Two Men, a Book, and Mt. Pilchuck

Edith and David Capocci, with David's book, Rambling and Scrambling around the Mountain Loop, courtesy Edith Farrell

Green Gables interior with a customer playing a hand-crafted flute, courtesy Edith Farrell

To the delight of travelers along the Mountain Loop Highway, an almost 80-year old landmark at Verlot has been renovated and reopened after closing last September.

The new owners of the Green Gables general store, Edith and Randy Farrell, offer friendly advice to hundreds of hikers and campers who come to play in Snohomish County’s backyard. They also offer food, coffee, and vacation necessities, as well as an eclectic mix of specialty items. For those wanting to know more about the Mountain Loop area, they carry a variety of new and used books.

Green Gables sits at the base of Mt. Pilchuck, the destination of an estimated 28,000 visitors each year. The store is also only a mile or so from where I lived as a child. Almost every day of my life until I left home for college, I looked up to see Mt. Pilchuck looming to the south. Some of my pleasantest memories are of exploring the mountain’s flanks or climbing its peak.

For six years while I was growing up, two naturalists, Harry W. Higman and Earl J. Larrison, studied the plants and animals that inhabit the forests, bogs, lakes, meadows, rocks and cliffs of the mountain. In 1949, they summarized their findings in an unusual, very  readable work of fiction they called Pilchuck, the Life of a Mountain. I’d never heard of the men or their work until I found a copy for sale in the Farrells’ collection.

From Amazon.com

The story’s main characters are Doc, Merle, and their woodsman friend Frank. Although these naturalists are fictional, their adventures, work, and descriptions of life on the mountain are obviously drawn from the authors’ own experiences. Edmund J. Sawyer contributed beautiful line drawings. Since I’ve been an avid nature observer and a lover of Mt. Pilchuck for many years, I found the time on the mountain with Doc, Merle, and Frank a treat not to be missed.

The mountain, like all mountains, is a living entity whose plants and animals are perfectly adapted to their own niches in the ecosystem.  I loved the historical and geological bits sprinkled in, although some of the latter are a little outdated now. The authors give marvelous descriptions of the incredible views, the quickly-changing weather, and days and nights spent at the lookout station on Pilchuck’s summit.

Today’s hikers have easy access to the mountain from the Interstate 5 corridor. They can drive to the 3,150 foot level, leaving only 2,200 feet of altitude to gain in about three miles of hiking. But when Higman and Larrison worked on Pilchuck in the 1940s, the trail began at the Stillaguamish River and climbed upward for five miles, much of it through timber. A trailside cabin had been built at timberline for a man who lived there during fire seasons. He made trips to the summit to watch for fires. In good weather, he found it easier to stay in a tent at the top.

The Forest Service ran a telephone line to the peak and eventually built the lookout a cabin there, with a cupola atop where he could have an unobstructed view. That lookout station was first built by the U.S. Forest Service in 1920, rebuilt in 1941, and renovated by the Everett Mountaineers in 1977.

While reading about that unknown watchman and his cabin, I remembered my first climb to the summit with a group of high-school friends. We wore old shoes and light jackets and carried our lunches in brown paper bags. As we labored up through the forest, the fog turned to mist and then to drizzle. Noticing lengths of rusted wire paralleling the trail, running through porcelain insulators or just nailed to rotting stumps not far above the ground, we guessed we were looking at an old telephone line. We paused to eat part of our lunch at a level spot where piled stones indicated a low wall. Rotted timbers, sunken in moss, outlined a rectangle. After many decades, I finally know why someone had built a cabin halfway up Mt. Pilchuck.

When Larrison and Higman roamed the mountain, they occasionally shared it with mountain goats, cougars, coyotes, and even a wolf. They studied shrews and six kinds of mice, fish, many kinds of birds, and they even found toads at the very pinnacle of Pilchuck. The larger mammals are scarce now, but marmots and pikas, two rodents of the high places, can still be seen by the hikers who stream to and from the lookout on an average day. Those with skill and know-how can still enjoy wonderfully wild and untouched spots on Pilchuck.

But for those who must do their adventuring from an armchair, Pilchuck, the Life of a Mountain, will serve as a lively, enjoyable guide.

Although the book is out of print, copies are available in libraries and through online booksellers.

    Henry Wentworth Higman and Earl J. Larrison, Pilchuck, the Life of a

Mountain, illus. by Edmund J. Sawyer (Seattle: Superior Publishing, 1949)

Look here for a list of libraries in this region that have copies:

http://www.worldcat.org/title/pilchuck-the-life-of-a-mountain/oclc/8991821

Download the book to your computer:

http://www.whoseebook.org/dtqio_pilchuck-the-life-of-a-mountain-pdf.pdf

A Long Fall on Mt. Pilchuck

The upper chair lift ran to the location marked on this old postcard.

This old photo shows the lower part of the completed chairlift.

50 years ago: Mt. Pilchuck Day Lodge and ski rental shop 

Not too many people survive a fifteen-hundred-foot fall down a mountainside and live to tell about it. My friend and Granite Falls classmate Gary Weber is one of them.

Fifty years ago this winter, Mt. Pilchuck State Park put into operation its new Riblet Tramway Company’s double chair lift. It ran from just above today’s parking lot to the 4000-foot level of the mountain. A Herald newspaper story dated December 31, 1963 described how they tested the new machinery. They loaded containers holding 400 pounds of water on the chairs going uphill, then ran them all the way to the top of the lift. They tried out the regular and the auxiliary motors. They checked the brake system thoroughly. Then the testers climbed on and rode to the top and back. They pronounced the chair lift ready for business, starting the next day, January 1, 1964.

