BCA Member Profile: Christine Hogan

Christine Hogan is the new BCA president-elect and took over the gavel at the January Board Retreat. Although a transplant from Colorado, she has always considered North Dakota her home and actually chose North Dakota! Her family moved to Minot Air Force Base to follow her father’s Air Force assignment in 1966. When her family moved again three years later, she was in college at NDSU and stayed behind to finish college eventually going on to UND where she completed a law degree.

Chris currently resides in Bismarck where she was a trial lawyer in private practice for thirty years. However, for the last five years, she has been working in the field of disability rights at the Protection and Advocacy Project and is a regular visitor to the Legislature when it is in session.

Chris loves reading (especially history), cooking, gardening, and getting together with friends and family.

When living in Colorado during one of her family’s military moves, Chris fell in love with the mountains and all wild places. This translated into leading an active outdoors life style that includes hiking, kayaking, swimming, cross-country skiing and just plain walking her dog outside.

The Badlands provided Chris an ideal setting to pursue her outdoors activities. She is grateful for all the wild places in this country that have been saved for the benefit of all of us—especially if we are willing to walk and carry a pack. Th is love of the outdoors and the Badlands led her to believe we North Dakotans have a duty to try to preserve the small wilderness areas that still exist in our state and eventually led to her membership in the BCA.

We are fortunate to have such a strong advocate of the Badlands and the BCA on board as our president. Chris’s favorite quote sums up her commitment:

We need the tonic of wildness... At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.

Henry David Thoreau
Walden; or, Life in the Woods