Dave Rak retires after 45 years with Forest Service

It's been 45 years since Dave Rak and his wife Paula came to Alaska. It's been 45 years since he accepted a job as a soils scientist with the U.S. Forest Service. And now, 45 years later, he's retiring.

Rak's last day as a full-time employee with the agency was Dec. 31. In that time, he's held a few different positions, worked with many different people and seen the Forest Service change in lots of different ways.

Fresh out of graduate school in 1977, Rak applied with the Forest Service to be a soils scientist at various locations across the U.S. One of which was in Elko, Nevada. Paula wasn't keen on living in the desert, he said, so they held out for a little bit.

"Lo and behold, we got two offers from the Forest Service in Alaska - one in Anchorage and the other one in Sitka," Rak said. "There was a fellow graduate student who worked for the Forest Service in Southeast Alaska when he was an undergraduate as a summer seasonal employee. He said, 'Don't go to Anchorage, it's just another big city. Go to Southeast. You'll like it a lot better.' We did. I took the job in Sitka. We arrived there in October of 1977, and it rained 32 inches that month."

They stuck it out through their first winter and they were hooked, Rak said. "You pay for that in the winter and then you get to play in the summer."

After being in Sitka for a year and a half, Paula wanted to return to school and was accepted at the University of Alaska Anchorage. A position opened up for a soils scientist there, so they relocated. Paula finished her schooling and about the same time the Forest Service went through a reorganization, Rak said, leaving him to pursue another job.

"There were people who, in their previous careers, had known Wrangell, and I got more than one recommendation from Forest Service employees ... who said, 'Go to Wrangell. Go to Wrangell,'" Rak recalled. "In fact, Judy Bakeburg was the administrative officer on the Chugach National Forest at the time where I was working. You often don't get called into the administrative officer's office unless you get in trouble. Judy called me into her office and closed the door. I thought, 'What did I do?' She says, 'I heard you're thinking about going to Wrangell. I grew up in Wrangell. If you need anything, just let me know.'"

Rak started in the Wrangell district as a soils scientist once again. One of the major functions of the position, he said, is to map out soils throughout the region. Once that was completed, he'd basically worked himself out of a job. "There are only so many soils out there to map," he said. "I have a certificate that says I participated in mapping over a million acres of soils in all the years I've been doing it."

From there, Rak moved into the position of resale forester and then planning. He was the team leader for a project that would send a power line from the Tyee Lake hydroelectric station into Canada to help serve mines there. The project never took off, but Rak had written the environmental document for it.

"After we completed the analysis, they needed someone to write the special-use permit," he said. He wrote that permit despite the project stalling. "After one special-use permit, it's a slippery slope. I've been doing special-use permits ever since."

That was in the early '90s. Though he's worked many different jobs while at the Forest Service, Rak was still writing special-use permits up until retirement.

One of the biggest changes to the Forest Service in his 45 years, Rak said, is the number of women the agency employed. "When I got up here, it was all men. If there was a woman on the crew, that was the exception. Now, if I go out in the field, there's more times than not that I'm the only guy. ... It's nice to have that balance."

Three of the top five stressors in life are a change in living location, a change of job and a change of marital status. Rak hasn't had any of those things in more than 40 years. Though he's not moving and is still happily married, he will have to adjust to life without the thing he's done for so many years.

Rak said he has been working with Tory Houser, the temporary ranger in charge of the Wrangell district, to sign a volunteer agreement to drive boats since a lot of what Forest Service employees and partners do is not on Wrangell Island.

"When you get new employees, it takes them almost a year to get a boat license," Rak said. "I'm a certified boat instructor and boat examiner. I have a lot of experience. I can instruct them while we're transporting."

One of the reasons it's taken Rak so long to retire is because he liked the job and the people he worked with. He was relied on so much that Houser joked they wouldn't let him go or, at the very least, she'd keep him on speed dial.

"Like Dave says, he never retires because he never has two bad days in a row," Houser said.