Board of Directors & Officers

I was born in Manhattan Beach, CA and grew up in nearby El Segundo. I worked for the Chevron Corporation for over 36 years and retired in 2018 as a Procurement Category Manager. I’ve been married to Laura Waag for just under 37 years. Laura is a retired Graphic Artist and owned her own design studio in L.A. for over 20 years. We have one daughter and two granddaughters and one grandson who all live in Indiana.

We moved to Nevada City, CA in early 2020 as the hectic lifestyle of Los Angeles finally convinced us to move to a quieter area. We also loved Gold Country history so the move really fit with our passion. Soon after moving to Nevada City, we became interested in the Emigrant Trail as the Truckee Trail and Nevada City Roads are in our backyard and began to explore them both shortly after our move. I first joined Trails West after coming across a large number of the “T” Rail Trail Markers and soon after became the Marker Maintenance Coordinator. I also learned about OCTA about the same time and joined as well. I participated on my first metal detecting field trip led by David Fullerton in 2024 and was hooked! Since getting involved with David’s Truckee Trail Team, I took the lead with researching and leading our team on a mission to find the Nevada City Rd. which was opened up in 1850 and split from the Truckee Trail in Bear Valley. I’m also leading the research at Mule Spring, which for you Donner-Reed party enthusiasts, was the staging site for the four Donner-Reed relief parties.

Laura and I also enjoy hiking, fishing, and camping in addition to my playing keyboards in a local Nevada City band, and also love to make wine! We planted a vineyard on our property in 2021 so make wine from our grapes, plus those that I purchase from a local organic grower.

I look forward to being the President of our chapter and also want to encourage our members to drop me a line anytime with any questions, or simply to say “hi.”

I have been a member of OCTA for many years.  My original focus was simply hiking and biking as much of the Emigrant Trail as I could.  More recently I have been very enthused about finding and mapping the many alternative trails, bypasses and cutoffs of the California Trail from Goose Creek down along the Humboldt River to the Humboldt Sink.  This involves field work but also a lot of diary analysis.  I am 65 years old.  I was born in Fresno and have lived in Sacramento with my wife for the past 20 years.  I retired from my work in California water resources management in 2019 and I am loving the extra time I now have to work on the trails.  I look forward to serving on our Board of Directors!

In 2001 Phyllis got her first taste of PITdom, repairing historic cabins, excavating 19th century logging sites and best of all, searching for remnants of emigrant trails, volunteering for more than 20 projects with the US Forest Service’s Passport in Time program. This brought her into contact with OCTA members and she joined up to see what the fuss was about, and before long she was managing the registration process for the 2015 annual convention in South Lake Tahoe.

Phyllis lives in Yuba City, one-quarter mile from where she was born, but she’s been around the world and has worked in Africa, Eastern Europe and Asia. She’s now a retired court management and technology consultant and spends her days volunteering for a variety of historical organizations. Her roles in OCTA are Board Member, Treasurer, Trail Talk editor and member of the National Library-Collections Committee, and she plays an active role in the organization of the Don Buck library.

Becky Judd is a retired elementary school speech-language pathologist. She was born in Omaha, Nebraska, and now lives in San Jose with her husband, Bill. They have three grown children. She volunteers with Santa Clara County Parks, the local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, and a small school her children attended. She picked up a book about pioneer women on the trail when she and her husband first moved to California (for his job in Silicon Valley). There was something about moving across the country to follow a dream that resonated. She’s been hooked ever since.

Dee has lived in her home in Placerville for 50 years, raising a family and now enjoying her grandchildren who live nearby.  She is a retired elementary school teacher.  As a teacher, one of her favorite subjects was California history.

She began emigrant trail work on PIT (Passport in Time) projects with Richard Silva twenty years ago on the Yreka, Nobles and Lassen Trails. Dee has worked with OCTA teams verifying and mapping emigrant trails in Northern California especially the trails through El Dorado County.  She enjoys locating the trails using historic maps, emigrant diaries and GIS to discover possible locations and then verifying the locations on the ground and mapping the discovered trail segments.

As the compositor for Trail Talk, she receives the print ready articles and arranges them for publication.  She is presently working on cataloguing and digitizing Don Buck’s extensive collection.

It all started differently for all of us.

For me it might have been all those weekends at Columbia in the 1960s, or in the Boy Scouts with map and compass, or in conversations with Richard Silva on layering old maps into Google Earth or maybe I just came by it honestly by my great-grandfather coming to California over the Beckwourth Trail.

My focus for the past 13 years has been extracting the information from old maps and diaries for the sites and features of William B. Ide, the President of the California Republic, John Sutter and Peter Lassen. On the Peter Lassen front, I started a six-week project that is now into its 10th year. Using GIS, Sat and LIDAR, I started a small group of old farts to map out the Lassen Rancho Bosquejo. Here at the end of the Lassen Trail there are miles of trail, the end of the Lassen trail camp, over 200 adobe sites, two Benton Cities, three Lassen mills, two Lassen compounds, 22+ miles of canals, two Benton Cities, the first Masonic Hall in California, Lassen’s smelter and foundry (again the first in California), two dams, and for good luck let’s throw in the shipwreck of the 1856 Riverboat  “Plumas.”