Gary and another classmate, Dick Larson, had been working for the Forest Service at Verlot, but in the winter they had the job of taking care of the road leading to Mt. Pilchuck State Park. He also worked at the park itself. He was there for the construction of the chair lift. One of the workers wrestled a machine on skidders, like a donkey engine, to where the top of the lift would be. He attached cables around the base of trees or to boulders and winched the big machine up the nearly vertical inclines. Once it was situated, he ran a cable down the mountain for hauling equipment to where it was needed.

One day the boss, Wendell (Wendy) Carlson, told Gary to up and help the man on top. It was no quick hike, two miles or more by trail. Gary started out, then looked at the nearby cable, running around the pulley and back up the mountain. He was young and strong. Without stopping to think, he grabbed the cable, swung his legs up and around it, and hung on for a free ride to the top. No one saw what he was doing. Part way up, the cable stopped. Gary hung there, twenty-five feet above the ground. He was six feet three and athletic, but eventually, his arms and legs became so tired he knew he would fall. The snow looked deep and soft. He let go.

The snow was deep...about ten feet. As he realized how deep, he arched his back and threw out his arms. He stopped himself from sinking, but he was already buried in snow nearly to his neck. After a long struggle, he rolled himself out of what had almost become his grave. Gary headed for the trail, overcome by the realization that had it not been for God’s intervention, no one would have known what happened to him until the snow melted in the spring.

Later, after the towers were erected and the chair lift was operating several days a week, a problem arose. The towers oscillated when the lift was running. The rough ride made customers nervous. Gary was trying to find a solution, working with the cables on one arm of the topmost 40-foot tower. Without warning, a weld at the base of the tower broke. The structure began to topple. Gary knew he’d be crushed beneath it if he rode it down. The last thing he remembers is leaping out, away from the tower’s fall.

Those who saw it happen said he looked like a tumbling rag doll as he struck the slick rock below, slid down it, then bounced and rolled 1500 feet down the mountain. He flew through the opening of a large hollow stump, on the edge of a 200-foot ravine. That’s where he was when he woke up.
   
Other workmen reached the spot, expecting to find him dead. They pulled him from his precarious refuge and laid him down. Jim Carlson, operations manager and brother of Wendy, Gary’s boss, called Mountain Rescue at Everett’s Paine Field to send a helicopter. When it got there it couldn’t land because of turbulence and the dangerous terrain, so it dropped a litter and hovered at a safe distance.

Gary told those with him, “Just set me on my feet. I’ll walk.” They did, but he collapsed, unable to feel his body. So his friends loaded him onto the litter and carried him to where the helicopter hovered. It dropped a line to attach to the litter. As the cable lifted Gary toward the open door, all he could think of was how small that line looked. Surely it would break and he’d again be falling through the air.

Then a burly African-American medic reached out and pulled him into the chopper. “I’ve got you, boy,” he said. Gary relaxed, knowing he was in good hands.

Unbeknownst to Gary, John Larson, another man who was working at the top, had been struck by a cable which snapped as the tower fell. He had a broken leg. The helicopter had already picked him up.

When they reached the hospital, Gary’s body was still covered in packed snow. Though in shock, he remembers chunks of snow falling from him onto the x-ray table. Although the x-rays discovered no broken bones, Gary’s entire body had turned black and blue. He was covered with fist-sized hematomas (areas where broken blood vessels had leaked and the blood had clotted.) The doctor told him the snow had saved his life because it kept the bleeding down.

Back home again, he decided to take a hot bath. No one had thought to warn him against doing so. His wife Thelma had gone to work and only his little daughters were at home. The hot water loosened the blood clots and suddenly Gary felt very ill. He knew if he passed out, he would probably drown in the bathtub, so he rolled himself over the edge and crawled to the bedroom, unable to reach a telephone. He told his little girls, “Daddy doesn’t feel well. You can help by going to your bedroom and playing quietly.” The children obeyed, and Gary lay there, sure he was about to die, until he felt better. He later found that some of the clots had broken free and passed through his heart.

Gary, convinced that God’s hand had been upon him, recovered and returned to work. Not until later, when he took his son for a ride on the Mt. Pilchuck chairlift, did he discover one result of that terrible fall. As they glided through the air, paralyzing fear suddenly seized Gary. He couldn’t move except to grab the center bar in the double chair. He held on so tightly he nearly snapped his knuckles.

It happened again that summer when he climbed the apple tree to pick the fruit. Even though the ground this time was not far away, fear still froze him to the trunk of the tree. What helped him to overcome the panic was going to work for the Public Utility District. (Though he worked as a heavy equipment operator, he sometimes had to climb the poles.) Gradually, he felt safe strapping on hooks and spurs and going up a pole, although he never felt quite at ease in the new bucket trucks.

A healthy respect for high places was one legacy of Gary’s long fall on Mt. Pilchuck. Much more important was the redoubled conviction that God has a purpose for his life. He is quick to acknowledge that God used these experiences to bring him back to the faith-filled life.

Thelma and Gary Weber today

*1st 3 pictures courtesy <http://www.hyak.net/lost/10.html>