Profile: Valeda Scribner

By Dawne Belloise

A newcomer to this end of the valley, arriving in 2020, Valeda Scribner quickly became involved in the community. Her background is in space engineering and environmental sciences, and in November 2024, she was elected to the Mt. Crested Butte town council. She hails from a little town in Maine called Belgrade, surrounded by woods with a small population of about 2,000. Most of her childhood was spent in a secluded house without another home in sight, an only child with her dog Ted. 

Valeda’s father was her outdoor inspiration, and she spent much time hiking from woods to mountain peaks and fishing. She enjoyed cross-country skiing, and she and her mom learned to alpine ski together when Valeda was six, driving to Sunday River, Sugarloaf and Saddleback. Throughout school, Valeda took dance classes with her mom. “She’s my biggest inspiration in life,” she says. Valeda has participated in Move the Butte for the past two years and is also a KBUT DJ.

Valeda became intrigued with space sciences, which blossomed as she got older. As a kid, she was given a telescope and astronomy books and attended Space Camp in Alabama. Enrolled in accelerated math classes, she was also a varsity cheerleader and worked on her school’s yearbook while in an engineering club. “We were issued a challenge to redesign the shopping cart because there were so many accidents with them, like kids falling out and sharp corners. We made one from PVC pipes and pool noodles. It was a gateway to learning more about what engineering is. It’s really problem solving.” She graduated in 1998. 

“I knew I wanted to go into aeronautical or aerospace engineering,” so she enrolled at Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York. “The curriculum was all math and science,” but she enjoyed the challenge while making time for entertainment and friends. In a male-dominated curriculum, Valeda was one of three women who graduated in 2002 earning a degree in aeronautical engineering with a math minor. 

She was hired by Boeing in California, in thermal analysis of the Delta Launch Vehicles. “What was challenging about that time was 9/11 changed the industry in the aircraft world in that there were no new planes being ordered,” she recalls. She had been living in New York City while job searching and feels she was really lucky since jobs in the industry were scarce at that time. “The job was basically finding errors in really old coding programs that would perform the thermal analysis. That was boring,” she laughs.

Through work she became part of a rotation program that allowed her to sample a handful of different jobs at Boeing. “I did three different positions over the course of two years – working on satellites, in the test labs on hardware testing and also on a satellite development program in mission operations. I loved working on satellites. The satellites have this interconnected system to provide all the capabilities for whatever your mission is,” she tells. Valeda then worked on Boeing Satellite systems, as a mechanical liaison in engineering, to fix problems that arose in assembling for the NASA Department of Defense. She was with Boeing for seven-and-a-half years, until 2010.

“Boeing is so large that you feel like a small cog in the wheel sometimes,” she says. Not only did she want to be at a smaller company, but she also wanted to live in the mountains. She’d spend her winter weekends driving to Mammoth to ski. She took an opportunity at the Sierra Nevada Corporation in Louisville, Colorado as a manufacturing engineer where she was involved with the entire satellite build. “There were under 50 people involved and that’s really small for a whole satellite program. We built, tested and launched 18 satellites in one year. The satellites are like a private GPS program for private companies.”

Valeda was living in Boulder, where she had friends from previous ski trips. In her time off, she was mountain biking, skiing, going to concerts and breweries and living the Front Range lifestyle. After a year, Valeda moved to Denver, finding it fit her lifestyle better than Boulder. She was promoted into the program management of satellite subsystems. “I was overseeing everybody involved with the satellite subsystems build,” working with clients like Lockheed Martin, NASA and MIT. “I was developing the process for solar panels for the satellites,” she explains. Valeda remained with the Sierra Nevada Corporation for five years. 

Although she had a clear path of excelling and moving up the career ladder, she felt it was time for a change. “I could feel the tension in my body of needing to shift in location and career.” In late 2016, after the election, she felt that, “I maybe had a false sense of security that our government was doing what they needed, thoughtfully addressing climate change and our environmental impact. Because I did spend so much time outdoors, there was no denying that climate change was impacting my homes in Maine and Colorado. As an engineer, when I’m faced with a problem, I want to do what I can to find a solution.” 

In 2017, Valeda’s lifestyle began to feel empty. “I didn’t feel like I had community. I felt like my drive to work in space was more about me, but I didn’t feel like I was contributing to something I believed in anymore. I wanted to see how the rest of the world was adjusting to climate change.” She started applying to environmental jobs, but her resume didn’t reflect any experience in that field. So she traveled around the globe for two years, hopping aboard a sailing expedition with an environmental focus in the South Pacific. “We started in Tonga and went to Fiji and Vanuatu,” she says.

Valeda decided to get off the boat and explore on her own, so she jumped ship and headed to the North Island of New Zealand. Afterward, she returned to New England and then spent some months chasing snow in the western U.S. and Canada. “I followed the storms, skiing 30 powder days in a row,” she smiles. After volunteering at the popular music festival SXSW in Austin, Texas, she traveled around Europe exploring Greece, Croatia and living off-grid on a farm in Portugal where she learned water conservation, hydropower and solar electricity management. “I was trying to combine volunteering and learning.” She traveled throughout Europe all summer and then went to Nepal, where she helped install solar in a tiny village in the Necha region. “It enabled them to go from unreliable electricity to having a functional computer room.”

While in Lisbon, she met a couple who own an environmental consulting firm in Spain and she offered up her services as an intern in L’Ampolla, Spain, helping with documentation for EU-funded programs that demonstrated environmental transitions, like ways for farmers to work together to build a co-op to face some of the challenges of climate change. “It was a great way of learning what progressive and ingenious projects were happening around the world.” 

Valeda felt she needed more of an environmental foundation to get the jobs she now wanted and found a graduate program in Vienna, Austria. It was there she learned about the Master of Environmental Management program at Western Colorado University in Gunnison. The first semester consisted of remote courses, which Valeda took while volunteering at a hospital in Bariloche, Argentina. While studying, she hiked the mountains of northern Patagonia.

After fitting in some skiing in Chile and Argentina, Valeda flew back to Denver, loaded up the car and drove to Gunnison. “It was a wild and incredible experience going back to school at 38 years old. There were eight of us who were sponsored to attend the International Mountain Conference in Innsbruck, Austria, and then present to the United Nations in Rome, only weeks after the September semester started.” 

Valeda assisted both Eagle County and Park City, Utah, with greenhouse gas emissions inventory and climate action planning as an intern. In March of 2020, just before the COVID shutdown, she was volunteering at the Climate Leadership Conference in Detroit where she met individuals employed with Impact Engineering who were doing carbon management for corporations. She earned her Master of Environmental Management in 2021 and was then hired by Impact Engineering as a remote carbon advisor. 

Over the last year, Valeda has been working with the town of Crested Butte on its climate action plan. “I believe that this intentional planning can really help to shape the future of this community we love. We, as a community, make this place what it is,” she says. “There are solutions and they are not outside of our reach. We can make a change, and it’s times like these that can inspire us as to how we can contribute impactfully. I see so many plans coming together to ensure we don’t become another ski town of empty homes. I don’t know what the future holds, but I love it here.”