The Lassen Trail has evolved from a simple dotted line on a map to five major routes to the various components for the Lassen Rancho. On top of that there are numerous sub-routes forming, and in places, just wonderful braids across the terrain. The town of Benton City 2 also has evolved with a newly discovered 20-side-street subdivision at the junction of the Lassen Trail branch, which heads directly to the front door of the Lassen Masonic Hall and the Marysville-to-Shasti Road.

With the attributes of the Lassen canals and mills known, I have had a bit of “project creep” and have found 13 and possibly 14 of Lassen’s other mills, many canal segments and infrastructure developments in Keytesville, Missouri, Petaluma, Fremont, Santa Cruz, Slough House, Johnson Ranch, and Plumas, Tehama and Lassen Counties.

These labors have led me to assist in the protection and conservation of early emigrant sites.

So, you can see that we lead an odd passion, we take the weak clues left from the past, like the flowers in a green meadow, grooves in Peter Lassen’s canal, a wagon bit left in the ground or the just the earth worn from the passage of the multitudes. I have also fallen into this group of time travelers who attempt to find the remnants of the past by wandering though the present.

Kevin Moore is a longtime Nevada resident with a lifelong interest in the outdoors, Western history, and the historic trails that helped shape Nevada and the West.

Kevin has more than three decades of public service experience. He began his law-enforcement career with the Nevada Highway Patrol in 1989, serving as a Trooper, Field Training Trooper, Corporal/Acting Sergeant, and Sergeant. He served as Chief of Police for the Moapa Tribal Police Department from 2010 to 2014 and was active in several professional law-enforcement organizations. He was manager of the Zero Teen Fatalities program for Nevada, bringing years of law-enforcement and traffic-safety experience to a statewide program focused on educating young drivers and reducing teen traffic fatalities.

Since retiring, Kevin has devoted more time to his interest in Nevada and Western history. He enjoys exploring historic emigrant routes, visiting trail sites, and learning about the experiences of those who traveled west. He is a member of Trails West and is involved with the National Pony Express Association, participating annually in the Pony Express Re-Ride.

As a CA-NV Chapter board member of OCTA, Kevin brings decades of leadership and public-service experience along with a genuine enthusiasm for Western history and historic trail preservation. He looks forward to helping preserve and promote these historic resources, introducing others to the stories of the emigrant trails, and helping ensure that these important pieces of our Western heritage are protected and appreciated by future generations.

I grew up in Sacramento, spent thirty years in Butte County and currently live in El Dorado and Inyo Counties. I am married to Calder Reid, a USFS employee, and we have two sons. I started my professional life with CAL FIRE in 1969 as a seasonal firefighter while going to college in the winter months. In 1974 I was offered a permanent job in the Butte Unit of CAL FIRE. It was in the early 1990s while in Butte County that I met Andy Hammond of OCTA. Andy asked if he could put a trail marker in front of the CAL FIRE station near Berry Creek on the Beckwourth Trail. I not only allowed Andy to put up the trail marker, but I signed up with OCTA. I’m not sure where I got my interest in history, but I’m giving credit to my mother who used to read to our family at night around a campfire at our cabin in the Eldorado National Forest.

I was too busy working to get out on trail projects, but I did go on one OCTA Trail project with Don Buck in the late 1990s. After that one field outing I became hooked on OCTA and realized what a professional organization it was. If everyone was as committed as the man I just met this was some organization.

In 2003, I promoted to Unit Chief for the CAL FIRE Amador-El Dorado-Sacramento-Alpine Unit and moved to El Dorado County. In 2013 I retired from CAL FIRE after forty-four years as a Deputy Director in charge of Northern California. I had traveled all over the United States either managing major emergencies as an incident commander or serving as an agency administrator and teaching. The farthest I traveled to teach emergency incident management principles was New Delhi. I’ve spent a lot of time in helicopters; flown an air tanker; was a peace officer for twenty-nine years; taught at Butte College; attended the Marine Corps Leadership Reaction Course in Quantico, VA; attended the Executive Fire Officer Course at the National Fire Academy in Emmitsburg, MD; was an incident commander on California’s major incident management teams for fifteen years; and led a federal team for one year. I was the recipient of the various Directors awards five times.

Even while still working I kept reading the various OCTA publications, dreaming of getting out on some emigrant trails. In 2018 I visited the AKT Ranch near Wheatland, CA, which resulted in a partnership between the Wheatland Historical Society and the CA-NV Chapter of OCTA. We were allowed onto the property to find historical sites and, most importantly, the emigrant trail. Those who attended our 2023 Spring Symposium saw the fruits of our labors when we were allowed to tour the historic Johnson Rancho and see the site of the ranch’s adobe house and the remnants of the End of the California Trail.