By Matt Skoufalos
Growing up in Granite City, Illinois, just across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, Eric Hooper enjoyed a childhood full of outdoor activities. From waterskiing to bow hunting to riding minibikes, Hooper developed a taste for action mixed in with the excitement of exploring wild places.
“I’ve gotten to do a lot of really interesting things,” he said. “That adventure piece had always been there, and I was introduced enough to it as a kid to go and do it on my own [in adulthood].”
At 7, Hooper decided he was going to kayak down the Mississippi River with a friend, starting from its headwaters in northern Minnesota down to the New Orleans delta. When he started planning and shopping for the trip, his friend bailed out as the prospects of making the journey became more real. Hooper continued on with his plan, however, and, at 18, his father drove him to Minnesota to put the boat in the water.
“I made it to Minneapolis and said, ‘I’m done; come pick me up,” Hooper remembered. “It’s the only thing in my life that I ever quit. But the way I think about it, it’s on pause. I’m going to do that before I die.”
Hooper isn’t just an outdoorsman by avocation; he’s a renaissance man who never met a challenge he couldn’t dissect and rise to meet. At St. Louis University, he’d intended to become a conservation officer, but ended up switching over to the nuclear medicine program, where a job-shadowing program landed him work in the field before he’d even taken a course of study.
“Whenever I did really well in my classes, I would remind my classmates that I wasn’t way smarter than everybody else, but that I had been doing the work for a couple years,” Hooper said.
From 2005-2011, he worked as a nuclear medicine technologist in Missouri, earned a masters in health physics from the Illinois Institute of Technology, and started his own medical physics consulting business, Olympic Health Physics, after graduating in 2012.
At the same time, Hooper continued his enjoyment of wild places in Missouri, supplementing his hiking, camping and canoeing pursuits with a caving hobby. With some 6,400 caves in the state, Hooper and his friends began mapping caves, descending deeper beneath the earth into limestone and dolomite caverns that had been scoured out by the movement of underground streams. It satisfied his thirst for adventure and exploration, particularly in those instances in which the party discovered virgin cave systems.
“That means you’re the first person on the face of the earth who’s seen this,” Hooper said. “We found one in Perry County that’s over eight miles long, and they’re still mapping it. No one even knew this thing existed.”
“There’s places I know I’ve been that no one has ever been back to,” he said. “From an adventure perspective, that’s cool. That’s the draw to doing difficult things: pushing your body, solving problems, all of those things wrapped up in one.”
His thirst for adventure – really, for pushing the boundaries of his abilities and intellect – drove Hooper to newer and bolder challenges. About 10 years ago, the family began searching for a new climate in which to make their home.
“I had been to Washington as a kid, and I remember typing in ‘North Cascades National Park’ and ‘Olympic National Park’ and ‘Mount Rainer’ and ‘San Juan islands,’ and clicked on Google Images,” Hooper said. “I called my wife into the room, and said, ‘Click through these different tabs, and look at these images. What if we lived here?’ She said, ‘That place exists?’ ”
What sealed their move to the Pacific Northwest was Hooper’s interest in joining the Seattle, Washington branch of The Mountaineers club, the preeminent mountaineering club in the world. After graduating from their climbing courses, Hooper immediately became an instructor, teaching the next generation of climbers, and eventually joining the Tacoma Mountain Rescue.
“I’ve climbed mountains, volcanoes and glaciers in the U.S. and Canada,” he said. “My time doing caving and vertical caving really helped. Now I’m more into back-country skiing. We’ll go and climb Mount St. Helens with [skins on] our skis, and then ski off the top of the mountain.”
More recent obsessions have included Crossfit, finance and aviation; Hooper aims to learn sailing and certify as a scuba diver next. As if that weren’t enough, he also picked up sea kayaking through British Columbia and Vancouver Island, and enjoyed it enough that he’s building a house (of his own design, of course) on Puget Sound.
Asked from where his diversity of interests stems, Hooper cites a pursuit of mastery married with an engineer’s approach to problem-solving.
“Whenever I was teaching at the Mountaineers, a lot of the people who were drawn to climbing are engineers,” he said. “I’m not an engineer, I’m a physicist; but we like to problem-solve. We like to think through things logically. We like to do hard things.”
“Those are all things that you find in climbing,” Hooper said. “There’s a natural draw to things like that for people who think the way I think. I have a natural curiosity about things and trying to solve for difficult problems. I also have a natural draw to adventure.”
“The whole motivation is constant learning, constant improvement, constant development,” he said. “When I look at any problem, I do this risk analysis. These are the barriers, these are the challenges; what do I need to do to eliminate the risks? When I reach an end, let’s go do the next thing. There’s no area that really doesn’t get explored.”
When you have a problem-solving mindset, barriers are meant to be shattered, and hard work and dedication overcome apathy and fatigue. Hooper believes most of what he’s achieved owes as much to self-belief as to commitment to the ends upon which he’s set his vision.
“I don’t really get to a point and say, ‘This isn’t possible,’ ” Hooper said. “That kind of vocabulary doesn’t register to me. When I get to that point, I say, ‘How is this possible?’ If I can’t make it possible, what’s the next goal that’s going to get me to the same endpoint?”
Now, as the father to a young child, he’s able to hand down that same approach. Much more simply distilled, the family credo is this, “We don’t give up,” he said.
Which is why, at some point in the future, there’s a river in Minnesota that’s still waiting.
