When I called Dr. Andy Embick at home one morning last summer to ask for advice on how to train for the Lost Lake Trail run in Seward, he told me he would try to find some information and send it over to me. I figured he was busy with any of his gazillion projects and I’d talk to him again a few weeks later.

Not more than four hours later, he was in my office at my desk with a map of the trail, a written description of its length, and a full training schedule of local trails in the area resembling its terrain with which I was to begin familiarizing myself with at once.

“This is everything you will need,” he told me. “Good luck.” And he was out the door in the span of a short breath.

I was less surprised by his resourcefulness and thoroughness than by his willingness to make my request for help his number one priority for the morning, despite any one of his gazillion projects he may have been working.

Embick didn’t loan his gear freely. But if you wanted to learn, he would hook you up with used kayak paddles, avalanche beacons, boats, skis and anything in his vast arsenal of gear.

Before coming to Valdez in 1979, Embick had already achieved a reputation as one of the most accomplished rock climbers in the mountaineering community. He is recognized for his ascents of the Kichatna Spires in the western section of the Alaska Range. He is the pioneer of a half-dozen first ascents in the range and has been recorded in climbing journal articles, notably the 50 Greatest Climbs in North America and the Seven Toughest Climbs.

Embick mastered rock climbing and was instrumental in the beginning of the Valdez Ice Climbing Festival in 1983.

A longtime local climber, Brian Teale first met Embick in 1983.

          “Valdez always had climbers. Embick brought them together,” said Teale. “He was a disciplined outdoorsman with a boyish enthusiasm. His life was on his trips.”

          Embick documented those trips in minute detail describing each crag, each ice pillar, and each piece of protection set into the rock. Those notes would eventually lead him to write the Valdez ice climbing guide book Blue Ice and Black Gold.

“He inspired a lot of exploration. The stuff he didn’t do, whoever got there first was probably inspired by Embick.”

In 1980, he picked up a kayak for the first time when he met Mike Buck, a local white water enthusiast.

          “Nobody knew or had (a kayak) at the time. We just kind of figured it out,” Buck said. During that summer, the two perfected roll techniques and by the following summer were descending extremely difficult rapids.

Embick explored several area rivers with Buck including Heiden Canyon, a five-mile stretch of rough water beginning at Mile 23 of the Richardson Highway. In 1981, the two rappelled into the canyon and ran the river. Embick later wrote about the adventure for the Valdez Vanguard.

“Very soon the two ran into extreme difficulty,” Embick wrote. “They were unable to stop and could only try to stay upright as waves broke over them, pulsating boils of water thrust them up and down, and they dropped out of sight into holes.”

He chronicled all of his trips through extremely detailed journals. He kept records, always taking notes in his head.

“I never saw him write it down as it was happening. He was keeping it all in his head,” Buck said.

Chris Roach met Embick in 1980 as a curious 15-year old with outdoor ambitions. Later, the two would explore many of the rivers featured in Embick’s 1994 book Fast & Cold, A Guide to Alaska Whitewater. During the summer of 1981, Roach and a friend paddled a rented canoe down the Valdez Glacier Stream. They wiped out, sending the boat down the river to the bridge. Embick picked them up along the stream

 “Do you guys belong to a canoe?” Embick asked. “Get in the car.”

          A few weeks later, when Roach’s hands were still numb from the botched canoe trip, he made an appointment at the Valdez Medical Clinic.         

          “I couldn’t feel my fingers. I was worried about it,” Roach said. As it turned out, it was Embick who saw Roach. Embick remembered Roach from the Glacier Stream. When Roach told him of his plight, Embick said, “My feet were numb for three months. They’ll be fine.” He then proceeded to write Roach a prescription for kayaking gear, urging him to get back out on the river.

          “He was a great mentor to me,” Roach said. “He was a man of exceptional toughness and mental fortitude.”

Embick continued his white water pursuits throughout the 1980s. In 1986, he and Teale claimed the first descent of the 33-foot Caribou Creek waterfall at a time when not many in the paddling community were dropping waterfalls.

As a physician, Embick possessed skills that ranged far and wide. He was the town’s anesthesiologist, enabling doctors at the Valdez Community Hospital to perform emergency surgeries. He delivered babies and sewed up dogs in the days before Valdez had a full time veterinarian. He prescribed physical therapy and offered up his own suggestions for exercises when he deemed conventional ones inadequate.

          He could be a harsh critic, blunt in his diagnosis, but more often he was compassionate. He opened his home to patients, particularly athletes, often inviting them over when they called him with their problems. He treated their aches and pains in his basement and was always on duty and always willing to help in order to get them back into their sport of choice, whether it was wrestling, skiing, basketball or climbing.

“He would do things I wouldn’t even think about doing,” said Joe Roth, a family practitioner in Juneau and former doctor at the Valdez Medical Clinic.

“If someone had a broken leg and needed to fly to Anchorage, he would drive them out to the airport in his own car. ‘Why get an ambulance involved?’ he would ask.”

“Andy was very meticulous, very exacting. That is what you need to be in anesthesia,” Roth said.

          Roth said Embick performed a lot of precise procedures requiring a tender touch. On his tendon work, Roth said, “Some are easier to repair than others. He could do all of them and he would show you how to do it.”

          Roth said it didn’t matter who Embick was treating. Whether it was a cruise ship passenger, a sport fisherman from Anchorage, or even a snowmachiner.

          “He surprised me. Andy would never be cruel or mean and nasty to a patient. That was his job, to take care of people. That was the Andrew that I knew.”

          For six months prior to his recent return to Valdez, he spent time in the high mountainous elevations of northern Pakistan, where he tirelessly worked to provide health care to sick villagers. In Shimshal a small village with no running water or electricity, Embick delivered medicines and diagnoses sometimes seeing 60 patients in a half a day.

          Embick’s outdoor adventures may have turned slightly more mellow, albeit slightly less risky in the late 1980s in order to accommodate his two young children. But he grew no less ambitious. He continued on long rafting trips, participated in ski and backcountry adventure and pushed himself beyond the threshold of conventional human limits. At one point he spoke of rowing his custom made kayak to Hinchinbrook Island for a deer hunting expedition. Always tweaking his gear, he constantly tinkered in his basement looking to make improvements and innovations.

          “He was the interface for everything that was out there,” said Dan Bross, host of the KCHU talk show Coffee Break, on which Embick was a frequent guest speaking of his outdoor pursuits. “What wasn’t on the market, he’d make himself. He had a huge, fascinating wealth of information.”

It was that wealth of information that Embick was so willing to share. He overflowed with generosity, opening his home to traveling climbers and adventurers visiting Valdez. He would help them fix their gear, treat their pains, feed them elaborate, gourmet seven-course meals, and do generally anything for them if they asked.

          He was notably instrumental in clearing brush for what would later become the elaborate system of Valdez ski trails. He gave time and money to the Valdez High School ski team and was a strong cross-country skiing enthusiast.

          He maintained a ski conditions hotline, giving detailed information on grooming status, wax recommendations, snow temperature and weather conditions.

His passion for the trail eventually led him into controversy as conflicts arose between motorized and non-motorized users.

          But he pursued his passions, championed his causes, and when called upon he responded instantly with a solution. If he didn’t know the answer, he would certainly find out. But chances are, he knew.

          “He wasn’t the kind of guy to sit on the sidelines. You couldn’t accuse him of apathy,” Teale said. “He was bigger than life itself.”