Nicholas Noecker

During the Sixties, Nick was growing-up in the Allegheny Forest in Northwestern Pennsylvania, and on the banks of the Ohio River in rural Northeastern Kentucky. Thus, he spent that iconic noisy decade wading through the silent spring of nature, hunting for Trout, fishin' for Largemouth bass, and going to church in the wild before arriving in Space City at the age of sixteen in 1969 to the sounds of ZZ Top on KILT. After fast times at Spring Branch High, a five year career in homebuilding led him to college and careers in the worlds of Wall Street, software startups, boondoggles, and finally high-tech business consulting at IBM where he traveled the world supporting client and project teams in the e-business transformation era until retiring in 2009. He went on to found the Margaret Noecker Nature Center in memory of his wife, long-time Head of School at The Parish School, to provide nature learning experiences for children with learning differences. He still lives in Houston with Bob the Dog and Taylor the Cool Cat. His first book, The Canyon Crawl, is a novella based on his harrowing hike, at age sixty, to Phantom Ranch in Grand Canyon in the dead of winter, 2014. His second novel, Riding With Aliens, is at once a photo-novella-journal and a prequel chronicling "the author's" cathartic, spacey, cross-country motorcycle ride from Houston to California Wine Country and back, in the Fall of 2013. These days, Nick hikes every morning with Bob along White Oak Bayou taking photos and visiting with fellow explorers wading through "urban nature."