Gael lives on the North Fork of the Shenandoah River with her husband, grandson, two dogs, and one cat. She is a retired teacher who taught in both Shenandoah and Loudoun Counties. She worked with children who have blindness or vision impairment and is currently assisting with an effort to have Braille installed in the children's areas at the local state park.

Gael is a former 10 year veteran of the board of the Friends of the North Fork of the Shenandoah River. She served on the Education Committee and was instrumental in the development and implementation of the FNFSR children's summer programs that have taken place for well over a decade. 

Gael developed her interest in river education and advocacy on a week-long canoe trip following a drop of water down the local watershed to the Chesapeake Bay. The experience was an offering to Shenandoah County teachers from the Chesapeake Bay Foundation to recruit more teachers to river education and advocacy. The teachers paddled in every Bay tributary from the North Fork to the Potomac and ended up staying on Fox Island, which is now underwater. They learned about composting, bicycling to produce their own electricity, banding birds, setting crab pots and kissing the fish used as bait, cooking and leaving no trace of themselves in the wild, water quality and macroinvertebrate monitoring, and riparian buffers. They smeared mud filled with organic matter from head to toe to truly understand the effects of pollution. Gael returned from this trip with a burgeoning desire to educate others and teach them to love nature the way she learned to on that trip. She eventually acquired property on the river and her husband hand built the 800 square foot cabin from local logs in which they now live.

Gael refers to this Co-education Coordinator position as her dream job and is excited to pass on her love of the Shenandoah River and how to care for it to the current students who are our community's future.