Chris Hill didn’t grow up outdoors. Raised in the Washington D.C. suburbs, she was an arts kid–interested in photography, crafts, and spending hot Maryland summers mostly inside. But when she was 12, her mom won her a week of outdoor camp at a school auction. Hill chose rock climbing for her week’s focus. By the end of camp, she was belaying and climbing multi-pitch routes. But beyond sport, it was the camp’s emphasis on Leave No Trace ethics and value for wild places that stuck with her. “I realized, oh my gosh — I love nature! It’s the coolest thing ever,” she remembers. “And I want to help save it.” That conviction has guided her career ever since.
Hill went on to earn a law degree from Vermont Law School and spent the next decade and a half as an environmental lobbyist and policy advocate, working at the state, regional, and federal levels. She served as the first Chief Conservation Officer at the Sierra Club — the first Black woman to hold that role — where she led the organization’s land conservation, water, wildlife, and outdoor equity campaigns. Today she is the CEO of the Conservation Lands Foundation, which works to protect the country’s National Conservation Lands system.
Over the years she worked in conservation, Hill traveled to Alaska for various solo trips — floating wild rivers and hiking in places like the Brooks Range and Katmai National Park. She was at Katmai watching the bears at Brooks Falls when a ranger invited her to join their afternoon fishing. On her first cast, Hill landed a salmon. “This is easy!” she thought. She proceeded to catch nothing for the two hours that followed, but she was hooked. “I loved the idea of being in the water and just being very still and in the moment,” she says. When she got home to D.C., she found a women’s fly fishing group and continued to learn. The hobby, which would become a way of life for Hill, eventually landed her permanently in Alaska.
Around 2012, a planned float of the Alsek River brought Hill to Haines a couple days early. With time to kill, she asked around about fly fishing. Someone told her to email a local guide named Greg, who wrote back immediately: “Want to go right now?” She said yes. He drove past her on his way to pick her up — he’d assumed “Chris” was a man. A few years later, they were married, and a few years after that, Hill would relocate full-time to Alaska.
Hill still fishes the Chilkoot and Chilkat rivers whenever she can, often with her dog Sammy. She hunts, skis and backpacks. Every summer her mother comes to visit and they head out on the water for shrimp, crab, and salmon — bounty that still stuns her East Coast family. “We just go out there and get our shrimp,” she says, laughing. “It blows their mind.”
For Hill, time outside isn’t separate from her conservation career — it’s what keeps her going. The ecosystems of Southeast Alaska and the Arctic remind her of what’s actually at stake. “When you’re in the Tongass or in the Arctic, you recognize these are very, very special places — some of the last places in our country that we need to protect,” she says. And when the policy fights get heavy, the land gives back. “It rejuvenates my soul and my mind,” she says. “And allows me to remember why I’m doing the work that I do.”
Since going full-time in Haines in 2020, Hill has leaned deeper into Alaska life. She has a brand ambassador role with Sage Fly Fishing and is active on the boards of Trout Unlimited and One Green Thing. Her 2019 film Where I Belong, which explores her relationship to fly fishing and outdoor equity, won Best Short Film at the American Conservation Film Festival and screened at Banff. She continues to travel and visit her family back in D.C., but Alaska is home. “I fell in love with the land, the animals, the people, and a person,” she says.
Emily Sullivan is a photographer and writer focused on outdoor recreation, environmental wellness, and community empowerment. She is based on Dena’ina lands, where she can usually be found skiing, packrafting, or berry picking.
