Harvey Manning RIP

[MarkMcJizzy]

I have learned that Harvey Manning has died.

 

He was an important environmentalist, and the author of many books.

Edited November 14, 2006 by Markmckillop

[jon]

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/traveloutdoors/2003422959_webmanning13.html

[roboboy]

 

[tread_tramp]

many years ago I saw an old duffer walking the trail up near Robin Lakes, carrying an old box camera. I suspected it was Harvey Manning; and in fact it was, though he seemed reluctant to admit it.

[wayne]

Truly he was one of the most significant people to grace the Northwest. I wish I could have met the man..

My condolences tp the Manning family and the whole population.

[bobinc]

I never met him, either. I did write him once just to tell him how much I appreciated what he had done.

 

If you can, find old Mtneers Annuals from teh early 60s and read his stuff -- strong prose and keen sense of humor.

 

I think he produced the manuscript for teh Sierra Club book on the proposed N Cascades Nat Park in less than a month; it needed little editing.

 

Also a good interview of him in the early 90s book, Cascade Voices.

[Lowell_Skoog]

Harvey Manning's best and most important book (in my opinion) is The Wild Cascades: Forgotten Parkland, published by the Sierra Club in 1965. The book was conceived by David Brower to promote establishment of a National Park in the North Cascades. Brower convinced Manning in March 1965 to try to produce a manuscript for June publication. Brower later wrote about Manning, "The Cascade River flows through the arteries on his right side and the Stehekin on his left, as any careful reader will readily perceive. So he made his deadline."

 

In The Wild Cascades, Harvey Manning paints a word picture of the North Cascades that complements the photos and poetry contained in the book. He describes a "respectful entry" into the mountains, one that savors the main course of forest and river before sampling the dessert of meadows and peaks. His words support the idea that it was not enough to protect just the rocks and ice and alpine zone. To preserve the full North Cascades experience, the National Park must protect all of it, from low to high. Today, when route beta and ultralight gear make it easier to rush through the mountains, Manning reminds us of the value of going slowly.

 

Although it stretches the boundaries of "fair use," I hope I may be forgiven for including here my favorite chapter from The Wild Cascades, in memory of Harvey Manning.

 

Part I: Low Valley

 

THE FIRST DAY must begin in a valley bottom--a low valley, as low as possible, no more than 2,500 feet above sealevel and preferably less than 1,000, with mountains assumed, not seen, and the only long view straight up to the sky between and beyond tall trees. A few steps from the summer brightness and dust of road's end, multi-layered branches lace together overhead, shadowing and cooling the trail, a two-foot-wide lane of civilization entering a wilderness many miles across and two miles high, and as wild now as when civilization began.

 

The morning trail passes Douglas firs too immense to walk by without pausing to see closely and sense deeply the tallness and the oldness, and hemlocks not much smaller or younger, and an occasional ancient cedar with massive root buttresses, fire-blackened trunk, and broken top--a monument of life-in-death shaped by centuries of slow growth and sudden violence. For every tree standing another dozen lie on the ground, some fresh-splintered, felled by the winds and snows of the past winter, others long since merged into soil and now become ridges of young hemlocks. The trail climbs far above the river on a dry sidehill, through salal and Oregon grape and the reek of sun-baked pine, drops into a dank gorge green with fronds of sword fern, deer fern, and maidenhair fern, and trenches through river-bank thickets of salmonberries in a grove of cottonwood and maple and alder footed in black leaf mould, branches and trunks swollen with moss.

 

A bend in the valley gives a glimpse out of the forest, up through haze to the ending of forest green and the beginning of meadow green streaked and patched with snow, a bright upper world impossibly remote from the low world of rivers, trees, and shadows. For morale's sake it is best to put away thoughts of so improbable a world, an infinity of footsteps away, and bury one's face in a creek and drink cold water in slow, lingering swallows, then lie back in moss, letting the sweat cool, and watch a thousand busy things with wings circle in a sunbeam.

 

The miles grow long in the afternoon, and the steps short and slow, and the rest stops frequent. The trail gains elevation, yet the forest is as full and tall as in the morning; the trail crosses tributaries, yet the river is no less loud. Forest and river are surely without end, and in all the knowable wilderness the maximum goal is a riverside bench with humus for a mattress and a gravel bar for a kitchen, and a log for a seat and a fire for warmth and light in a cold night that fills the valley even before the sky is dark enough for stars.

