Fire And Ice

As long as I can remember, I’ve loved the mountains. Growing up in East Portland on (where else?) an extinct volcano known as Mt.Tabor, we had stunning views of both Mt. Hood and Mt. St. Helens, as well as a tiny tip of Mt. Adams, from the family home at 350 S.E. Gilham Avenue in the City of Roses.

At an early age, I took to adventures in the Cascades. In the Boy Scouts, I roamed the trails of the Mt. Hood National Forest and hiked from Timberline Lodge to the Columbia River Gorge on the Pacific Crest Trail. By age 12, I had climbed Mt. Hood with my dad’s high school climbing club associated with the Mazamas in Portland.

By the time I was 14, I had climbed Mt. St. Helens. In Boy Scouts, we’d spend a week at Spirit Lake on the north side of the peak. This was all before the blast. In the mid-60s, I kept having this recurring dream: gazing from our kitchen window, the mountain erupted. About 15 years later, it actually happened.

Climbing other lesser peaks during my high school years (I was quite busy with academic and athletic pursuits), I resumed my serious hobby in college, working at Crater Lake National Park, and the Forest Service on the Malheur and Wenatchee National Forests. After graduation from j-school, I resumed working for the U.S.F.S.

On the Lake Wenatchee District, which had peaks galore, I worked as a wilderness ranger for the next five years. By the early 80s, I had left the Forest Service for graduate school in journalism and a career in public relations, first at McKenzie-Willamette Hospital and then Eugene Water & Electric Board.

Being my career job, I spent 23 years at the utility. Hooking up with other like-minded backcountry enthusiasts, I reconnected with Oregon’s Cascade peaks while traveling to Lake Wenatchee to reacquaint myself with those trails and massifs. By 2008, I had retired from the utility to dedicate time to more wilderness endeavors.

In retirement, I’ve had the opportunity to explore my Alpine roots, with visits to Germany, Switzerland and Italy. My heroes throughout my climbing career were Fred Beckey, a Northwest resident (Seattle) who was a transplant from Germany, and Reinhold Messner, an Italian-cum-German citizen of South Tyrol.

Hence, I will initiate a series of posts on the the mountains of the Northwest, beginning with peaks I’m most familiar with in Oregon and Washington, in a series entitled “Fire and Ice” on the Cascades, this region’s contribution to the Pacific Ring of Fire that extends from the tip of South America to the tip of New Zealand.