Dan Bigley
Dan Bigley grew up in Ohio, California, and Malaysia, where he took up with an acrobatic hip-hop dance troupe and got a black belt in Taekwondo at 14. While earning a degree in natural history and a minor in environmental education at Arizona’s Prescott College, he spent several months a year living out of a backpack. Dan has ways felt the most at home in wild, quiet places. He loved sharing the magic of the natural world with the kids he guided on wilderness trips throughout his college years and beyond. He dreamed of starting his own outdoor school someday.
Dan’s need to go where roads are rare drew him to Alaska, where things started falling into place for him. The last few months he could see, he had the most challenging and rewarding job he’d ever had, taking emotionally disturbed kids on outings for Alaska Children’s Services.
Losing his eyes meant giving up much of what he loved. Upon rethinking his future, he decided to go for a master’s degree in social work. As a newly blind graduate student, he felt at times like he was climbing El Capitan in flip-flops. He not only got through it, including Statistics, which couldn’t be more visual, he graduated with a 4.0 grade point average. He was hired a week later as a clinician for Denali Family Services, a nonprofit counseling center in Anchorage for emotionally disturbed children and their families. A year later, he was promoted to director of foster care for DFS, the largest therapeutic foster-care provider in the state.
In 2008, the Governor’s Committee on Employment and Rehabilitation for People With Disabilities presented Dan with its Alaskan of the Year Award. Prescott College honored him with a Distinguished Alumni Award that same year, and in 2010, a Desert Star Award, which recognizes alumni carrying forward the Prescott mission.
Dan and his wife, Amber Takavitz Bigley, and their two young children, Alden and Acacia, live in Anchorage. When Dan’s not working or on active dad duty, he’s playing guitar, or the stock market. He studies yoga and Tai Chi. And he fishes every chance he gets.
