NORTH POLE — The first time Stephanie Brown experienced 25 below zero, walking out of the Fairbanks International Airport, her nose hairs stood on end. She was on a visit from Seattle looking for “real winter.”
“I took my first breath and my nose hairs went — bing!” the 56-year-old information systems analyst said. “It was energizing.”
A few years later, in 2011, she moved to Alaska, and she has been embracing winter ever since. Brown is the president of the board of directors for Christmas In Ice, the holiday-themed ice sculpture park in North Pole, which opened on Nov. 26 and runs through Jan. 8.
She earns her living at home on a computer, and volunteering for Christmas In Ice gives Brown a reason to spend time outdoors and be around people.
“It gets me outside and gives me fun things to do, and I get to hang out with people I really like,” she told the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner.
Early years
Brown grew up in Enumclaw, about halfway between Seattle and Mount Rainier National Park.
She lived in an apartment with her mother, a nurse, and her sister and brother on her grandparent’s property. Brown, the middle child, was the sort of girl who was always moving around and doing things.
“I was the one who was up in trees,” she said. “I ran everywhere as a child. It drove the schoolteachers nuts.”
She learned to garden from her grandfather, but he refused to teach her to how to fix engines and run power tools. That she learned by watching her grandfather teach her brother.
“He absolutely did not think it was a girl’s place,” Brown said.
By the time she was a teenager, she knew she didn’t want to be a secretary or teacher or nurse.
“They had this computer class in the college catalog,” she said. By the second semester, she was tutoring other students.
Dreams of the Far North
Brown put herself through college cleaning and gutting fish, mostly salmon, for the Pacific Salmon Co. and nearly made her way to Alaska via a transfer for work.
By then, she had heard the story of how her father, a machinist, had built a sailboat and sailed to Alaska. She wanted an Alaska adventure too, and she nearly had one while in college.
Brown was about to board a plane to a fisheries job when she heard that she couldn’t bring her dog, and she canceled the trip.
It turned out to be a misunderstanding but Brown moved on, eventually joining the corporate world, working for a bank, an electrical utility and a third-party benefits administrator, a job she still holds. The company manages health, welfare and pension plans for unions.
In 2005, her dream of seeing Alaska came true. Brown rode here on a motorcycle trip with her partner, Richard Welliver, a former U.S. Navy submariner.
They liked it so much they started coming up to Alaska to volunteer at Ice Alaska, host of an annual international ice carving competition in Fairbanks, and eventually bought an RV park in Fox.
The ice park
After volunteering for Ice Alaska, Brown decided to focus her energy on the more modest ice park in North Pole.
“It’s a smaller operation,” she said. “You get to know people a little better. There is a little more willingness to spread the knowledge around.”
Brown also has more opportunity to use heavy equipment. One of her responsibilities is to oversee ice block harvesting.
“There are so many fun things to do, and they all involve chainsaws and power tools and heavy equipment,” she said.
The North Pole ice park is still coming together with the multi-block ice carving competition underway.
The park is open until 10 p.m. except on Fridays and Saturdays when it closes at 11 p.m. and on Christmas eve and Christmas Day when closing time is 6 p.m. Daily admission to the park is $8 for adults and $5 for children.
Brown said if she weren’t helping at the ice park, she would be dedicating herself to some other worthy cause.
“I have been volunteering most of my life,” she said. “I was a Girl Scout. If I wasn’t here, I would be somewhere else volunteering.”
