William (Bill) St. Lawrence

William (Bill) Francis St. Lawrence of Sonoma, Calif., passed away on Jan. 30, after a long illness. He was born in Brockton, Mass., on Jan. 17, 1941, the youngest of four children of the late Margaret (Lynch) St. Lawrence and Charles St. Lawrence. Following the early death of his father, he was raised in Brockton by his mother and three of her siblings, Mary, Catherine, and Lawrence Lynch.

After graduating from Boston University with a BS in Engineering, he earned an M.S. in Engineering from Pennsylvania State University and an MS and PhD in Earth Science from Montana State University with research focused on avalanches. He worked at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL), in Hanover, New Hampshire, before moving to California, where he founded and ran Polar Alpine, Inc., an Arctic and alpine-focused research, engineering, and environmental monitoring company in Berkeley for more than 45 years-without ever losing his Boston accent.

In his younger years, Bill was an exceptional powder skier, and rock and mountain climber. The peaks he summitted included Denali in Alaska and multiple mountains in South America. In the late 1960s, with a battered blue VW van as his home base, he regularly scaled the sheer faces of El Capitan and Half Dome in Yosemite National Park. In more recent years, Bill and his wife Ana Maria divided much of their time between Ana Maria's native El Salvador and their home in Sonoma, where they enjoyed making and consuming wine from their backyard vineyard and olive oil from their own olive trees.

Bill is survived by his beloved wife of 30 years, Ana Maria Dueñas of Sonoma and Berkeley; his son Andrew, wife Megan Kennedy and their daughters, Clara and Arden, of Bow, Wash.; his daughter Nicole and partner Scott Hargis of Oakland, Calif; his stepchildren Ximena Arestizabal and sons Tyler and Marcus; Gonzalo Arestizabal and his wife Kalene and their children Marcelo, Wallace, and Vivi; and many nieces and nephews. In addition to his parents, he was predeceased by his brother, Leo, and sisters, Margaret S. Carey, and Elizabeth (Betty) Walsh. His previous marriage to Sally Jones St. Lawrence ended in divorce.