Christine Rolka was a fan of Hitchcock Woods long before March, when she became the executive director of the foundation that oversees it.
"I love this local resource," she said earlier this week. "It is my sanctuary when days are tough, and it is where I love to come to play with my family and our dog. To work on its behalf is like a dream come true."
Rolka started her job with the Hitchcock Woods Foundation right before the Aiken Horse Show, which has been held for nearly 100 years in what is one of the nation's largest urban forests.
"I tried to make myself as useful as I could, but I think people were training me more than I was helping them," she said. "My new Foundation family referred to my orientation as 'drinking from a fire hose.'"
Since then, Rolka has been busy finding out everything she can about the Woods and day-to-day operations there.
"What I knew was based on my experience with the Woods in a recreational sense," she said. "But I'm learning so much now about what goes on behind the scenes to make it accessible to us all, and it's very eye-opening. To some extent, I think that maybe I have taken the Woods for granted because you don't really appreciate something until you see what goes on to make it happen."
Rolka earned a bachelor's degree from the State University of New York at Cortland and an interdisciplinary Master of Arts degree in natural sciences from the University of South Carolina.
Rolka was a guidance counselor and a teacher of gifted and talented students in Aiken County for six years. She then worked for the National Wild Turkey Federation for 16 years. She was that organization's director of education from 2008 until 2014.
"She came to us with really good qualifications, and her references gave her glowing recommendations" said Harry Shealy, chairman of the Hitchcock Woods Foundation's board of trustees. "Her experience with the National Wild Turkey Federation put her in a position to work with conservationists from a lot of different areas and some of the people that we deal with."
Rolka replaces Dorothy Bryan-Kanda, who resigned as the Foundation's executive director last September.
"We hope to have a strategic planning meeting soon, and we'll sit down and talk about where we would like to go in the next five or 10 years and how we would like to do it," Shealy said. "We didn't want to do that until we had a new executive director in place."
Rolka lives in Aiken with her husband, Tom, and their two children, Lance, 10, and Heidi, 7.
Dede Biles is a general assignment reporter for the Aiken Standard and has been with the newspaper since January 2013. A native of Concord, N.C., she graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.