By Marc Glass (Fall 2007 issue)

Dave Brann’s colleagues at Homer Middle School in Homer, Alaska, knew better than to give him a rocking chair when he retired from 26 years of teaching. The golden years are anything but inactive for Brann ’68, who—with fellow volunteers from the Kachemak Nordic Ski Club—has helped build and maintain 30 kilometers of ski trails outside his front door. And the paternal figure of Nordic skiing in Homer is now beating paths farther afield, helping to clear hiking trails in Siberia.

On a typical winter morning, Brann chooses from among three grooming machines parked in his front yard and spends several hours meticulously laying down classical tracks and skating lanes for the Kachemak Nordic Ski Club’s 500 skiers. He then conducts a little quality control by “testing” the 30 kilometers one kick-waxed classical stride at a time.

“I enjoy seeing crowds of people on skis,” said Brann, who was welcomed to the Alaska School Activities Association High School Hall of Fame in April for his contributions to Nordic skiing in Alaska, including 20 years of coaching and organizing ski races. “There’s a lot of pleasure to be gained from good, honest labor that not only benefits yourself, but also others.”

As an example of that “good, honest labor,” Brann and his wife, Molly, recently purchased 100 tiki torches to light 2.5 kilometers of the trails near their home for “Friday Night Lights,” a night-skiing fund-raising event that netted $3,000 for the Kachemak Nordic Ski Club over the four Fridays in February 2007. Back in the late 1970s when he began his teaching career at the nearby town of Ninilchik, he wrote grants and solicited donations from local businesses to purchase 50 pairs of Nordic skis for students in grades 3-12. He built a track setter to groom trails near the school, took grade elementary students on daily ski tours at recess, and after hours started a middle school-high school ski team.

“Alaska is a basketball-oriented state, which is fine for the 10 players on the court, but it doesn’t allow much activity for the majority of kids on the sidelines,” he said. “I wanted the kids to have something fun to do outside for little or no money. I basically said [to the kids], ‘I want to go do this, and you’re welcome to join me, and I’ll make it easy to do and even teach you how to wax.’ I’m not the kind of person who can swim laps in a pool or run laps on a track. I have to be outside.”

Not surprisingly, outside is where Brann can be found on typical summer days of late. As part of a Rotary International project to build and maintain 100 kilometers of the Great Baikal Trail, he has led crews of international volunteers on two-week trail-building stints on the shores of Siberia’s Lake Baikal. All of his tree felling and brush clearing over the past three summers (“real pick-and-shovel work,” he said) has helped expand the hiking trail system, which will eventually encompass more than 2,000 kilometers of Lake Baikal shorefront.

“I think my biggest contribution has been teaching basic camp skills to the volunteers, how to set up a solar shower and a field camp, how to build a trail and cook over a fire,” said Brann, who leads crews with a Russian counterpart and an interpreter to facilitate communication with the Germans and Russians who comprise the majority of trail-building volunteers. “People shake their heads when they see me working to cook over a smoky fire, fighting off bugs. It’s not onerous labor. It’s fun stuff.”

When he’s not skiing, building, maintaining or grooming trails, Nordic skiing isn’t far from Brann’s thoughts. With fellow Nordic skiing enthusiast Tim Kelley, he founded the Alaska Lost Ski Areas Program, which compiles historical data and photographs on Alaskan alpine and Nordic ski facilities lost in the snowdrifts of time. And his original research into the first skiers in Alaska and North America (Russians harvesting furs in the 1790s) won him an invitation to present a paper at the International Ski History Congress just prior to the 2002 Winter Olympics in Park City, Utah. (Brann’s research can be seen on Kelley’s Alaska Lost Ski Areas Program website, www.alsap.org.)

Brann is now an Alaskan through and through, but ask him about the magnitude of his contributions to Nordic skiing and some of that deep-seated Maine modesty comes shining through: “I’m just a life-long learner and life-long sharer of fun stuff,” he said.