Meet Our Board
Ray Culter
Ray Culter holds a B.S.C.P. from the University of Cincinnati and a business degree from Xavier University. In 2009, Ray retired as Vice President of The Nature Conservancy based in Arlington, Virginia. Ray was the Director of Business Operations, Administration, Trade Land Dispositions, Corporate Purchasing, and Trade Lands, and has held other positions at TNC over his 32 years there. Culter also has experience as the Regional Planner in the Cincinnati area and was instrumental in conservation work in the Little Miami River basin in Ohio. For 9 years he served on the board of the Potomac Conservancy and on the board of several other organizations including the Center for Watershed Protection.
He and his wife Paulette built a home on their Hampshire County property, which is protected from further development with a conservation easement. Ray joined our Board in 2007.
Todd Carlisle
Todd Carlisle is the president of Millbrook Sportsman, Inc., a Capon Bridge hunt club with 1,400 acres protected by a conservation easement co-held by the Cacapon & Lost Rivers Land Trust and Potomac Conservancy. With family ties to the region stretching to the 1800s, Todd joined the Trust’s Board in June 2021. He spends most weekends with family members at the hunt club, which was originally purchased by his grandparents, and he has said, “I have a special appreciation for hunt clubs and believe I have landed in a great spot to assist in conserving more land in the watershed.”
A self-described “IT geek,” Todd has over 35 years of information technology (IT) experience and currently leads a team of 20 engineers for BAE Systems. He has served on both the Planning Commission and Historic Preservation Commission of Clarke County, Virginia and holds a Master’s degree in Economics from Shenandoah University in Winchester, VA. Todd resides in Berryville, VA with wife Lynette and youngest daughter Lily.
Guy Davis
Guy is a Hampshire County native and the fifth Davis generation to live and work on the Davis Farm along the Cacapon River near Yellow Spring, West Virginia. Guy joined the Board of the Trust in 1999, helping form a new ‘second generation’ of board members and bringing tremendous local insight to the process. Guy works for the West Virginia Department of Agriculture and still maintains a small working cow/calf operation with other family members at the farm.
Dottie Eddis
Dottie Eddis spent her first 18 years in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, before moving to West Virginia for school and career. She received her B.S. in Wildlife Resources in 1979 from West Virginia University and worked for 15 months with the West Virginia Department of Natural Resources before joining her husband in a rural veterinary practice located on his small family farm in Augusta, West Virginia. Now retired, Dottie enjoys studying the cello and playing chamber music, taking Master Naturalist classes, and exploring the world through adventure travel.
Becky Ganskopp, Treasurer
Becky grew up on a family farm at Capon Lake, West Virginia and is the sixth generation of the Rudolph Family to have lived in Hampshire County.
She graduated from West Virginia University in 1983 with a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration and a major in accounting. She is a CPA with 35 years of accounting experience and is currently employed as the CFO of a trade association. She lives in Alexandria, Virginia with her husband, Michael. They make frequent weekend trips ‘home’ to West Virginia to spend time enjoying the family farms.
Roger Griffis, Secretary
Roger is a marine ecologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). In his current position as Climate Change Coordinator for NOAA National Marine Fisheries Service, he helps lead and promote efforts to understand, prepare for, and respond to impacts of climate change on coastal and marine ecosystems. Roger led development of the first U.S. climate adaptation strategy to safeguard the nation’s valuable fish, wildlife and plants in a changing climate.
He is an avid birdwatcher and lives with his family in Takoma Park, Maryland. He and his family own property in the Lost/Cacapon River watershed along Dillon’s Run Road in Hampshire County.
Mark and his wife Caroline own forested land and have a solar off-grid cabin in Hampshire County. He first became familiar with the area by canoeing on the Cacapon River. He spends large portions of spring, summer and fall working to improve their forest through control of invasive plant species year around and management of the deer population during hunting season. He recently retired as President of Concordia Power, a small consulting firm focused on strategic services and implementation in the areas of advanced fission and fusion energy development. During his professional career, he worked closely with federal agencies, Congress, national labs, universities and numerous domestic and foreign companies and laboratories to advance better technology in the service of environmental and economic improvement. He has a Masters degree in Environmental Science from Miami University in Ohio and a BS in Environmental Science from Morehead State University in Kentucky.
Henry Ireys
Henry isn’t from around here, doesn’t have a background in environmental conservation, and has little experience with easements. But he loves his land. Fiercely. And he writes about that love. To date, his essays have appeared primarily in The Hampshire Review. Together, he and his wife, Priscilla, write stories and essays about the goat farm they operated in Hampshire County and the natural world around it. Although the goats are gone, Henry and Priscilla still live on their farm and still ride their horses for hours on trails that wander through the forests and over the mountains.
