The trails at Averill’s Viking Creek Wetland Preserve were quiet despite clear blue skies and warm February temperatures.
Snow squelched beneath Erick Parker’s knee-high waders as he navigated across a frozen wetland in search of the game camera he had deposited last week.
He paused on the banks of Viking Creek to watch the gush of water. The ice that encased the stream during winter had already broken up, hinting at the coming deluge of spring snowmelt. Parker could already picture the water rushing across the streambanks and soaking into the roots of the nearby trees.
The creek runs under Wisconsin Avenue and into Whitefish Lake, so some of the water would end up there. Some would continue downstream into the Whitefish River, then the Flathead River and then Flathead Lake.
“I have always been fascinated by the way water interconnects the rest of the world,” said Parker.
As the newly hired program coordinator for the Whitefish Lake Institute, it is Parker’s job to bring those connections to the surface for residents across the Flathead Valley.
As a child growing up on the shores of Lake Erie, Parker developed a love for the natural world through visits to nearby parks and nature centers. He was especially intrigued by lakes and streams and enrolled in as many hydrology classes as he could at the College of Wooster, but Parker said he didn’t fully consider a career researching water until the summer after his junior year.
The first of two pivotal moments occurred when Parker accepted an internship monitoring lakes and streams in Mount Rainer National Park. He spent the summer trekking to high alpine lakes to retrieve vials of water that could be sent to a lab for testing.
“This is the stuff,” he recalled thinking each time he plunged his hands into the chilled water.
His ambitions were further fortified when a family friend introduced Parker to Ric Hauer, a renowned streams ecologist at the Flathead Lake Biological Station. One conversation turned into a multi-day question-and-answer session as Hauer recounted his own career in conservation to a rapt Parker. He even forwent a planned excursion to Glacier National Park to spend more time with the elder scientist.
“He was everything I wanted to be,” said Parker.
Hauer mentored Parker through his first post-graduation job, analyzing water samples at the biological station. Parker loved the work and the mountains, but he was also hesitant to settle down so soon after college. If anything, the job at the biological station had proved to Parker that there was so much more to learn and explore.
He moved back east to study blue-green algal blooms on Lake Erie and wetlands in central Michigan. In 2019, he took a job as a research technician on a project studying long-term trends to water quality on the North Slope in Alaska.
“That was a really seminal experience because I was exposed to all these people doing this really cool research,” said Parker.
The project inspired him to pursue a master’s degree in natural resources at the University of New Hampshire. But Parker said he also had reservations about a career in academia. The world of scientific research is notoriously insular, and Parker didn’t want to simply do science. He wanted to share the excitement and novelty of the process with non-academics.
“I think the scientific community does a lot of good and important work,” he said. “But one of the things I took away from working in academia over the past decade is that we need more science communicators to break down barriers to entry of that knowledge.”
He assumed the program coordinator role at the Whitefish Lake Institute in January, with the goal of doing exactly that. In his new position, Parker will be responsible for managing the nonprofit’s longstanding volunteer and outreach programs, including annual fifth grade field trips to Averill’s Viking Creek Wetland Preserve and the Science Quencher talk series.
In the summer, Parker will train the next generation of citizen scientist volunteers in the Northwest Montana Lakes Network. Members of the group regularly collect water samples to test for nitrogen, phosphorus and chlorophyll levels and early signs of aquatic invasive species. The water samples are akin to getting blood drawn at the doctor, explained Parker. Regular monitoring allows the Whitefish Lake Institute to see problems as they emerge.
Since citizen science monitoring first began in 1992, the Northwest Montana Lakes Network has grown to encompass more than 50 volunteers and 41 lakes.
“That’s just an incredible legacy of working with the community to be involved with science,” said Parker. “It’s just, like, wow, I’m the steward of all that.”
Reporter Hailey Smalley can be reached at 758-4433 or [email protected].