Wilderness Alps

Harvey Manning was a founder of Mountaineers Books in Seattle with the original publication of “Freedom of the Hills” (1960), the Northwest “bible” of mountaineering. He was a long-time board member of the North Cascades Conservation Council (NCCC) and with wife Betty produced hundreds of issues of NCCC’s journal The Wild Cascades.

Ken Wilcox is an environmental and outdoor writer and trail planner living in Bellingham. He has served on the board of the NCCC since 1984.

Part 1

I think of the stories that Harvey Manning shared in “Wilderness Alps,” collectively, as a story of our time. I was among the guilty ones, not too long ago, who roamed around the North Cascades, including the Glacier Peak Wilderness, more or less oblivious to the struggle it took to win Congressional protection of this amazing paradise as national park and wilderness.

The battle for the North Cascades began roughly in the early 1950s and culminated in the designation of the Glacier Peak Wilderness in September 1960. Then on October 3, 1968, President Johnson signed the bill that created the lower-forty-eight’s most spectacular wilderness park, North Cascades National Park.

In 1992 Harvey published an early version of the history of those events, of which he was intimately familiar as a rare and endangered conservationist of the late 1950s. Ultimately, it would only make sense to bring the story current, pretty it up just a little — Harvey was a remarkable historian and storyteller — and publish it for the masses to consume at their leisure.

To my good fortune, the burden of editing and publishing the book was handed to me. With the help of many others too numerous to name, we released the book just this spring. What follows is an excerpt.

In their journey westward from the Great Lakes across the Great Plains and the Great American Desert, over the Big Muddy and under the Big Sky, passing side trails to the Grand Teton and Big Hole and Gros Ventre, and to the Great Salt Lake and the Great Central Valley, to the Grand Canyon and the Rio Grande, the pioneers of the American Frontier gazed upon and heard about a goodly amount of sizable geography.

Then, approaching Puget Sound, they were struck dumb, or as near to it as a pioneer could be, by the hugest lump of freestanding American earth ever in view of a prairie schooner, so almighty high that the upper reaches were winter-white the whole summer long.

Had they felt the need for an outside opinion, they (or their children, anyhow) could have quoted John Muir, who after completing the eighth (or thereabouts) ascent in 1888, proclaimed that “Of all the fire mountains which, like beacons, once blazed along the Pacific Coast, Mount Rainier is the noblest.” His imprimatur helped establish “The Mountain,” in 1899, as Washington’s first national park.

Mount Rainier was only the fifth such park in America, following Yellowstone, Yosemite, Sequoia and General Grant (later absorbed into Kings Canyon). Crucial support for Rainier also happened to come from Northern Pacific Railroad baron James J. Hill whose trains might carry carloads of tourists there — that is, once he had swapped some treeless land-grant holdings on the flanks of the volcano for thousands of acres of the public’s best timber elsewhere, which he did before selling much of it to Weyerhauser.

When the government objected to trading glaciers for prime timber, Hill threatened to go into the ice business, but the public called his bluff. And thus Mount Rainier became the first vertex of what conservationists would later call the “Golden Triangle” of national parks in Washington.

The second vertex came slower, despite the oratory of the state’s first elected governor who in 1889 announced, “Washington has her great unknown land like the interior of Africa.” Governor Elisha P. Ferry challenged adventurers “to acquire fame by unveiling the mystery which wraps the land encircled by the snow-capped Olympic Range.”

In Washington, as elsewhere, the frontiersman’s fondness for scenery had two sides, the one an ebullient proprietary pride, the other a shameless proprietary greed. The great rainforest of the Olympics could not be seen by the timber barons, blinded as they were by so many board feet. Its fringes were homesteaded by the great-granddaddies of today’s communities of Forks, Port Angeles and Hoquiam, and tens of thousands of acres of prime forest were quickly logged off.

In the same period, a half-million acres of the Olympic Forest Reserve, according to historian Carsten Lien, were fraudulently acquired by timber companies colluding with the McKinley administration. For a time, the best cash crop of Olympic Peninsula Dan’l Boones was the Roosevelt elk, killed not for meat but for teeth, wanted for watch chains by the fraternal society founded in 1868 and at century’s end burgeoning nationwide — the Brotherly and Protective Order of Elks.

