Appalachian State Climatology Professor, Himalayan Mountaineer, National Geographic Explorer Baker Perry talks about his roots in the High Country of Boone, North Carolina. | Photography by JC Garcia
Baker Perry walks the steep hill behind his house. Past the garden with kale ready to be plucked and eaten. Past the weather equipment uphill from the garden, a piece of hardware that measures precipitation.
Past the small cabin where he has a desk, a cot, a handful of books, and various pieces of gear collected from decades of outdoor adventures. Past the gate where the goats and the chickens are kept.
“In college at Duke I lived in a cabin like that,” Baker says.
He’d discovered an old sharecropper’s shack, found out who owned it and began renting the spartan space, with water supplied by a spring water tap outside and equipped with an outhouse. In grad school at Appalachian State he lived similarly, building a lean-to cabin out in Vilas on Joey Henson’s property–at least until he got married to his wife, Patience.
Suddenly Baker’s dog is walking beside him then disappears again up the hill.
It’s a high, beautiful hill with occasional rock outcroppings and groves of trees. When the kids were younger, he’d ski down this hill. Now he uses it mostly for amping his physical fitness and uses its very top as the perfect vantage point for a weather station–one of more than a dozen of his research-grade stations in the High Country–to collect wind speed and other weather-related data, which was where he was walking when join him on the stroll. He was going to check on the weather station on the family land.
“This is one of my training hills. When I’m out here on the farm, I’ll run hill repeats and do a circuit on the perimeter trail. I also spend a lot of time on the bike on Russ Norris Road,” he says.
This is mostly to train for the unforgiving rigors of high-altitude science, which he’s been involved in for decades. More recently, though, he’s taken it to the extreme.
Funding in the last couple of years from National Geographic’s | Rolex Perpetual Planet expeditions, along with support from Appalachian State University, has helped make it possible for him to do what few weather scientists have done–installing the highest weather stations in the world.
Weather Station World Records
In 2021, Baker helped lead a team to place the highest weather station in the western and southern hemispheres–more than 21,000 feet up on a Chilean mountain called Mt. Tupungato–as part of a National Geographic Expedition. (He did that with a blood clot in his leg, by the way. Don’t worry. He was cleared by doctors before he traveled.)
The year before that was even more groundbreaking–he helped lead a National Geographic Expedition to the Balcony of Everest, placing the highest weather station in the world–27,500 feet above sea level–before summiting the 29,028-foot mountain.
He’s since helped lead return expeditions to Everest and to the high Andes for equipment maintenance and for research with his graduate students.
A Mountaineer, a Scientist, a Family Man, a Mountain Athlete
It’s not just anyone who can climb these mountains in the cause of atmospheric science.
As you can imagine, funding from Rolex, Nat Geo and the university aren’t the only foundational pieces necessary for these types of rare endeavors (although clearly they are absolutely essential).
Obviously you have to be a reputable scientist who can garner support across a broad swath of interested people.
You have to know how to handle and install the precision scientific equipment under horrendous conditions–-sub zero temperatures and violent winds–and train others to the same level of proficiency.
The January before the 2019 fall trip to Everest, Baker and the team went to Nepal to train sherpas on the equipment–equipment Baker helped design with engineers and technicians at Appalachian State’s machine shop. They built several iterations of the equipment mounted on a tripod and capable of withstanding the unimaginable abuse inflicted by nature near the highest point on earth.
In addition to the scientific, engineering and logistical pieces of the puzzle, he had to be able to make it up the mountain and back down, which means high-altitude and mountain know-how, a certain type of adaptability particular to the rigors of mountain-based athletics, and probably a quiet, plodding and dogged determination, plus the delicious omelets he says his wife makes from their chicken’s eggs.
His genetics probably also lended him a helping hand, plus his commitment to ongoing fitness. Rarely does a professional academic build the necessary credentials for a professorship while they’re a spring chicken. Of course it didn’t hurt that he spent many of his younger years traipsing around the Andes and in the Himalayas, and later did the same during graduate school.
Whatever his secret recipe, what’s evident is that all the years in the books didn’t sabotage his aptitude for altitude or for the often-excruciating endurance training it takes to get there. Baker is in his late 40s and still operates like he’s in his 20s, and obviously all that youthful vigor would come in handy to do the type of research that weather science requires.
The Training Routine of a Mountain Weather Man
In 2019, before the first Everest ascent, National Geographic put him on a training regimen with an outfit called Uphill Athlete. The physical training required many hours each day of biking, hiking, running and strength training–a schedule that required plenty of allowances from the university and from his wife and family.
“I remember toward the end of the training cycle I did 12 hill repeats over four hours on my bike up on Howards Knob,” he recalls, describing that arduous experience that accrued him more than 12,000 feet of elevation gain and descent for the day as he rode his street bike up and down the mountain’s summit road. “Howards Knob is the best workout in Boone if you’re training for a mountain climb.”
All that training wasn’t without its downside. He ended up climbing Everest with a tear in his meniscus on his left knee.
“It’s still not completely healed, but as long as I don’t run on it too much it seems to do fine,” he says.
It’s healed enough, obviously, because on Tuesday nights, when the weather allows, Baker still occasionally does 30 mile bike rides on the Blue Ridge Parkway with riders half his age.
“I just try to keep up with them nowadays,” he says. “If I’m feeling good I usually try to stay in the middle of the pack.”
The training for Everest required the equivalent of a part-time job every week for months–all in addition to course prep and teaching, coaching the kids’ sports teams, and the litany of other everyday-life kinds of activities.
Baker’s High Country Roots
Appalachian State University isn’t the only thing keeping the Perry clan in the High Country. Nor is it the unparalleled training grounds for his athletic endeavors (You might recall that Lance Armstrong chose this area–on Beech Mountain–to train for the Tour De France back in the late 90s.)
Baker has deep roots in the High Country. His great, great grandfather, for instance, had a surgical practice in one of the buildings that’s now part of the Mast General store in Valle Crucis. And he hails from the Doughertys–B.B. Dougherty, D.D. Dougherty and Lillie Shull Dougherty who helped start Watauga Academy–which eventually became Appalachian State University.
Baker also has an abiding fascination with the weather in the mountains of western North Carolina and surrounding. He’s established weather stations on Grandfather Mountain, Roan Mountain, Bethel, Beech Mountain, the hill in his own backyard, and at least a dozen other stations through the High Country.
These projects are fueled by a similar motivation to those that he carried out on the National Geographic expeditions–the higher altitudes provide an early warning system for weather patterns down below.
As you can learn from this interview in December, Baker has concerns based on observations dating back decades involving unusually harsh snowstorms and catastrophic flooding in the Appalachians.
His schedule of teaching, training, traveling, researching, and hosting guests from all over the world–including many from his expeditions–his generosity with time and knowledge are a bit surprising. The kind of ideal climatology professor you’d want to have if you’re serious about the discipline–a scientist who’s traveled around the world and felt the fury of the weather he’s teaching.
He’s also the kind of scholar who defies the dusty, bookish stereotype, the type of scientific explorer whose eccentricity is nearly undetectable behind his relatable demeanor–though you’re certain that it’s there because how else would he have accomplished multiples of every mountaineer’s dream.