2017_Annual Report_single page

HIRE DATE - OCTOBER 10, 2016
Mark A. Noel
Mark Noel comes from the rural outskirts of Harrodsburg in
central Kentucky. He was a boy before high-speed internet
and spent his early years exploring in the outdoors. He looks
back on it as an innocent place in a much more innocent
time. In the summers, he’d often leave in the morning and
not get home until dinnertime.
His father was self-employed, and he taught Mark the value
of hard work. His mother was an English teacher at Mercer
County High School, and Mark was one of her students. She
had a rich collection of American and international classics.
He used to pull works from authors such as Emerson, Camus,
Thoreau, Dickens, de Tocqueville, and Twain down from the
shelves and spend hours poring through them.
He is drawn to national parks, especially the ones out
West. Just prior to coming on board with the Firm, he took
some time to hike in and around Glacier National Park in
Montana. He’s been to Yellowstone a few times, as well as
Arches National Park in Utah, Denali in Alaska, the Badlands
in South Dakota and the Grand Canyon -- the more scenic
and out of the way, the better. He gravitates to places
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where the locals advise carrying
bear spray, although he has not yet
encountered any bears.
“The appeal is just seeing those
beautiful places that, for the most
part, have been unaltered by human
contact.You’re generally seeing
the landscape in the same way it
looked to the first humans who
encountered it. Those are unique
places. Everything is huge – huge sky, huge mountains, huge
rivers.”
One thing about Mark is that he can take a joke. He likes
to check out stand-up comedians and has been to dozens of
shows. He puts himself in harm’s way, seeking out seats in the
front row, which is the turf comics mine for heckling sitting
ducks. “I’ve done that a lot – I think it’s important to be able
to laugh at yourself. We must take our work very seriously,
but we shouldn’t always take ourselves so seriously.”