Breaking Frozen Ground

Glenn Brady's grandmother was a heavy construction contractor in Alaska before it was even a state. Three generations later, Glenn is a PE, a third-generation builder, the owner of Silver Gulch Brewing in Fairbanks, and a civilian engineer who earned a call sign from a fighter squadron in a ceremony that has no official records. In this episode, Shelly sits down with Glenn to talk about the conversation with a former UAF dean that sent two mechanical engineers down a nerd rabbit hole that changed everything, why he started an entirely new company after one meeting about pilot housing at Eielson, and the thing he's been building quietly that could change the math on how Alaska constructs its future. 🎙️

Sarah Dow's first day on an Alaska construction site ended with her throwing a stop sign at a car that blew past her.(She says it was basically a hockey hip check with a paddle. She played college hockey. This tracks.)Her boss called her dad that night and said "this isn't going to work." Then he came up with a plan to get her to quit by the next afternoon: 100 mailboxes to hand dig, four feet deep, along Northern Lights and Spenard. Sarah called it the best workout she'd ever had. She stayed.Today, Sarah is the safety manager at Colaska, one of the largest road construction firms in the state. She started as a general laborer in 1997, moved into grade checking, went back to school for construction management, and now leads safety for crews building roads across Alaska. In this episode, Bill Schnabel sits down with Sarah to talk about what she learned working in the hole while everyone else sat in heated trucks, why she believes teaching people beats forcing them every single time, and what she wishes drivers understood about the people building the roads they're speeding through. 🎙️

Megan Militello was 17 years old, controlling air traffic in an Iraq war zone out of an airfield the size of Phoenix Sky Harbor. Today she's building something completely different, and arguably just as ambitious.Megan is the executive director of the Alaska Manufacturing Association, which she co-founded in March 2025 to fill a gap nobody else was filling: a real community for the people actually making things in Alaska. At her last networking event in Palmer, a founder still in the prototype phase sat across from the owner of a 70-year-old Fairbanks manufacturing company, swapping notes. That's not an accident. That's the whole point.In this episode, Megan tells Shelly how she went from the Army to the FAA to her dad's basement in Alaska to launching a granola company to building a statewide manufacturing community. She shares her "spinning plates" framework for not losing your mind, why community over competition is a survival strategy in Alaska, and one of the best lines we've had on the show yet: closed mouths don't get fed. 🎙️

Erik Williams spent one of the wildest days of his early career on a North Slope landfill in negative temps with 30 mph winds, taking his gloves off to connect wires inside a panel box so a sensor could do its job. He tells that story in this episode, and the lesson he took from it is not the one you'd expect.Today, Erik is the CEO and co-founder of BeadedCloud, an Arctic infrastructure monitoring platform built in Anchorage. He's also a UAA grad, founder of the UAA robotics club, Alaska Angel Conference Audience Choice Award winner, and current G Beta Anchorage participant.In this episode of Breaking Frozen Ground, Shelly Thomas sits down with Erik to talk about what it actually looks like to deploy monitoring stations across the North Slope by helicopter, why he had to leave Alaska to start his career and what pulled him back, and the thing he said about ideas becoming reality that neither of us has been able to stop thinking about. 🎙️

Most engineers pick a lane. Natalie Wagner has worked in all of them. Fortune 100 private sector, state government, federal agencies, and her own consulting firm. She's a PE, has a master's in water resources from UAA, and has served as a State Engineer with USDA.And she's spent that expertise on some of the least glamorous, most consequential work in Alaska: rural water systems in communities where the roads aren't wide enough for pickup trucks, oil and gas platform permitting in Cook Inlet, and permafrost engineering on projects where design life has to reckon with ground that might not stay frozen.In this episode, Bill Schnabel sits down with Natalie to talk about what rural Alaska water system design is actually like (and why the textbooks almost completely miss it), the one thing that determines whether a water system survives long after the ribbon cutting, what happens when the ground under a bridge stops being frozen, and the piece of advice she'd give every young engineer in Alaska right now. It's the kind of thing that makes you want to book a flight. 🎙️Come find your people. 👇

Amy Steiner was going to build rockets and go to college anywhere but Alaska. Neither of those things happened, and Alaska is better for it.Today, Amy is the Chief of Geotechnical and Materials at the Alaska District Army Corps of Engineers, and one of the very few engineers on Earth with hands-on experience designing and installing ad freeze piles in frozen ground. When McMurdo Station in Antarctica needed someone to review a foundation design driven into 180 feet of pure ice, the qualified-reviewer list was exactly one name long. It was hers.In this episode, Amy tells Shelly about drilling boreholes in Kaktovik at 20 below with a polar bear guard, getting stranded in the Arctic when the airline just stopped flying for three weeks, and the quiet worry that keeps her up at night: that the frozen ground expertise she's spent her career building might have an expiration date as the Arctic warms.She also has an unpopular opinion about engineering education that every college and hiring manager needs to hear. 🎙️