By Gretchen Wing

Ian Lange has just been asked, “Where is the most thrilling place you’ve ever stood?” Ian has been to Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Croatia, Cuba, Indonesia, Peru, Romania, Slovenia, Tanzania and that’s only an alphabetized, partial list. Ian is a geologist. He makes a point of standing in thrilling places. He has a lot to choose from. His answer, therefore, is a surprise: “It’s hard to beat the North Cascades.”

Really? Somewhere so close? “When you’re up there, my God, it’s just incredible. You can’t get any more alpine, and it goes on forever.”

Geology need not be exotic to be thrilling.

Growing up in the New York suburb of Tenafly, Ian majored in geology at Dartmouth because he “liked rocks.” The first generation of his family to earn a degree, Ian headed west for a job in Alaska, discovering Seattle along the way. It was 1962, and with the World’s Fair in full swing, Seattle “looked like a cool city.” Back at Dartmouth for his master’s, Ian kept Seattle in mind.

But first he had Barrow to deal with, spending a winter drilling through permafrost with the Army Corps of Engineers. In winter, “the only smells up there are from the mess hall and from these things they have called Destroylets” (a natural-gas toilet).  But that grueling Army Corps work kept him out of the draft, so later, when he headed for University of Washington for his doctorate, Ian was able to finish his degree without getting sent to Vietnam.

Geologists get hired by oil companies, so Ian took a job with Mobile in Fresno. There, in 1969, he met Jo-Ann Thome, a teacher, at a party. Calling her up the next day to ask for a date, Ian received an unusual excuse: “I can’t, I’ve just fallen off a horse.” In fact, Jo-Ann’s horse had fallen, injuring her so badly that their first date had to wait six weeks. “And even then, her knee was still swollen and purple, so I knew she hadn’t just been telling me a story.” Well suited for a life of mutual adventure, the couple married that same year.

After three years in Fresno, Ian was hired to teach at the University of Montana in Missoula. Teaching suited him immediately. He especially loves teaching intro courses to non-majors, trying to turn them on to the delights of the field, or at the graduate level. “Rock hounds,” he says, aren’t really what geology is about; geologists are “the real historians of the world.”

As much as Ian enjoys working with students, he devotes plenty of time to exercising his own passions. Besides having run several marathons, Ian skis, bikes, and climbs mountains. Discovering all the planet has to offer, Ian and Jo-Ann are inveterate travelers. This spring, for example, they will head for Turkey as a jumping-off point for a tour of all the former Soviet “Stans” – i.e., Uzbekistan – and then, in the summer, they travel to Sumatra to see the world’s largest volcano. How could a geologist not?

When not traveling or working in Montana, though, Lopez is home. Ian and Jo-Ann discovered Lopez on a bicycle trip, over the mountains from Montana in 1977.  San Juan and Orcas both felt too “busy,” says Ian, so he asked about Lopez. “’Oh, you won’t like it,’ the realtor said, ‘it’s full of rednecks and hippies.’ So we said, Hey, sounds like a cool place!” They’ve been coming back ever since.

But the Langes are hardly part-timers. Ian is a regular volunteer at the Dump, the Thrift Shop, the Home Tour, and the Lions Club Fourth of July race (Ian helps design the T-shirt, but of course he also runs the 10k). “When you have a community like this, where people are really in tune with preservation…that’s the thing about the San Juans … you’ve got a group of people who realize the value of this place.” Even for such a world traveler, who knows the Earth literally inside and out, being part of the Lopez community is still its own thrill.