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THE MAZAMA TRAIL A LOOK BACK
by Peter Boag
At the Mazama Council meeting in November 1992, Ray Sheldon, a member since 1960 and outgoing president of the Mazamas, received the official blessing to pursue possibilities for finally getting something of larger relevance at Mt. Hood named in honor of the organization. The 100th anniversary was fast approaching and since our founding on Mt. Hood’s summit back on July 19, 1894, the Mazamas has considered that mountain to be our home away from home— far more than anywhere else, our climbs and other outdoor activities, research, and attention had and have focused on Mt. Hood. And our lodge had and has been nestled on the lower slopes of that grand peak since 1923.
And yet, strangely, nothing at Mt. Hood officially carried our name (the intraorganizationally named Mazama Rock had slipped from the summit years before), though several of the mountain’s features had been named for prominent members. It is not as though we had been either shy or modest about plopping down the Mazama brand elsewhere in the region. The most notable occasion occurred early in our history, in 1896. Many Mazamas and other Crater Lake enthusiasts had gathered at that natural wonder during our Annual Outing, a summertime affair that moved from place to place each year and was a popular fixture of the organization for decades. On August 21, led by our founder William G. Steel, a group of the assembled enthusiastically watched charter member Fay Fuller smash a bottle of lake water on a rock, christening the enormous volcano in which Crater Lake sits as “Mount Mazama.” It has been known as such since. The ceremony was just one of the many attention-grabbing activities Steel used in his quest to have the U.S. government elevate Crater Lake to national park status, something that finally happened in 1902.
Ninety years later, and with the organization’s hopes of bringing the Mazama name permanently to Mt. Hood riding on his shoulders, Ray Sheldon approached the United States Forest Service (USFS) with a bold proposal: Would it consider renaming the wondrous Timberline Trail, which entirely encircles Mt. Hood, in honor of the Mazamas? The Forest Service balked at the request, as one might imagine. Mainly this was due to that trail’s truly historic nature. In the 1930s, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), a federally sponsored program specifically designed to employ young men who suffered destitution during the Great Depression, constructed major portions and features of the new trail, including several stone shelters, three of which still remain at McNeil Point, Cairn Basin, and Cooper Spur. When the CCC youths connected varied existing traces to the path that they had newly carved from the mountain, they completed a 40-mile circular trail around Oregon’s most majestic mountain. Some people at the time, including the CCC, unofficially called the loop “Round the Mountain
Trail,” a designation that many Mazamas will readily recognize today—it is the name we use for one of our cherished summer activities that takes place on the Timberline Trail. When the CCC completed it in the 1930s, “Round the Mountain” extended the legendary Oregon Skyline Trail around Mt. Hood; some 30 years later in 1968, it became part of the nowcelebrated Pacific Crest Trail. By 1992, the Timberline Trail was a treasured Oregon landmark. Changing its name would not only change history, but no doubt rile many of its fans.
All was not lost, however. Federal budget cuts in the 1970s and 1980s had continued on next page severely limited the ability of the Forest Service to maintain many of its trails. One pathway that had fallen through the everwidening fiscal cracks of these years was the Cathedral Ridge Trail perched on the northwestern flank of Mt. Hood. A major blowdown event during the winter of 1985–86 blocked the pathway with innumerable tree trunks, limbs, and other debris. In the ensuing years, more tree falls, erosion, and the inevitable succession of plants, shrubs, and new trees led to the trail’s further deterioration. To Sheldon, the Mt. Hood District recreation manager Kevin Slagle made an ambitious counter-proposal: Should the organization take on all the costs and labor of rebuilding the four-mile Cathedral Ridge Trail, from where it begins at the end of Forest Road 1811 (at an elevation of 3,400 feet) to its junction with the Timberline and McNeil Point Trails (at 5,700 feet), then the Mazamas would get its namesake trail on their beloved Mt. Hood. to mean that they had to be accessible for such things as fire control, scientific discovery, and leisure. In 1920, the very first trail we built was a one-mile path along Tanner Creek in the Columbia River Gorge. From that moment forward, the Mazamas had been building and tending to trails, and doing so with the cooperation and
This would be a major undertaking for the organization, somewhat more complicated than a mere stroke of the pen that would rename an extant trail. The proposed work included attending to the aforementioned obstructions as well as rerouting and regrading parts of the trail. A new trailhead and approach path were also required. Surveys, engineering, and close consultation with the USFS would also be required, not to mention hours and hours of time and labor, especially given that only hand tools could be used on the vast majority of the faded trail that was disappearing within the bounds of the Mt. Hood Wilderness Area. The costs and time commitment seemed enormous.
And yet, the Mazamas were hardly tenderfeet when it came to trail building, something the Forest Service likely took into consideration when putting forth its proposition. Back in 1920, our organization began to undertake that very activity. With the authority that our bylaws granted, the Mazamas interpreted our self-charge to preserve and to disseminate knowledge about the forests and the mountains assistance of District Forest Rangers.
The long relationship that the Mazamas had cultivated with the Forest Service through trail tending and construction provided the seed for what would shortly, though with considerable effort, blossom into the Mazama Trail. In April 1993, Sheldon presented Slagle’s proposal to the Executive Council. The next month, after gathering additional information and some pledges of funding from the Conservation Committee and commitments for work from the Trail Trips Committee, the Council pledged more money and approved the project. Within the year, the Forest Service assumed some of the costs that were originally to be borne by us, namely for the surveys and contracts and some other planning requirements. This freed up a good portion of our pledge that amounted to a total of $14,150 (a sum equivalent to about $30,000 today).
