My Early Years with Max

Jon Wartes,
Feb. 2001

Max was the advisor for Post 804 in the Shoreline area. A friend of mine had joined the post and brought me to a meeting. That is when I first met Max. I remember Max taking us on several Camporees and we enjoyed the competition between patrols. One Camporee was at Deception Pass State Park. I was in a car with another adult leader driving there. We got to telling jokes and had such a good time that we didn't notice we had missed the turn to the west at Mt. Vernon until we were driving into the downtown area of Bellingham!

Max encouraged us to advance through the rank system of Scouting. I earned my Eagle in 1959. I sent my Eagle badge back to the National Council in July, 2000, in protest to their policy of excluding gays. Max was one of three scouting men who was influential in my youth. I later learned that one of the other three was gay. He was, in virtually every respect, a positive person in my life. To say that gays are poor role models is contrary to my whole life's experience!

Because of earning Eagle, being comfortable in the woods and knowing many of the hiking routes that Max had been exploring in the Pilchuck area, I was selected to serve on the summer camp staff of the Rocking T Bar H Ranch in 1959. The Ranch existed as an Explorer camp from 1959-1964 before becoming Camp Brinkley in 1965. For the first three of these years my job was to lead weeklong hikes mostly in the Bald Mt. to Mt. Pilchuck areas. It was great fun! On one hike alone, the group racked up 210 as the body count of horse fly's killed. Several times we ended the hike by leaving Summit Lake on Mt. Pilchuck in the early evening and hiking by the light of a full moon to a point near the Ranch and then bedding down between 1:00 and 2:00 AM. Because I was leading hiking groups of 20-30 Explorers, being a hike leader was considered a more responsible job and I received a premium wage ($50/Mo.)! Clearly it was Max that gave me the skills and knowledge that resulted in my being on the camp staff. Those were great years and is a whole story by itself.

In the very early years of my knowing Max (probably around 1956), he was actively searching for hiking routes in the Mt. Pilchuck area. A group of about eight of us, some adults, some youth like me, had hiked in toward the summit of Mt. Pilchuck from the parking lot near where the ski resort would later be built. We started very late. It was dark by the time we approached the peak. I'm not sure if Max had been there before. We ended up camping on a rocky shelf area about 200 ft. below the peak on the north side. The event was memorable because we slept on a large horizontal granite slab that night. There were no trees or poles to set up our tarps so we just laid our plastic tarps directly over our sleeping bags. It rained! It rained a lot! We got wet from the condensation that collected on the lower side of the tarp. We got particularly wet from the rain that hit the granite slab on the uphill side and ran in under our tarp to soak us from underneath. There was nothing we could do about it! It was a wet night!

The following morning we traversed the ridge going east from the Pilchuck summit. We camped at 20 Lakes Basin. Again we set up our tarps but it wasn't raining any more. I remember sleeping under the same tarp setup as Max. He used his axe to dig a trench just under the tarp on the uphill side so that rainwater would be diverted to the sides. Of course, now days, digging such a trench in the alpine sod would be considered poor manners. Times have changed. We explored the 20 Lakes area and walked a mile east to the top of Iodine Gulch. That was a long time ago.

It was about 1991, that I retraced the same route with Jeff, my then 12-year-old son. We saw mountain goats along the ridge east of the peak. We camped in the same spot where I had camped with Max at 20 Lakes Basin. There was still a faint residue of the drainage trench Max had made so many years before. We were using a mountain tent now -- much better than the old tarps. We talked with my brother in Bothell via ham radio from our tent. I remember a very satisfying feeling in retracing, with my son, the same route that I had hiked with Max. Three years later, when my daughter was about 12, she and I took the same hike.

Another memory from the late 50's and early 60's was working with Max to build several three sided shelters on Woods Creek. One was about 2 miles north of what became Camp Brinkley and the other 1+ miles south. Max taught us all how to use a "misery whip" (long crosscut saw), wedges to keep the kerf open, and 12 ft. vine maple logs to use as levers to pry up on the big logs we were cutting. He put value on using intelligence rather than just muscle to move logs weighing hundreds of pounds. We learned how to use a frow to split cedar bolts into shakes. To make construction easier and faster, we split shakes about 1 ft wide and six feet long. Max taught us how to use hand tools (axe, wedges and hammer, peeve, swede hook). He occasionally mentioned that having these kinds of skills could be useful in the event of economic hard times (e.g. great depression). We would know how to make shelter.