 

Thus ends the first day, as deep in forest as it began, and not much higher above sealevel. This is the valley day, the mandatory beginning for a respectful entry into the North Cascades.

 

Next morning the trail abruptly switchbacks up a step in the valley, the river composed of equal parts of air and water, a series of pounding cascades and bubbling plunge basins, white foam and green pools. At the top of the step the trail emerges for the first time into full sunshine, crossing a green flood of slide alder and willow and vine maple sweeping down from gray talus thousands of feet above. Once again in forest, the silver fir are still thick at the base but dwindling in height, and with short, steep branches; the shadows are not deep enough to be cool and the hot air is heavy with resin, and it is important now to inspect the huckleberry bushes, watching for ripe blue fruit.

 

Again the trail opens out into the sun, this time onto a causeway of cedar puncheon crossing a meadow-marsh where slow streams meander through fields of knee-high grass, and frogs leap from underfoot and splash in stagnant ponds squirming with polliwogs, and the air is rank with the smell of skunk cabbage and black ooze.

 

Late in the afternoon the trail climbs another valley step, and once more, and this time finally, emerges from forest, emerges from premature dusk into the brilliance of heather and flowers and rock and snow and a suddenly enormous sky. The alpine firs no longer are continuous but climb the valley walls as narrow strips between avalanche paths and cluster in small groups atop knolls. And when the trail comes to the river, it is not the thunderer of the lower valley; in fact, it's not a river at all, but only one fragment of the river which here is gathering itself together from waterfalls streaming down cliffs from hanging valleys and perched snowfields.

 

With campfire beside a torrent boiling out from under the snow, with tarp strung from alpine firs, with flowers and grass and heather extending all around to moraines and snows and ice-plucked buttresses, with marmots whistling in the alpenglow, here in the upper world that as recently as morning seemed impossible of attainment, here ends the second day, the transition day essential to a respectful North Cascades entry.

 

Having paid one's way with many thousand steps and many pints of sweat, having learned to know the forest and river well, the third day is the summit day, duly earned--a day of strolling through meadows and scree to a pass or a peak, looking out over mountains and glaciers--and down to valleys dimmed by the blue haze exhaled by the living forest. High in sunshine, high in the quiet air of the upper wilderness, it is difficult to conceive that at the feet of those trees is the green gloom and the river roar of yesterday and the day before, that the high world of wide horizons and minute flowers and the low world of deep shadows and giant trees and loud water are, indeed, parts of the same world, the unified world of wilderness mountains.

 

After such a properly respectful North Cascades entry, it is at length necessary to exit, and this too in a properly respectful manner. Again there is a transition day, taking leave of the last snowfield, the last heather, the last near view of rock and ice, watching the river grow on the way down, and watching the trees grow, and the shadows.

 

The final day is, as was the first, a forest day, and the Douglas fir and hemlock and cedar seem marvelously gigantic after the days spent above where plants are miniaturized for survival, where only the peaks and glaciers and sky are huge. There comes a final glimpse of snow-streaked green meadows far above in haze, once more receding into improbability. And then the trail ends, and while the traveler washes his feet in the loud river, all the louder after the quiet of high ridges, he may speculate whether some of the cold water rushing through his toes may not, mere hours ago, have melted from the snowfield at his meadow camp.

 

From...

The Wild Cascades: Forgotten Parkland

by Harvey Manning

Edited by David Brower

Sierra Club, 1965

[tivoli_mike]

Too bad he and Ira didn't reconcile before their deaths...

[Alpine_Tom]

Truly a giant in the northwest. Maybe even more than Fred Beckey, he deserves to have a mountain named after him -- Fred inspired hundreds of climbers, but Harvey inspired thousands of hikers, and worked like a gadfly to keep trails open and maintained.

 

My favorite book of his is "The North Cascades National Park" which so far as I know is still out of print. I found it at the King County Library. As usual, photos by Bob and Ira Spring, and text by Harvey Manning. Inspiring stories about taking his family on climbs.

