Mike Knott's 40 years of service at Stanley Consultants is a blur of sewers, clams, steel mills, wetlands, power plants, barges, federal and state agencies, rivers, waste treatment plants, transmission lines and endangered species. He has experienced a multitude of memorable moments ranging from exhilarating to frightening but most, if not all, of his favorite memories occurred while in fascinating places with classy individuals working on projects that anyone could take pride in.
In 1978, he was on a project in Healy, Alaska on the eastern fringes of Mt. McKinley and Denali National Park doing the biological fieldwork for a proposed transmission line for Golden Valley Electric Association. "Our team spent the week setting fish traps, seining salmon, looking for peregrine falcon nests, and avoiding grizzly bears," Knott recalled. "It was also the week of the peak Sandhill Crane migration, and late one afternoon with the sun setting, four of us sat on a rock ledge and watched in awe as 100,000 cranes flew directly over our heads."
Like most Stanley Consultants members, those good memories typically outweigh the bad. "A thought I've had since," Knott said, "is that this experience may even have offset the week I spent slogging through layers of bloody cow pelts in the basement of a packing plant to get to a water meter that had to be read four times a day."