First in a series of feature stories profiling residents who’ve moved to Haines in recent years.
Do you need help printing from your email at the Haines Borough Public Library?
Why not ask the rocket scientist who works there? Trained as an aerospace engineer at the University of Colorado, Erik Stevens, the library’s part-time systems engineer, designed multi-rover communication and navigation systems for NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
He can also troubleshoot your printing issue.
“It is not about his degree,” said library director Patricia Brown. “It is about his personality: He is able to work well with people at all levels.”
Stevens holds a bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering sciences and a master’s degree in remote sensing Earth and space science from University of Colorado-Boulder.
He says the library job is “a perfect fit” for him.
“It’s about managing the flow of information,” Stevens said. “In aerospace it is about bringing it all together and making sure the pieces fit on a higher level. Libraries are a hub for huge amounts of information and the challenge is trying to keep it all running smoothly from a technical standpoint.”
Stevens applied to the aerospace engineering program at the University of Colorado because “it sounded like the hardest possible thing that I could do.”
When he graduated in 2010, he had a job at Ball Aerospace and Technologies, a job offer from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (“the ultimate dream job for an aerospace engineer”) and an all-expenses paid scholarship offer from the University of Colorado to continue his studies at a doctorate level.
“I was at a crossroads in my life… I figured that the best thing I could do was turn all that stuff down” and move to Alaska.
Stevens began searching online real estate listings for land in Alaska that would be within a reasonable budget. He found just the right parcel at Chilkat Lake. In addition to being affordable, “it was mountainous, very snowy, and would have great skiing.”
Despite seeing his peers go on to work on high-profile projects, such as the Mars rovers, Stevens says he does not regret his decision to come to Haines. “I have got it really good…I am happy that I have embraced living here in a permanent way. The aerospace industry sounds glamorous, but the glamour wears off fast and then you feel like a cog in a giant machine that you have no control over.”
Stevens spends his free time in the winter backcountry skiing. Skiing was a big part of his life growing up in Arizona and later in Colorado, and he has not been disappointed by the skiing Haines has to offer. “The terrain is awesome here, everywhere, it just depends on where the snow is and what the conditions are.”
However, he was surprised to find that there was no organized sharing of information regarding skiing conditions, safety and avalanches in Haines.
“It was a shock to realize that skiers here had no information out there about what the conditions are like and how to be safe and how to ski safely here,” he said. “In Colorado, the Avalanche Center there is so developed, so advanced, everybody checks the avalanche forecast every time they go skiing. They know the conditions before they go. It is engrained in the ski culture there. People here were talking about skiing big lines, but avalanches and safety seemed to have no place in the discussion.”
It was clear to him the town needed some form of avalanche information center. Stevens and another friend from Colorado, Jeffrey Moskowitz, decided to take on the challenge. The two founded the Haines Avalanche Information Center (http://alaskasnow.org).
One big hurdle for Stevens and Moskowitz was the charged debate that surrounds the topic of skiing, particularly heli-skiing, in Haines. “Because it is such a hostile political atmosphere in Haines, it takes a long time to build partnerships,” Stevens said. “There is this political world where people just bicker and not a lot gets done, although in general most people are really nice and accepting as long as you are not talking about heli-skiing or whatever the controversy is at that time.”
Still, Stevens is upbeat about the progress and prospects of the Haines Avalanche Information Center. “An avalanche center takes years to develop (in terms of) the data, the forecasts, and the trust in the community. Right now, there is very little funding but I think that things are progressing. We are in year four; after a decade of operations I will expect us to have decent funding and to be comparable to other avalanche centers across the country.”
In addition, Stevens believes that the Haines Avalanche Information Center can go a long way toward developing winter tourism.
“It is astounding that Haines is not a ski town. It has the potential to be an incredible ski destination and I think an avalanche center is a big part of that. It is like a big online advertisement of how the skiing is,” he said.
Stevens says that most of the people who read the condition reports on the website are located outside of Haines and that they use the reports as a way to follow the ski conditions. “You can’t build a ski town without an avalanche information center.”
Drawing on his own relatively recent relocation to Haines, Stevens points out that there are aspects to Haines that are increasingly hard to find in America.
“This is an amazingly wild place. That is the thing that draws people to Haines and I think we need to be really careful not to compromise this. There is plenty of talk about how we need to make more jobs and we do need to make more jobs, but people don’t come to Haines to have a career or to get rich, they come here to enjoy the wildness of this place and that should be the top priority in how we plan the future of Haines: to keep it wild, to keep in pristine.”
It wasn’t until he had been living in Haines for some time that Stevens realized that, in addition to finding the “phenomenal backcountry skiing” that he had been seeking, he had a additional bond with the area. Stevens had spent his high school years gazing at a photo of an unknown Alaska mountain scene, taken while on a cruise through Alaska with his parents.
Stevens didn’t remember where the photo had been taken but said that it spoke to him and so he enlarged the picture and hung it over his bed. A few months after he moved to Haines he returned to Arizona to visit his parents and realized that all that time he had been looking at a photograph of the Cathedral Peaks, one that matched the view from his future home.