help plus giving back also fills my soul with joy.”

Debbie is also thinking about what’s next. “I’m at an age where I’m thinking about legacy, how I can leave the world a better place. We live on a unique planet, and it’s a miracle that we are here to witness and enjoy it, so we have an obligation to be stewards, to save it, and to cherish it.”

Debbie has been involved with TKO for years now, and she says it’s been a rewarding experience. “I love that this organization gives me a chance to give back. I’m grateful for the organization and I’m grateful that I have the time and the resources to support it.”

Scott Borg

TKO BOARD MEMBER

TKO board member Scott Borg first found out about TKO by pure chance.

“I was doing scouting work for the North Coast Land Conservancy, and I came across a Trailkeepers trail maintenance party,” Scott said. “And, you know, they were all wearing the hard hats, and carrying tools around and that sort of thing.” 

The trail party was just about to stop for a lunch break, so Scott decided to join them and learn more about TKO. “I said, ‘Okay, so, like, what are you guys doing?’ and I was really interested in finding out what the trail conditions were, that sort of thing. Anyway, I had a really good conversation, and that was sort of my introduction to what Trailkeepers does.”

Scott ended up connecting with the crew leader, later sharing information he’d gathered in his scouting work. And, from there, Scott decided to volunteer with TKO. “Part of my motivation was to help convince them that a little bit of work was needed on the Oregon Coast,” Scott said. He participated in some trail parties, which convinced him to get even further involved by helping coordinate trail parties along the North Coast and the Oregon Coast Trail. “So a year or two later, when I started getting lobbied to throw my hat in the ring as a potential board member,” Scott said, “it was a little bit of an easy sell there.” 

After growing up as a self-described “army brat” and spending much of his youth hiking and backpacking all over the world, Scott moved to the Oregon Coast for his retirement, largely because he loved the landscape. As a geologist who worked at the National Science Foundation for over thirty years, Scott has a wealth of knowledge to share with TKO, and he also understands how important TKO’s work is for supporting trails. “I kind of knew that there must be organizations like Trailkeepers from way back, because I had dealt enough with the U.S. Geological Survey to know that things like the Forest Service are chronically underfunded, and so are state park things, and so, without volunteer help, a lot of the trails can’t be maintained.” 

When asked what being a Trailkeeper means to him, Scott described it as a way of giving back. “Recreational trails represent an opportunity to learn something new, to see other perspectives, to meet people,” Scott said. “You know, and so maintaining the trails and ensuring there’s a reasonably maintained network of trails is, I think, a great service to society.”