2010 – Alpine Steward Award Winner – Charlie Jacobi
2010 Alpine Steward Award Winner: Charlie Jacobi
The Waterman Fund presented the 2010 Guy Waterman Alpine Steward Award on Saturday, April 10th, to Charles Jacobi of Acadia National Park. The award is given each year to a person or organization that has demonstrated a long-term commitment to protecting the physical and spiritual qualities of the northeast’s mountain wilderness.
Charlie Jacobi, Natural Resource Specialist for Acadia National Park, will be this year’s award recipient. Jacobi has worked for the National Park Service since 1982, and has spent the last 25 years in Acadia, focusing on managing outdoor recreation and related visitor use to ensure both protection of park resources and the quality of the visitor experience. Jacobi has lead or co-lead efforts in the park, which receives 2.2 million visits annually on only 35,000 acres, to develop and implement management plans for the Carriage Roads, the trail system, the park’s climbing program, and all primary visitor sites on Mount Desert Island, including Cadillac.
In 1998, Jacobi began Acadia’s Ridgerunner Program, where employees and volunteers educate visitors about Leave No Trace and conduct trail maintenance over the course of the summer. He has lectured and published widely on visitor management, and has been instrumental in a long-term research program at Acadia on trail and resource management. Jacobi organized the 2007 New England Alpine Stewardship Gathering, which included a focus on sub-alpine management. A founding member of Friends of Baxter State Park, Jacobi has served as board president for three years and on the board of directors for eight. Jacobi has continually sought to give visitors to Acadia a sense of wildness and has worked to preserve and educate park users about Acadia’s unusual sub-alpine and treeless mountain summits.
David Manski, Chief of Acadia’s Division of Resource Management, and Dr. Bob Manning, a professor at the University of Vermont, nominated Jacobi for the award. Manski notes “his dedication to mountain stewardship, innovative approaches to managing visitors in sensitive habitats, excellent inter-personal skills, and just plain hard work… he has never been timid about tackling complex and controversial visitor use management issues in the interest of doing the right thing for the resource and visitor experience.