By GARLAND KENNEDY
Sentinel Staff Writer
After decades of providing reliable and consistent data to the National Weather Service, an Elfin Cove woman has been formally recognized for her work.
Mary Jo Lord-Wild received a NWS Thomas Jefferson Award on Monday for her 47 years as a volunteer cooperative weather observer in the remote Chichagof Island community.
She still enjoys collecting daily weather data, she told the Sentinel by phone.
“I still find it fun, actually,” she said. “You go out the door and you go take a look... I get to look around, take in the air and the water and I play a game with myself, ‘OK, how much precipitation do I think fell today?’ And I measure it and see how close I came… and it’s just, you never know what you’re going to see, what you’re going to see when you do it.”
Back in the 1970s she made her daily reports to the National Weather Service in Juneau by radio, but now transmits data online.
During the virtual award ceremony, Lord-Wild was glad to see so many other weather observers, as well as the head of the national agency, and to know that her data is useful and part of a much larger whole. She’s always mindful of where she is in the world of weather observers.
“I work in isolation. I live in Elfin Cove, I live across the bay from everyone else, but when they spoke it was so wonderful to hear of the connection of my work to the national picture, international picture even,” Lord-Wild said. “They really spoke to how important this data is immediately and over time. That was the fun part, feeling connected to a big picture with this little bit of data that I collect every day. There are 8,000 climate (data volunteer) people nationwide.”
Mary Jo Lord-Wild and her son are pictured in Elfin Cove in 1975. (Photo provided to the Sentinel)
In the award citation, NWS Observing Program Leader Kimberly Vaughan highlighted the importance of Lord-Wild’s work.
“The National Center for Environmental Information publishes daily, monthly and annual climate normals for Elfin Cove based exclusively on the data collected by Mary Jo,” Vaughn wrote in the citation. “This benefits the residents of not only Elfin Cove, but surrounding communities as well. The Weather Prediction Center used her detailed precipitation observations to compute flood recurrence frequencies at time scales of 1 to 100 years. This was particularly beneficial for understanding the scale and scope of the early December 2020 flood event.
“Southeast Alaska is one of the most challenging locations in the world to forecast weather. The complicated topography and lack of systematic observations mean that scientists have very few frames of reference for characterizing the local climate. Mary Jo’s climate observations are crucial for NOAA scientists to understand the relationships between what is observed on radar and other remotely sensed information and what is reported on the ground.”
Speaking to the Sentinel, Vaughn, who is based in Juneau, praised Lord-Wild and her husband for their dedication to their work for the weather service.
“Their diligence for decades, literally decades… They never took a vacation together so they would be able to take observations every day,” Vaughan said. “So it really wasn’t until there was a medical reason, extreme family reasons that required them to both travel at the same time, did they ever leave Elfin Cove together, and even in some of those times they were able to find somebody to take observations in their absence.”
All told, there are only 35 volunteer observer stations in Southeast and 124 across Alaska, Vaughan noted. The only volunteer observer in Sitka is at the wastewater treatment plant. A person interested in the program should send a message to juneau.noaa@weather.gov.
Vaughan stressed Lord-Wild’s place in a much larger network of weather observers.
“She really saw that even though she is one person taking observations on one place on earth, she is part of a bigger community that is doing so much for the Weather Service and our planet really,” Vaughan said. “It’s not just our country. And that was really cool.”
Since joining the program on November 11, 1974, Lord-Wild and her husband have made more than 16,000 data entries at Elfin Cove.
Her role as a weather observer began with a house-sitting job in the remote Chichagof Island village.
“I was house-sitting the Swansons’ store ... during a period it wasn’t being operated, and the owners had secured this National Weather Service contract. And it was just part of my duties, beside maintaining the diesel generator and shoveling snow, was to do the weather operation. When the store sold, the new people were not interested in the weather contract so at that point I contacted the National Weather Service… and signed up for the weather service contact,” she recalled.
Lord-Wild fills multiple roles for the NWS, both as a volunteer and as a paid weather observer, and received the award for her volunteer work. The award is named for the third president of the United States, who recorded the daily weather at his Virginia home, Monticello, for decades.
Far from Virginia, Lord-Wild also operates Elfin Cove’s post office and museum and tends to gardens around town.
The story of her arrival in the state is an Alaskan tale of adventure.
“Previous to getting here, I finished with university at Berkeley and was hanging around Berkeley because you did that, and I met some people who were intellectuals, but were searching for the meaning of wilderness to mankind,” Lord-Wild remembered. “So they had moved to the Brooks Range (in Alaska’s arctic), but they realized you can’t just live as an isolated couple in the Brooks Range. When they got ready to come back they wanted to bring people back to the Brooks Range.”
Lord-Wild jumped on the opportunity.
“I said ‘I’ll go.’ In 1968 I moved from Berkeley to the middle of the Brooks Range… I was a suburban California girl. I’d done a little bit of hiking in the Sierras but not much. But somewhere deep in me was that yearning for wilderness, and I feel richly blessed to have had the opportunity to live like that for a couple years,” she said.
She first arrived in Elfin Cove in 1972, and chose to stay.
“I traveled round Alaska a little bit, and those days you could just hitchhike and people took you home and fed you. So I met some people who had just bought a piece of land in Elfin Cove… and I was in California at the time getting ready to move back to the wilderness, and on our way north we stopped to visit our friend in Elfin Cove and I never left. You live on the water. It’s absolutely beautiful. It’s richly supplied with resources. My heart is home now,” Lord-Wild said.
The tiny village across Icy Strait about 33 miles from Hoonah has been her home for nearly half a century. As the pandemic escalated around the world, she and her husband, Jim, spent 21 consecutive months in the town with a year-round population of fewer than ten.
“We have two children and two grandchildren (in Sitka), so it’s a big draw to spend time in Sitka and we’re just going to establish a beachhead here, a place here to make it easier to come to stay for a while,” Lord-Wild said. “But those 21 months just staying in Elfin Cove were just fine. We didn’t miss anything except just family.”
Elfin Cove has shrunk over the years, and Lord-Wild remembers raising children there when the town had its own school.
“It’s been a lot of changes over the time. When my three children grew up there, my son was born in Elfin Cove. The three kids grew up there and during a certain time period for a whole generation of children, we had a school,” she recalled. “So there was a rich educational, cultural, social family life during those years. My kids are all happy to have grown up there. They didn’t miss anything and they became very capable people.”
But over the years, the town’s population declined.
“But now things have changed and there’re no children and no families. And last winter I think there were about six of us, so it’s very peaceful there in the winter. And at my stage in life, peaceful is just fine,” she said.
Though she now spends some time in Sitka with family, she’s happy to live in Elfin Cove.
“I feel richly blessed to have landed there and had the life I’ve been able to have,” she said. “I wouldn’t trade it for anything. Hasn’t been perfect, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything else.”