In building these shelters, it was necessary to make a latrine. Max always emphasized the most important criteria in choosing a location: it must have a view!

I remember one time when we just started the north shelter, Max asked me to find a standing cedar of particular dimensions to be part of the vertical framing of the shelter. Ideally the cedar would not be very tapered. I felt some confidence that he trusted me to do this task. I found a tall tree with very little taper 150 ft from the shelter site and cut it down. Only then did someone comment that it was a hemlock. Max was very understanding and I went out to find another tree -- this time a cedar.

Another of our projects was to make puncheon bridges across the Woods Creek valley about 1 mi. north of Brinkley. The intention was to expand the system of riding trails extending from Brinkley. These bridges would link trails made on old RR grades NW of Brinkley to another system to the east. It was a labor-intensive effort. We cut cedar logs for sills, smaller logs for runners and decking 4 ft. long and about 4 inches thick. The decking was nailed to the runners with foot long spikes. By this time, the Rocking T Bar H Ranch (now Camp Brinkley), had obtained a team of draft horses. Their names were King and Queen. They weighed probably 2,000 lbs. each and had the most gentle temperament. We used them to haul logs from cutting to the construction site. As the years went by, the 220-ft. of puncheon bridge that we made was rarely used. There were two many wet spots in the valley that were not bridged over. Horses stepped deep into the mud. It became a hard trail to maintain and was abandoned. A lot of work went to waste.

While working on this project one day, I remember taking a rest, lying out on the ground, and looking up into the vine maple with the sun shining though the new light green leaves of springtime. I think an imprinting took place then. I have always liked vine maple in the sun. As I type this now at my computer, the sun is shining through a vine maple I planted just outside the window ten years ago.

Max taught us how to make fires even though the wood was wet and it was raining. Find a cedar stump or log from which you could split out some dry kindling to start the fire. Dead but standing alder snags would generally provide reasonably dry wood to maintain the fire (when you struck the alder with the axe, watch out for upper sections that may break off and come down on top of you). Once a good base fire was going, you could put anything on it. Even sponge-wet wood would burn if you had a good fire under it. Weekend after weekend, Max would have us make fires at these work sites. We learned the skill of fire making and got good at it by sheer repetition,. Alas, this is a skill that would deteriorate in time. Ten years ago, I set
about to make a fire on an old logging road in about 4 inches of snow. I use a 20 minute road flare and I still couldn't make it go! As it turns out, there was a rut in the road underneath the fire site -- a regular creek of water was passing under my fire.

In these years, Max was very involved, along with Don Wilson and Bill Pitts in getting Seattle ESAR going. I took brush monkey training in 1957. I remember being at Camp Omache during this training when we heard that the Russians has launched Sputnik (for younger readers, that was the first man-made satellite to be put into orbit and touched off the space race between the US and Russia). At that time, ESAR training consisted of three weekends only. Course I included gridding and use of compass. Course II went around Explorer Lake (the lake at what is now Camp Brinkley) and then westerly toward Camp Omache. It was about seven stations of straight-line compass runs and much shorter than the current courses. There was no Easter egg hunt component either. There was only one target for each compass run -- after a few weekends there was a "trail" going from one station to the next. On our first leg of Course II, my partner and I set on what we thought was the right compass direction and paced the appropriate distance. But we found no target (in those days the target was a flag about 1/2 yd2). After looking for 15 minutes we decided wemust have really screwed up so we returned to the start point and did the run a second time. We ended up at the same point. After a few minutes, I looked up. The target flag was 3 ft. above our head! Course III consisted of a single cross country run in a team of about 8 persons from the store at Lake Rosiger to Camp Omache. We had to camp over night enroute. It was easy!

My first search was for a lost deer hunter near Palmer in King Co. I was team leader of one of three teams: the rapid promotion was a result of ESAR being so new that there were no team leaders yet. We gridded up a large hillside. I remember some other deer hunters were in the area. They went immediately to the top of the ridge and waited there for us to scare the deer toward them! We never found anything. Seven years later, the hunter's remains were found at the base of a tree several miles to the east near the top of the ridge. Had he gone any other direction, he would have come out to a road. Modern techniques would have been to use small teams to traverse the ridge and related drainages and run in a string line for confinement on the east. But these were the early years and it would be more than a decade before the advantages of non-thorough methods would begin to get consideration.

