STEHEKIN, WA

Stehekin is a small unincorporated community, settled just south of North Cascades National Park in northern Washington state.  The community today boasts 75 permanent residents along with a one room, log cabin schoolhouse that was in use up until 1988.  It now stands on the NPS' National Register of Historical Places.  Pictured above is the schoolhouse and a student beginning his trek home, from the National Geographic book American Mountain People (published in 1973).  It is noted in the margins that students would ski up to 5 miles into the surrounding mountains to and from school each day.  Yes please.

Take Pride In America

Take Pride In America is a 1987 video that seeks the American people's help in reducing litter, vandalism, etc., in and around the national parks and public lands. Even more interesting is the video's narrator, Lou Gossett Jr., who seems legitimately angry about the "bad people" who were, at the time, killing our bald eagles and filling our mountains with Diet Pepsi bottles. Watch it here.

Finis Mitchell

Finis Mitchell (1901–1995) was an American mountaineer and forester based in Wyoming. During the Depression, he and his wife stocked lakes in the Wind River Range with over 2.5 million trout. He served in the Wyoming House of Representatives from 1955 to 1958. At the age of 67 he retired from his job as a railroad foreman and dedicated himself full-time to exploring and writing about the Wind River Range of mountains.Over the course of his life, Mitchell climbed all but 20 of the 300 peaks in the range. At the age of 73, while on a glacier, he twisted his knee in a snow-covered crevasse. He hacked crude crutches out of pine wood and hobbled 18 miles to find a doctor, and was able to resume climbing until the age of 84, when further injury to the knee from a fall put an end to his solo climbing career.In 1975, he published a guidebook to the range called Wind River Trails, and in 1977, the University of Wyoming gave him an honorary doctorate. Congress named the mountain Mitchell Peak after him — one of the few landforms to ever be named after a living American.Read: Finis Mitchell on the Forest Service website

Hull Cook

During the late 1920s and early ’30s, a small hut stood at the Boulderfield (12,750 feet) on Longs Peak in Colorado's Rocky Mountain National Park. The Boulderfield is 5.9 miles into the Longs Peak hike and the beginning of the hike's most difficult portion. Guests could hike or ride horseback to the Boulderfield Shelter Cabin, spend the night in a bunk with a hot meals, and climb the 14,259-foot peak in the morning, usually by the north face, which was equipped in those days with steel cables for hand rails. For two or three years during the early ’30s, Hull Cook worked at the Boulderfield Shelter Cabin. He and Clerin Zumwalt, aka Zum, became famous for their rescues on the park's only fourteener. Hull is pictured on the left in middle picture. Each morning the guides used to shout, "Indian's a-comin'!" as they spotted the first hikers at the edge of the Boulderfield.Back in April, the Colorado Mountain Journal posted some of Hull's memoirs from his time at the Boulderfield. You can read them here:

As hotels go, ours was tiny and Spartan. We called it “the cabin.” There was no electricity and no running water, unless you ran while carrying it from the spring. There was also almost no privacy. It was a two-story structure, the upper floor accessed by a ladder hinged to the ceiling of the ground-floor room. By Hilton standards it was indeed small, only 14 by 18 feet, so the space had to be efficiently utilized. Upstairs, springs and mattresses were placed directly on the floor, three on each side of the stair hole, and above the stair hole was a double-decker single bed. This arrangement could accommodate 14 people in relative comfort, unless someone had to go to the bathroom during the night, in which case comfort might be called into question. He or she would have to stumble over fellow sleepers, descend the ladder and seek relief outdoors, presumably making the effort to follow the dark rocky trail to the distant privy. No lights. Possession of matches or flashlight was desirable even to find the place, and to obviate the need for a somewhat unsanitary old-fashioned pot, and although canvas curtains could be drawn between the beds, there would have been few people with the callous temerity to use it in such a setting of crowded togetherness. If you rolled over you were apt to find yourself in bed with a stranger, possibly not all that bad if it happened to be someone of the opposite sex.

Mount Mitchell

Mount Mitchell, located near Asheville in the Black Mountains of North Carolina, is the highest peak (6,684 ft) in the Appalachians, and, as you can you can see from the photo above, the highest peak east of the Mississippi. Until 1845, when Texas joined the union, the mountain was the highest in the whole country.Mount Mitchell was named after Elisha Mitchell, a professor at the University of North Carolina, who determined its height in 1835 and fell to his death at nearby Mitchell Falls in 1857, having returned to verify his earlier measurements. Rough. His tomb is on the summit.MP3: Dolly Parton - Y'all Come (Live)