Stan Egbert (Mazama member from 1992 to 1997) took a special interest in the venture and joined Sheldon as a trusted assistant over the course of construction. During the summer of 1993, the actual work on the ground began in earnest. James K. Angell, Mazama president in 1968 (member from 1961 to 2004) and a professional trail designer, was brought in for on-site expertise. The major accomplishment that season was the removal of more than 250 logs, stumps, and limbs from the several years’ worth of accumulated deadfall up to the trail’s junction with the Timberline Trail. One of the greatest concentrations of such annoyances occurred at what volunteers came to call “Whip Saw Alley,” where 30 trees up to 30 inches in diameter had tumbled over the trail in close proximity. Planning geared up over the course of the following winter, since the summer of 1994 would coincide with our 100th anniversary and the Mazamas hoped to have enough of the pathway in condition to meet with USFS approval and lead to its official redesignation as the Mazama Trail. From late spring through September that year, several multi-day work parties labored on the slopes of Mt. Hood with the weather, naturally, not always cooperating. The Forest Service occasionally lent workers and also undertook the building of a new parking lot at the trailhead. An ingenious plan was implemented to offer several trailbuilding seminars to interested parties over the summer so that they might learn the tricks of the trade and at the same time provide support for our efforts. The major accomplishments that season included carving a 500-foot pathway through a talus slope that required moving boulders, repositioning stones, and transporting pails full of smaller rocks to new locations; constructing an elaborate French drain to continued on next page guard against a seeping slope; the removal of layers of duff from portions of the trail so as to limit the swiftness with which plants might take hold and soon grow up in the pathway; the reconstruction of a multitude of switchbacks; and the finalizing of a trail brochure. Although far from “completed,” by the end of the summer, the USFS approved the new Mazama Trail in time for an anniversary-year dedication ceremony in September.
The official event occurred on September 10 with USFS and Mazama officials, including Ray Sheldon and Kevin Slagle, speaking on the occasion. Several attendees, including Stan Egbert, held the pink ribbon which they fittingly cut with a Pulaski, a trusted old trail-tending and firefighting tool whose storied origins lay in the ashes of the enormous western fires of 1910. On the same day, Rich Conser and Winnifred Becker, and on the next day, Nancy King, led the first three official Mazama hikes on its newly christened namesake.
Ray Sheldon wrote the following in our 1994 Annual of those who gave of themselves the previous two years and who had made the 1994 occasion come to pass: “There were 145 volunteers who put in 3,400 hours…to build Mazama Trail. Seventy-seven of those worked at least eight hours to earn a Mazama Trail patch. Twenty-four volunteers put in 25 hours or more and received a benchmark emblem. Three gave over 50 hours and earned two emblems. Three gave over 75 hours for three emblems. Five volunteers gave 100 hours or more on the project.”
Official designation notwithstanding, the Mazama Trail was not truly completed by the end of the 1994 construction season. Work carried on over the next several years and more. In 1995, 75 volunteers toiled 1,435 hours to complete a one-mile project. This was a test assignment in the sense that the Forest Service would judge the resulting product for evidence that our organization might be allowed to continue the Mazama Trail reconstruction without further oversight. The mile stretch was a success, and the Mazamas would mostly work on its own moving forward. Following an especially snowy winter in 1995–1996, a good deal of repair work and removal of newly fallen trees faced the volunteers during the summer of 1996. The weather continued to be especially uncooperative, but several additional volunteer groups joined the cause to bring about the successful conclusion of repairs and to undertake new improvements: the Mazama Explorer Post of the Cascade Pacific Council, Hands on Portland, and the Pacific Crest Community School. In all, 79 volunteers labored on the Mazama Trail over 1,167 hours in 1996.
When the 1997 work season began, Sheldon and Egbert were confident that the anticipated end of the labor to build the Mazama Trail was in sight. But snow lingering longer than normal, a couple of early disappointing reconnoiters by the two, and an initial work party that made good but slower than hoped-for progress, soon made clear that such hopes were perhaps too ambitious. In mid-July, Sheldon even sent word to the Forest Service that the organization’s efforts would sadly have to carry over into 1998. With all this hovering like a cloud, the stalwart visionaries nonetheless moved forward, even employing for the first time, and on different occasions, teams of mules and (not-always-compliant) llamas to pack gear and tools higher up the trail to where major projects yet awaited—perennial cleanup from the winter months, the rerouting of a one-half mile section of trail that had sloughed off the ridge, the repairing of a portion of trail that had devolved into ruts, and the toilsome effort to move large boulders onto a steep section to act as secure steps.
But as Sheldon described in the Annual later that year, “One of the phenomena of trail building that has always been baffling is how painstakingly slow the movement is as you hack away at your individual job; but, at day’s end, how unbelievably far you had come as a group.” In this specific instance, he might have changed “at day’s end” to “at season’s end,” for as it turned out, on Wednesday, September 3, 1997, the last of the Mazama trail builders could not believe their eyes, even looking around to see if surely they had forgotten a misplaced stone here, a lingering stump needing winching over there, or a water diversion left incomplete. They had not! The Mazama Trail was finished and the Mazama name—along with the blood, sweat, and tears of the many volunteers who form our organization and carry its spirit forward— is indelibly etched onto the official maps and records covering the northwestern flank of our cherished Mt. Hood.