In 2019, Henry retired from a 40 year career in the academic world of health policy research. Among his various roles, he was an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and a senior researcher at a health policy research consulting firm. He has published numerous technical papers and reports. He was delighted to accept the wonderful (although surprising) invitation to the join the Board in 2022.
Bob Knisely
Bob Knisely will have owned 110 acres (80 forested acres) in Hardy County for fifty-five years on October 9th, 2023.
He came to West Virginia looking for peace and quiet during the tumultuous summer of 1968.
After retiring from the Federal Government in 2000, he and his wife Susan built a home on the property Far Muse. His time alone brings him contentment. Sharing it with their five children and 11 grandchildren brings him great joy.
He has a B.A. from Harvard, a J.D. from Georgetown University, and is a US Marine. He has taught at Johns Hopkins University, Harvard’s Kennedy School, and the St. Albans School of Public Service. He worked in Washington for thirty-six years, including time at Transportation, Energy, and Education (and four other departments) and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is also a member and past president of the Board of the Cacapon Institute.
Christine Lambert Pentino, Vice-President
Christine Lambert Pentino is an attorney by training who has been working in the nonprofit sector as a fundraiser for the past 20 years. She specializes in gift planning and on gifts for collaborative partnerships. She currently serves as the Director of Planned Giving at The Trust for Public Land.
Christine has worked in various fundraising capacities for the University of Maryland College Park, University of Maryland Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University, Maryland Institute College of Art, and as an independent consultant.
She earned her BA from The Johns Hopkins University and her JD from The Catholic University of America, Columbus School of Law. She is also a certified Master Gardener with the University of Maryland Agricultural Extension in Baltimore City.
Christine and her husband, Marc, live in an 1880 rowhouse in the historic Bolton Hill neighborhood of Baltimore with their two standard poodles.
They have a family cabin on 184 acres of mostly wooded mountain property in Connors Hollow in Morgan County, WV where they spend as much time as they can and thoroughly enjoy their dual city/country life, Their Morgan County property is under conservation easement.
Michele Mouré-Reeves
Michele earned a BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art and an MA from University of Maryland College Park. Her professional experience included gallery management and arts administration positions before moving to Aurora, West Virginia in 1994 where she operated an inn with her husband. Michele later added a restaurant and bar to the property.
Putting her art, historic preservation, and administrative experience to work as a volunteer, Michele helped restore the 1938 community center, curating a few art exhibits related the community’s history. Still working within the community, she co-founded an artist residency program, writing grants, developing programs, and managing the early phases of restoration of six historic buildings before leaving the organization to focus on running her own business.
Now living in Hardy County, WV, Michele markets the county’s tourism industry and writes grants for tourism-related community and economic development projects. She reads extensively, occasionally cooks for friends, and has finally found time to return to the studio, working sculpturally with clay, an artform and medium new to her.
Bob Poole, Vice-President
Bob is a retired corporate pilot. Eighteen years of his flying career was for ARAMCO in Saudi Arabia. In the United States, he flew for Exxon/Mobile, AOL, Time Warner, and Verizon. He also spent two years in Vietnam with the U.S. Army.
Bob has a B.A. degree from the University of Maryland.
Since his boyhood, he has been going to Conners Hollow in Morgan county to enjoy the wonders of Nature. He donated a conservation easement on his 160 acres there and joined the Board in 2008
Our People
In Memory
Jim Baker
Jim was a board member from 2014 to 2024. A past president of the Seldom Seen Hunt Club in Morgan County, he was an outdoorsman with a passion to protect the land he loved – be it his family farm in Pennsylvania or his forested, mountain land in the Cacapon and Lost Rivers Watershed. This love of land was demonstrated by his very important 2013 role in protecting 917 acres of hunting grounds with conservation easements, to ensure future generations of hunters can continue to enjoy the land. We are deeply grateful for his wise advice, fresh perspectives, and his many helpful contributions to our organization. We will miss him dearly.
Willard Wirtz
Jane and Willard Wirtz came to the Cacapon River Valley in 1968, bought the “Old Davis Place” along the Cacapon River, just north of Yellow Spring, and protected it with a conservation easement. A founding board member of the Trust, Willard was a retired law school teacher, lawyer, and government servant. He practiced law with Adlai Stevenson II in the firm of Stevenson, Rifkind and Wirtz in Chicago and was Secretary of Labor in the Cabinets of Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. In 1995, he wrote Capon Valley Sampler a book about the beautiful Cacapon Valley. We miss him deeply.
Nathalie Black
Nathalie was one of the founding members of CLRLT. She continued to work diligently for the trust as the Secretary for many years.We are grateful to Nathalie and those who had the foresight to establish Cacapon and Lost Rivers Land Trust when they did.