by Wenatchee Outdoors Board of Directors
If you have spent any time in the Wenatchee Valley outdoors community over the last decade, you have felt Sarah Shaffer’s presence. Maybe you used one of the guidebook posts she helped shepherd onto this site to find your trailhead. Maybe you benefited from advocacy work that kept a trail accessible, without ever knowing her name was behind it. Either way, she was there.
Earlier this year, Sarah Shaffer stepped onto a new trail, passing the torch after a decade of dedicated leadership at Wenatchee Outdoors. We wanted to take a moment to celebrate her story right here—in the vibrant community space she poured her heart into building for the people she loved serving.
The Woman and the Mission
When Wenatchee Outdoors went looking for its first Executive Director, we needed someone whose love of the outdoors was genuine, whose energy could carry a scrappy young nonprofit, and who could connect with people across a community as wide and varied as ours. We found Sarah.
For ten years she has been the face most people put to this organization. When someone in North Central Washington thought of WenOut, they thought of Sarah: her name in the inbox, her voice at community events, her fingerprints on everything from guidebook updates to grant applications to volunteer recruitment. She held the thing together, often as a one-woman operation, with a stubbornness and care that we have rarely seen in anyone.
She also found time, somehow, to keep getting outside herself (mountain biking, skate skiing, alpine rock climbing), because she understood that the work only makes sense if you still love the thing you are working for.
What She Built
Over 700 guidebook posts live on this website, filterable by activity, difficulty, location, family-friendliness, dog-friendliness, and accessibility. That library did not build itself. Sarah grew it, updated it, and made sure it stayed useful year after year for anyone who has ever stood at a trailhead trying to figure out where to go.
WenOut Kids, our program putting younger generations on bikes and trails, grew under her watch and now runs weekly, bringing kids outside in ways that stick.
Then there is the advocacy work, which may be the hardest part of her legacy to see and the most important. For ten years, Sarah showed up at public comment meetings and planning sessions, in conversations with land managers and agencies, to make sure the human-powered outdoor community had a seat at the table. She built relationships across the Wenatchee Valley so that WenOut was a trusted partner, not just a website. When access was threatened, she raised her hand. That kind of work is quiet and often thankless, and she did it consistently for a decade.
Sarah took the look of the website and the sustainability of the organization to new levels.
– Andy Dappen, Founder, Wenatchee Outdoors
In the last few years, she also built something structural: a team. She poured energy into growing the volunteer base, the board, and the staff around her, so the organization could hold what she built. That is harder than it sounds.
The Person Behind the Role
Sarah is a mother, a gardener, a baker, someone who tends to chickens and a cat and a dog and fish and a frog with the same earnest attentiveness she brought to this organization. She has a list of outdoor things she still wants to try, kayaking and backcountry skiing among them, and we have no doubt she will get to them.
Her interests in wildlife, nature, and people are not a professional biography. They are just who she is. And for ten years, that has been good for all of us.
From the Board
As the outgoing Board President who worked closely with Sarah for several years, we want to say this plainly.
Watching her grow in this role has been one of the real pleasures of my time with Wenatchee Outdoors. She met hard things with that smile, the one that has not changed since Andy Dappen first hired her. She never stopped caring, even when caring was expensive. When things got difficult, she kept going. When they were good, she made sure the people around her felt it.
Sarah, thank you. A lot of people got outside because of you, people who might not have otherwise. The trails are better-documented, the community is more connected to its wild places, and this organization is stronger than it was ten years ago. That is your work.
We will miss you in this role. Out on the trails, we fully expect to still see you.
