Voices of EPUMC: Stan Havlik
- EPUMC Office
- Sep 17, 2025
- 4 min read
Parishioner Stan Havlick has worked, cycled, skied and mountain-climbed all over the world. He’s sought travel and adventure and met people in remote villages and big cities from Botswana to high above the Arctic Circle. But now, in his early 80’s, Havlick relishes living in Estes Park and working as a volunteer ranger in Rocky Mountain National Park. He likes to help novice hikers make smart decisions. “If people say, I want to go to Sky Pond, I look to see if they have sandals on,” he says with a chuckle.
Havlick knows a little something about preparing for conditions. He’s not only climbed some of the highest mountains in the world (22,838-foot Mt. Aconcagua in the Andes, for one) but cycled across six continents between 1992 and 2006, raising money for The Colorado Cancer Foundation. Havlick developed the non-profit after his first wife got acute lymphocytic leukemia in 1979. The foundation supports oncology research and patient care in Colorado. It still sponsors an annual cancer run in Eldorado Springs that Havlick dreamed up 46 years ago.
Havlick’s wanderlust started, he says, with his mother, a devout Methodist and “ferocious traveler” who spoke five languages. She studied at the Sorbonne, taught French at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay and kept stacks of National Geographic magazines that piqued her son’s interest in world travel. So when Havlick was offered a job in the Philippines working for American Express in his mid-20’s, he dropped out of graduate school to take it. “I passed on the MBA,” he says. “No regrets at all.”
Havlick’s banking career took him to Germany, New York, Kansas City and eventually Boulder. When he retired at age 78, he was an executive with Eldorado Natural Spring Water Company near Boulder. But it was high-altitude mountaineering, long-distance cycling and raising money for cancer research that drove him. In a 2008 article for “Adventure Cyclist,” Havlick’s eldest son Erik described his dad as “hyper-ambitious,” and a man who “does not procrastinate – ever.” Not satisfied with just donating money for cancer research, Havlick and his younger son Justin pedaled their way across the U.S. in 1992 in a “Coast to Coast for Cancer Research” ride. They solicited donations from major companies (who got good advertising and a nice tax write-off to boot) and raised post-trip donations at lectures and slideshows about their adventures. By 2006 Havlick had completed coast to coast rides across six “bike-able” continents, riding with different teams (four cyclists is ideal, he says) each time. “I went over 20,000 miles,” Havlick says proudly. He’s also cycled the perimeter of Iceland and traveled in Antarctica.
Havlick has many stories, of course, like the time Chinese soldiers opened up his tent zipper with a gun, demanding to know why he and his team were camping so close to a military installation. Havlick and his friends were scared but managed to escape trouble. “I’m pretty good at talking myself out of things!” says Havlick. Or the time in Africa when two of his cycling companions got food poisoning after eating goat meat at a little rural café. He had to find a truck to transport them to a hospital where, they discovered, the doctor didn’t speak any English. Somehow, Havlick says, they communicated the problem and after a few days in the hospital his unlucky teammates were cycling with him across Africa again.
Sometimes Havlick had to be tough on his teammates. On one continental bike ride one of the cyclists kept riding way ahead of the pack. He was young and strong and “just couldn’t get over the fact that you’ve got to draft,” says Havlick. (drafting involves riding close together to take advantage of the reduced air resistance). “He always wanted to be in the front, but he’d always be way ahead, and the three other riders weren’t getting the benefit of being right behind him. So, I had to take him aside and tell him I was going to kick him off the team because he wasn’t helping the others.” In the end the cyclist stayed. “He finally got it,” says Havlick.
Ask him whether his world travels improved his view of humanity he answers emphatically. “Absolutely!” And he notes that people in places of great poverty were some of the most gracious. “I was the person on the team responsible for finding us lodging or a place to bed down each night,” says Havlick. “I would walk up to a farm and show them our brochure and ask if we could put up a tent in their barn or backyard. And many times, they invited us into their homes instead. Oh, Stan, don’t worry about it. We have an extra bedroom, they’d say. You wouldn’t believe people out there.”
Havlick feels a sense of welcome and comfort at EPUMC as well. He joined the church at the end of 2022. “I can sense by the parishioners that they’re neat people,” he says. “They believe in God. They believe in this church. And I like being around them. It helps me throughout the week, continuing my faith and stabilizing it.”
Havlick isn’t the first in his family to live in Estes Park, by the way. His dad, born and raised in Wheat Ridge, Colorado, worked at Enos Mills’ Longs Peak Inn as a laundry boy. Havlick and his wife Margaret moved here full-time from Boulder in 2020. He has two sons and a daughter from his first marriage and a stepdaughter from his second. If you want to learn more about Havlick’s travels and the kind of presentations he’s made over the years you can check out his travel website www.goforitadventures.org.