In the late 50's, Max was involved, along with others, in building a cabin at Steamboat Prow on Mt. Rainier. The idea was to use heavy galvanized steel plates which, when bolted together, were normally used as a tunnel liner. They would form a shell around which rocks would be piled to shelter it from the wind. These plates came in two sizes, 35 lbs. and 43 lbs. The only way to get these plates up to the Prow was to carry them. For two seasons, we hiked in to Starbow Meadows and Inter Glacier and spent weekends tying one plate at a time on to our pack board, carrying it up the mountain, dropping it and going down to get another. Actually, it was fun. About then I took a beginning climbing class from the Washington Alpine Club and we learned how to handle ropes, ice axes, etc. The second season was the time to pack the plates up Inter Glacier. One of the men had rigged a chain saw motor to power a small-scale rope tow. We would anchor the motor at the top of a snow field and let the 1/8" line go down to two pulleys so that a triangle was made with the base side at the bottom of the slope. One at a time we would hook on a single plate and the person at the motor would start it up. The plate was pulled to the upper position, unhooked, and another was tied on below. It sure was an improvement over back packing the plates. One time I remember looking up at the crew at the top of the tow in time to see a boulder about 1 ft. in diameter come shooting down the slope above them at 60 mph and missing them by only 30 ft. or so! Exciting times!

The top of Inter Glacier is actually about 200 ft. above Steamboat Prow. Someone came up with the idea of running a steel wire from the Winthrop Glacier next to the Prow up to the top of Inter Glacier. We then attached the plates to the wire and let them slide down to the Winthrop. We learned to attach the plates to the main wire with two coils of small wire about 6 inches in diameter. When the plate hit bottom, the coils would spring off with the impact releasing the plate to travel several dozen feet up the Winthrop before stopping. After all the climbing, it was really fun to watch to plates slide down the wire to the cabin site.

The following season, we cleared off the ridge to make a level cabin site. I remember Max using dynamite for this. The plates were bolted together to form the shell. The ends were closed with wood and covered with a concrete mixture to make them weather proof. The real irony is that after spending two years packing the steel plates up Inter Glacier, the Air Force, the next year, acquired a helicopter that could fly to this altitude and could have saved us all that work! It is now 40 years later. I
understand the cabin is still in good shape.

I remember climbing up to Steamboat Prow late one evening. The cabin was full, so we set up a tent made from a parachute near the cabin on the Winthrop Glacier. It blew so hard that night that at 2:00 AM the aluminum tent pole broke. I sewed up the hole made where the pole had gone through the fabric while Gordon Lowe lashed the tent pole back together, reinforced with a 2x4 left over from the cabin construction.

Twice during those years I had the opportunity to climb Mt. Rainier. Both were expedition style climbs. We started from Steamboat Prow, camped at about 12,500 ft. on the Emmons Glacier and then went to the summit the next day. Between the two climbs, I spent a total of 5 nights camped in the summit crater. I have a photograph of Seattle/Tacoma taken from the summit at dusk -- a time exposure taken while holding my camera steady on my ice axe.

I do have fond memories of playing football in the crater snow field- the center part was fairly level. Running out for a pass was interesting. You would sprint for about a dozen steps and then suddenly realize that you were totally out of breath! The really fun part was to be playing football between 8:00 AM and 10:00 AM. Most of the people who climb Rainier in the quick 2 day manner would come over the crater rim at this time. They were usually exhausted! It was great sport to be playing football while they sat there on the rim contemplating their fatigue and whether or not they had enough energy left to cross the crater to the summit.Much of what I am came from Max. My love of the woods and self-confidence outdoors was a gift from him. My experience on the summer camp staff at the ranch was a direct result of what he taught me. Later, my career in ESAR would expand to include Director of Training, Director of Operations and Unit Chairman. These were accomplishments made possible because of the work Max had done in developing ESAR and his encouraging me to become involved. Clearly, Max had a profound effect upon my life in my youth. I still benefit from the things I learned and the opportunities he created. I am reminded of an old Tennessee Ernie Ford ballad called "Sixteen Tons". It ends with the verse "At the bottom of the mine lies one hell of a man". In my life, Max has been "one hell of a Man.