Eric and his wife Robin Schepper and moved their family to Steamboat Springs ten years ago to take advantage of the SSWSC and its programs so that their boys; Marat, 20 and Shokhan, 16,  could learn skiing and pursue their dreams of racing, especially Marat who is a Division 1 collegiate ski racer at Bates College.  Washburn lived outside Phippsburg and attended SOROCO in the late 1970s, and moved his family to Steamboat from Washington DC in the summer of 2012.

Washburn is the sole proprietor of Windward Strategies, LLC, a natural resource consulting firm.  For the past few years he has raised money for USA Nordic and worked pro-bono as a lobbyist to promote enactment of federal legislation to reform Olympic sport governance to prevent sexual abuse of athletes and to raise funds for amateur sport athletes, coaches, clubs and National Governing Bodies.
Prior to becoming a consultant,  he co-founded the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, a coalition of over 50 national hunting and fishing and land conservation organizations working together to promote natural resource conservation policy.

For ten years, Washburn worked in various policymaking and management capacities in the United States Senate.  He was a Senior Policy Advisor to U.S. Senate Majority Leader Thomas A. Daschle, where he oversaw the development and U.S. Senate passage of the Energy Policy Act of 2002.  Prior to that, he worked for Senator Harry Reid as the Democratic Staff Director for the Senate Environment and Public Works (EPW) Committee. Before joining the EPW Committee, he was the Legislative Director for U.S. Senate Democratic Leader Thomas A. Daschle for four years.  Washburn’s initial service in Congress was as Legislative Assistant to Senator Daschle, where he led the development of Senate Democratic Caucus strategy on a range of environment and energy issues, including federal lands management, clean air and water, endangered species protection, and global climate change.

Washburn has been a Bullard Fellow at Harvard University Forest, and holds an MFS from Yale University, and an AB from Bowdoin College.  He sit on the Boards of the Boulder Open Space Conservancy.
“I have been helping to raise money for Nordic Combined and working in Congress to raise money for Olympic athletes generally, and look forward to connect those efforts of the SSWSC.  We recognize how impressive the club’s legacy is for ski racing – both Nordic and Alpine – and want to do what we can to support it and ensure that it has a strong future.”