Profile: Frank Stern

By Dawne Belloise

Frank Stern says it was a trip to the Canadian Rockies that piqued his interest in rock climbing, which is why he liked living in Boulder with its excellent access to outstanding climbing and decent access to skiing. Plus, it was a bike and pedestrian friendly town. He often climbed in Boulder Canyon, Rocky Mountain National Park and Eldorado Canyon. Frank had a friend in Crested Butte who lived in one of the historic coal miner’s houses on Second Street and Frank visited him a few times. “I was very impressed by the charm, the snow and the skiing. I can’t say I was impressed by the climbing,” he laughs. “But that wasn’t why I moved to CB. I moved to be close to skiing, all kinds of skiing.” And so, he bought a place in 2004 and in 2016 moved here full-time.

Frank was a city boy, born in Manhattan and raised in Queens, but his family moved to Mount Clair, New Jersey when he was just eight years old.

As a kid, Frank did a lot of reading and played clarinet and piano in high school. “I was pretty introverted, but I was on the wrestling team,” he tells.

When his dad retired early, his parents decided to move the family to Fort Collins. “I liked the move to Colorado. I liked being near the mountains and people were much more friendly.” He graduated from high school in Fort Collins in 1977 and enrolled at CU Boulder as an English major. 

It was the energy crisis of the 1970s that turned Frank’s attention toward solar energy and energy efficiency while he was at CU. “My 

father had built a solar greenhouse behind our house, and I thought that was pretty interesting.” He switched his major to Environmental Design/Architecture and graduated in 1982. “I also majored in rock climbing on the side,” he jokes, which included climbing El Capitan in Yosemite Valley.

Frank admits that he was mostly interested in rock climbing, and there was a recession going on, “so it was a terrible time to graduate and get a job with an architecture degree.” He moved to Seattle in 1982 and worked in a climbing shop for about a year. He recalls that Seattle was rainy all winter but had good coffee and good access to a lot of interesting outdoor places. When he left Seattle, Frank was hired as a mountaineering instructor for 

Outward Bound. “We went all over Colorado, the Collegiates, the 

Gore Range, the San Juans, Sangre de Cristo.” It was his summer employment for a couple of years and in the winter he worked construction in Boulder.

Frank grew tired of the seasonal lifestyle of an Outward Bound instructor and felt he needed more education, “But I wasn’t very good at architecture and thought I might be better at engineering.” So, he enrolled at CU again and earned a master’s degree in Building Systems Engineering in 1987. He spent a summer working at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, a Department of Energy lab in Washington. “I was working on a national commercial energy building code, helping to determine if it was working correctly,” he says of his internship. Frank spent a year at the Colorado State Energy Office in 1989 in work related to energy codes before being hired by Navigant, which later became Guidehouse, a consulting company for energy efficiency programs for electric and gas utilities. He spent a decade at Navigant, from 1990 to 2000, doing a lot of work-related traveling and evaluating and designing energy efficiency programs. All in all, Frank worked for consulting companies ranging in size from 30 to 7,000 people, for over 30 years before his retirement in 2020. 

Around 1987, while still in Boulder, Frank met his future wife, Caroline McClean. “We were housemates in Boulder and were doing a lot of mountain biking together.” They married in 1989. Their son Eric was born in Boulder in 1995 and their daughter Kate came along in 1997. 

Frank and Caroline had been coming to Crested Butte to ski and mountain bike since 1989 and he recalls, “I got tired of sitting in Boulder reading about the great snow in CB and I wanted to train for the Grand Traverse, so I spent the winter of 2015/2016 here.” He completed his goal to do the Grand Traverse that year and stayed for the summer. “My skiing history started on long wooden, double camber cross country 210s, with a pine tar base. My first time up on skis was at Eldora when I was 17 years old.” During his time in Boulder, he skied Summit County as well as the nearby Eldora, enjoying Nordic, backcountry and downhill. Since then, Frank has skied eight of Colorado’s 14,000-foot peaks, has done the Grand Traverse three times and a few Alley Loop 42k marathons. 

Frank says that although he retired from consulting in 2020, the big news is that he was recently elected to the board of the Gunnison County Electric Association (GCEA). “I felt like my previous experience would be of use to the association. I’m looking forward to working with the board and staff to lower or maintain electric rates. I want to help them achieve their greater renewable energy, more renewable energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.” He’s also vice president of the board of the Elk Mountains Backcountry Alliance and is a volunteer for both the Nordic Center and the Crested Butte Mountain Bike Association (CBMBA). 

Expanding into more creative aspects of his free time, Frank started a classic rock band in 2022 called Atmospheric River (you can find them on Facebook) in which he plays keyboards and sings. “After I retired and during COVID, I had a lot of time to play and study music,” he says. Grateful Dead, Neil Young, Talking Heads, The Doors, The Beatles and Pink Floyd are all in the band’s repertoire, whose members include Tom Shepard, Dave Fisher, Tony Lee and Lauren Cooper. “There are three to five of us in the band at any given gig,” he explains. He’s also involved with the Crested Butte Mountain Theatre (CBMT) and was cast in two roles as Mr. Boykin and Reynard in Dashing Through the Snow for which he was also the sound engineer.  He was also sound engineer for the production of Small Mouth Sounds and is currently the designated sound engineer for the upcoming CBMT summer show, Elvis Has Left The Building.

“I love it here, the community, the access to the outdoors. My favorite season is winter and Crested Butte excels at winter,” he smiles. He’s been a ski instructor at CBMR for the past two seasons. “I enjoy it. My favorite runs are Spellbound and Phoenix,” but he laughs that he also got in a lot of days teaching on the magic carpet.