But Teddy Roosevelt’s Boone and Crockett Club wanted the elk protected, as well as the forest, and they took their case to Congress in 1904, pleading unsuccessfully for the creation of Elk National Park. The elk slaughter continued into 1905 when public pressure forced the state legislature to impose a hunting ban. Then, as Roosevelt’s second term came to a close in 1909, he designated the last of his 18 national monuments in the wild heart of the Olympics.

From front porches of Seattle in wintertime, folks watched the sun sink into the horizon south of South Mountain, in summertime, north of Mount Zion, and midway through the seasons, directly into the crags of Mount Constance, highest point of the skyline. It seemed apparent that parkhood for the Olympic Mountains had to come.

By the late 1930s, four decades after Mount Rainier, there had been too many sunsets to be denied. In September 1937 President Franklin Roosevelt paid a visit to Port Angeles and promised a park. Olympic National Park was so designated the following summer, assuring permanent celebration of the sunsets, the rainforest and the elk.

The campaign for the North Cascades National Park would have been the lengthiest of the three had it truly begun, as the chronicles usually repeat, at the turn of the twentieth century. In reality, the gestation did not commence for certain until the mid-1950s and came to full term in 1968 — stunningly swift for a campaign of such large dimensions, geographically and philosophically.

In the wake of victory, the words and deeds of prophets and harbingers suitable for holy writ were sought out, but really, the first 50 years of intermittent calls to action never came to anything, nor led to anything beyond good memories of a worthy cause. For the generation arriving on the scene in the 1950s, everything remained to be done.

The most prominent failing of the North Cascades was that they did not stare much of anybody in the face, as the Olympics and Rainier did. Foothill and coastal hamlets might brag up their backyards but the newspapers of Wenatchee and Bellingham were not read in Washington, D.C., nor in Seattle.

Nor did the hamleteers in those days solicit or encourage or desire or tolerate outside interest that might inhibit the orderly looting of said backyards. The railroad barons found no financially practical routes through the ramparts to scenery suitable for marketing in Chicago and Boston, and therefore didn’t push their well-worn buttons in Congress, as they did for Yellowstone, Mount Rainier and Glacier National Parks and other surefire ticket-sellers.

Though automobiles probed the range in the 1920s, for many years thereafter, the flower fields and glaciers of Mount Rainier, and even Yellowstone’s geysers, the Southwest’s canyons, and Oregon’s Crater Lake drew immensely more Washington state tourists, to say nothing of those from Ohio and New Jersey.

Few people knew much of anything about the North Cascades, presumably due to a lack of much of anything worth knowing. No roads traversed the North Cascades, and for the America that had recently gained the freedom of the wheels, what could not be seen from an automobile window did not exist.

A second major fault of the North Cascades was being too big to fit handily into an urban imagination. A Puget Sounder of the genteel class, which invented and fostered the notion of national parks, could wrap his mind around the compact uplift of the Olympic Mountains and the grand unity of Mount Rainier, but not until far into the twentieth century did the genteel mind expand sufficiently to embrace the 13,000-odd square miles of America’s “wilderness alps,” extending north from Stevens Pass to Canada, and nearly from saltwater to sagebrush.

Third and finally, if the North Cascades were to be condensed into a single Rainier-like or Olympic-like symbol of essence, what would it be? Mount Baker? Glacier Peak? Lake Chelan? The Cascade Crest from Park Creek Pass to Cascade Pass to Suiattle Pass? The Picket Range? All of the above? Was there such a central defining feature or was it just one big jumble of beauteousness?

To keep the record straight, there were prophets and harbingers. Henry Custer in 1859 and Edmund Coleman in 1866–68 eloquently described their explorations in the North Cascades, and as veterans of the true Alps spoke from the authority of an international perspective. In the 1890s a few of the hardier urban tourists began hiking prospector-built trails and dispatching prose poems to local newspapers and national magazines and journals.

In 1917 Mary Rinehart’s story of her epic journey across Cascade Pass appeared in Cosmopolitan. By the late 1930s, a young Bob Marshall, a leading proponent of wilderness preservation and founder of the Wilderness Society, had explored the Glacier Peak area at length and proposed a 794,440-acre wilderness area — then suddenly died before anything could come of it.

Nevertheless, these decades of now-and-then, here-and-there praise that flickered, faded and flickered again, very gradually exposed to the world a sublime mountain wilderness worth saving. The knowledge stimulated a campaign that would culminate in the completion, on October 2, 1968, of Washington’s Golden Triangle of National Parks. §

Next Month: 1959-60: To Square One (from Chapter 2).