Welcome Christine Spang to the Board

The Sugar Pine Foundation is thrilled to welcome Christine Spang as one of our newest board members: a technology entrepreneur, climber, and lifelong tree lover whose connection to the Sierra Nevada runs deep.

Christine grew up in Upstate New York, in a family where, as she puts it, "nature was free entertainment." With 3 siblings and parents who kept things simple, summers meant car camping in the Adirondacks, swimming in lakes, hiking, and playing in the woods where she was building forts, making slingshots, and shooting rocks. She ran cross country in middle school, enjoying the fall foliage through maple and oak forests. Her happiest childhood memories involve her grandmother's 400-acre farm in the Great Canadian Shield of Ontario, where she spent long summers surrounded by eastern white pine, ash, and elm. "I thought it was infinite when I was a kid," she recalls, "but now I can walk from one end to the other in one hour." That sense of wonder at wild, expansive space never left her.

Her parents are Norwegian, and visits to extended family in Norway deepened her sense that the natural world was something to be lived in, not just observed.

At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she earned her degree in Computer Science, Christine discovered a culture that pushed boundaries in every direction. The student tradition of "hacking" the campus buildings was legendary: at various times students placed a life-size Where's Waldo hat on a rooftop and hoisted a full fire engine shell atop another building. Christine got involved in the caving club, learning to place climbing equipment underground, and then found her way to the Outing Club. The realization came quickly: climbing was just like caving, except outside and more beautiful.

As a teenager, Christine discovered Linux and open-source software. At MIT, the institution where so much of that culture was born, she became a self-described "hardcore Linux nerd." She learned how to code as a teenager by reading developer blogs and helping build a Lord of the Rings game on Linux. That passion for building things ran in the family; her father and grandfather were both engineers.

After graduating, Christine moved to California for the tech industry and stayed for the climbing. She began climbing seriously in 2011, and the California lifestyle suited her perfectly: work hard during the week, spend every weekend on world-class routes in Yosemite. She has since climbed trad and alpine routes across Yosemite, Canada, and Europe. Six years ago, she bought a cabin in Strawberry specifically to be close to Lover's Leap, one of the Sierra's most beloved climbing destinations.

"I came to California for tech and stayed for climbing," she says simply, and that double life, rigorous intellectual work balanced against physical challenge in wild places, defines her well. These days she no longer plays computer games. "I play the game of life now," she says. Climbing is her way of stepping fully away from the screen and into something real.

That same drive to build and solve runs through her professional life. After MIT, Christine joined a startup called Ksplice as an early employee (later acquired by Oracle), then co-founded Nylas, an enterprise communications infrastructure company she grew over twelve years. "Being an entrepreneur is the only thing I've ever known," she says. What draws her to it is the freedom: she doesn't like constraints, moves fast, and loves solving hard problems without the drag of large-organization bureaucracy. "You can achieve things in a small company that would take too long in a big one."

Her relationship with the Sierra isn't just recreational. Christine was present during the 2021 Caldor Fire, watching with deep concern as it swept toward her community. She had already prepared her property with defensible space, closely tracked the fire's progress, and tracked the heroic effort Cal Fire made to protect the Strawberry cabins and the sobering destruction that followed as the fire crested toward South Lake Tahoe. That experience made the fragility and importance of Sierra Nevada forests viscerally real.

Long before the Caldor Fire, Christine had been thinking seriously about her relationship with trees. "I feel that forests have a spiritual power," she says. She is also a Limited Partner in Superorganism, a venture capital fund with a distinctive mission: using Silicon Valley-style investment strategies to protect global biodiversity, an approach she finds compelling because results are visible and tangible. When the invitation to join the SPF board arrived shortly after a period of deep personal reflection on forests and fire, she took it as a sign.

Christine brings exactly the kind of voice our board needs: someone who has loved trees since childhood, understands wildfire from lived experience, thinks boldly about conservation, and knows how to build organizations that last. We are honored and delighted to welcome her.