[olyclimber]

Another PI article:

 

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/292252_manning14.html

[Jim]

I had the pleasure of going over to Harvey's house to discuss the potential of buying land parcels to extend Cougar Mt. Park about 10(?) years ago. He rambled on with some great stories of putting in the early trails of the park (encounters with the shy bear) and what the county really should do. We talked about what trails should be closed, the best parcels adjacent to the park, and what the park means to the community. Then he went on to tell stories of when the county first established the park and how mountain bikers wanted their share of the park. There was a big public meeting, the bikers came out in force, as did the politicians and news media. Always a man to take hold of theater when it presented itself, Harvey strode into the meeting muttering something about these bikers who wanted to trash the park while riding around in their sister's underware. What a hoot. Grizzly and determined. He was one of a kind and a force in the local environmental movement.

[MisterMo]

I always had it figured in my mind that the passage you quote was inspired by the Downey Creek approach to Dome.

 

I am also very fond of the essay "Rain Sleep" in the same book.

 

Harvey wrote an awful lot of good stuff.

[Lowell_Skoog]

Harvey Manning was a keen historian who appreciated "credit where credit is due." Reading the newspaper obits, it seems that he may be given more credit for preserving wilderness in Washington than he would claim for himself. Regarding the North Cascades, Manning always gave most of the credit to Patrick Goldsworthy, president of the North Cascades Conservation Council (NCCC) during the National Park campaign. Manning once joked that he was Goebbels in that war, while Goldsworthy was Hitler. Pat Goldsworthy is still around and still active in the NCCC.

[Lowell_Skoog]

I am also very fond of the essay "Rain Sleep" in the same book.

 

Yeah. That's a great piece. I was tempted to include it as well, but decided that would be too much for this setting.

 

I often think of Big Beaver Creek or Thunder Creek when reading the first chapter. Downey Creek definitely fits. I wish I could write like that.

[MotorMouth]

Truly a giant in the northwest. Maybe even more than Fred Beckey, he deserves to have a mountain named after him -- Fred inspired hundreds of climbers, but Harvey inspired thousands of hikers, and worked like a gadfly to keep trails open and maintained.

 

My favorite book of his is "The North Cascades National Park" which so far as I know is still out of print. I found it at the King County Library. As usual, photos by Bob and Ira Spring, and text by Harvey Manning. Inspiring stories about taking his family on climbs.

 

I think that book was my favourite also, since my father was able to capture the true essence of what it was like hike through sub alpine landscape with as he put it glistening fly crap everywhere. I remember he always believed in water fights when we came to a creek or river. But we were never allowed to get him wet because he would yell, don't get water on my camera or glasses or the list would go on and on. But he always seemed to get his share of water when he would have to help us 4 children and my mother across a river. That man had legs of solid muscle. You could say he was Strong Like Bull.

 

He had a wicked sense of humour. He told a story once about Life Magazine wanted to do a story on the Mountaineers. So they went up on Mt Rainier with the photographer and writer and when the writer asked what did they eat on their climbs, everyone pulled out a watermelon and started eating it. For some reason it was never published it got kicked off the front cover because of some national tragedy.

 

I will miss daddy, I always thought he was special and important, I never realized that other people would think the same.

 

Thanks for your remarks and kind thoughts

 

Claudia Mannning

aka motormouth

Clodhopper

or #3daughter.

 

[Dechristo]

Thanks for your post. It makes this internet wake all the more special by your presence.

 

I wish you peace.

[chirp]

Fixed image from ms. Manning

 

[mattp]

He had a wicked sense of humour....

 

Here's a piece that appeared in the 1950 Mountaineer, unsigned, when Harvey Manning was editor. At this time, the bulletin was full of reports from Beckey and Schoening and others of their climbs using aid and the occasional lasso to climb features like The Flagpole, and Hammer Head, etc. I'm not sure this is "wicked" in the sense that it is not directly critical of anybody but it is certainly mocking humor a la Mark Twain:

 

[Dechristo]

Awesome! Thanks, MattP, for the great sample from a forefather in the American Humor in Climbing Literature tradition.

 

It's, also, nice to witness the lack of deterioration and continued excellence in the lexicon of climbers from that time to now.

[KaskadskyjKozak]

It's, also, nice to witness the lack of deterioration and continued excellence in the lexicon of climbers from that time to now.