#david foscue

[pcttrailsidereader]

A Tribute to David Foscue

On January 20th of this year, David Foscue (75) passed away after a short illness. He was a former president of the PCTA board and an experienced horseman who rode the entirety of the trail in the 1990s.  My connection with David began more than a decade ago when I asked him to contribute a short story to The Pacific Crest Trailside Reader: Oregon and Washington.  David had often contributed content to the precursor to the current “Communicator” on a variety of (generally historical) topics related to the PCT.  It was one of those pieces he expanded into “Triumph and Tragedy at Stevens Pass”, a fascinating account of a devastating March 1, 1910 avalanche that resulted in the loss of 96 lives and the investment in the 7.8 mile long tunnel that opened in 1929.

As president of the PCTA Board in 1997 - 1998, Dave was instrumental in hiring the first ED of the PCTA and mobilizing volunteers to assist with trail maintenance.  Professionally, Dave was a Superior Court judge in southwestern Washington.

Over the years he contributed a variety of posts to this website including profiles of William O. Douglas and Judge John Waldo, the pinon pine, a history of PCT names, a railroad to nowhere near Santiam Pass, and others.

Thank you, Dave, for the many ways your enriched the PCT and help to preserve its history.

[pcttrailsidereader]

Can You Identify This PCT Pioneer?

Many of us PCT hikers walk the trail without fully appreciating the role that those who came before us played in the creation of the trail, of wilderness areas, and national parks and forests.  David Foscue introduces a giant figure in the preservation of the natural environment.  Who is he? (The answer will be revealed on July 21st.)

Read more of this person's writing in an excerpt from "Of Men and Mountains" that is included in the Oregon/Washington volume of The Reader.  Of the nearly 100 stories included in The Readers, it is among my favorite.

If he was still alive, he would be 114 years old.  He was named one of the “100 Environmental Heroes” of the Twentieth Century by Audubon magazine.  He explored the area of the  Pacific Crest Trail by foot and horseback from his boyhood in Yakima to his senior years in Goose Prairie.  His is still a prominent name along the PCT.  See if you can identify the subject by his own words:

Of a boyhood visit to the Goat Rocks he wrote: “In summer [the slopes] are ablaze with flowers so thickly matted they produce the effect of a rich Chinese or Persian rug.  Once Doug Corpron and I marked a spot about three feet square and counted thirty species of flowers in bloom there.”

“I have seen in my lifetime a wilderness of trails remade into a maze of roads.  The network of roads is so vast and intricate that almost every wilderness area is threatened.  There is hardly a place these days a jeep road will not reach.  Along with the growing emphasis on roads has been a lack of attention to trails.”

“I knew Potato Hill as a boy.  It was then a good ten day’s hike from civilization.  The hike was worth it because of the blueberries as well as the view.  Here are the finest stands of blueberries in the Cascades.  In the early days I would see Indian squaws with horses carrying five-gallon kerosene cans loaded with this delicious fruit and headed east for the Yakima Valley.  Today there are jeep roads clear to Potato Hill.” [The PCT curves around Potato Hill just north of the Mt. Adams Wilderness.]

“A stroll can be very tiring.  A hike, in contrast, is exhilarating.  One who hikes a distance comes back with a different perspective.  His worries and concerns have faded away and he is once more in tune with the world.  His subconscious may have solved knotty problems for him as he hiked.”

“The wilderness advocates do not want those two uses [roads and campgrounds] to preempt every section of land.  We want some of the original America left in primitive condition so that one hundred years from now a lad can walk the North Cascades in the manner of Daniel Boone and see what God has wrought."

[pcttrailsidereader]

The Railroad to Nowhere

We are often reminded that the tread of the PCT really touches four dimensions . . . width, height, depth, and time.  Places we pass on the trail often have interesting histories. One of the stories that would enrich any passage of Santiam Pass, is the story of Thomas Egenton Hogg and his railroad to nowhere.

This old railroad grade can be seen near Santiam Pass (Photo Credit: Curtis Irish)

By David Foscue

On Santiam Pass in Oregon, between Mt. Washington and Three Fingered Jack, The PCT crosses the traces of a railroad dream, the dream of one of the more interesting promoters in the lore of the Pacific Crest Trail.

He called himself “Colonel” Thomas Egenton Hogg, but he was a naval man — for the Confederate navy.  He was arrested for leading an abortive attempt to commandeer an American steamship and received a life sentence. After the Civil War, Hogg was pardoned and released from Alcatraz Prison.  

In 1871 Hogg’s brother, a San Francisco financier, sent him to Oregon to enter the high-risk high-profit young business of railroad development.  Hogg organized a company to build a railroad across Oregon from Yaquina Bay at Newport to Boise where it would connect with a transcontinental rail line.  Hogg’s plans were ridiculed by Portland group that backed a competing route up the Columbia River.  

While others scoffed, Hogg became a serious contender when he interested a British investor who ultimately raised $15 million dollars in bonds for Hogg’s company, the Oregon Pacific Railroad.   In 1881 the company began laying track from Corvallis to Newport.  But the competition was tough —  the Portland group had bought up key properties on the Newport Bay in an attempt to block Hogg from the coast.  Hogg modified his plans and ended his railroad at “Yaquina City”, on the Yaquina Bay three miles short of Newport.

Hogg purchased a steamship to connect his new railhead to San Francisco, then turned his energies to extending his railroad eastward into the Cascades.  He had acquired a Federal franchise but the terms of the franchise required him to complete construction across the Cascade crest before he could claim the federal land grant across Eastern Oregon.  He was forty-three miles from the summit when his money began to run out.  Meanwhile his steamship sank;  Hogg suspected sabotage by the Portland group.

In a desperate attempt to secure his franchise, Hogg stopped construction in the foothills and moved his operation to Santiam Pass.   From a work camp at Big Lake, Hogg’s large crew cleared some eleven miles of right-of-way and laid a mile-and-a-half of track around Hogg Rock and across the Cascade crest. They then assembled a crude box car they had hauled up to the pass, loaded it with freight and pulled it back and forth across the pass with mules.  

Hogg Rock and the old railroad grade just west of the PCT as it crosses Santiam Pass

Hogg then asserted his right under the franchise to the land grant since he successfully built his railroad across the Cascade crest and was running freight across it.  The humorless federal government was not impressed and denied Hogg’s claim to the eastern Oregon lands.  The railroad was bankrupt, but probably not Hogg.  Portland grew to a major city.  Hogg’s “Yaquina City” disappeared.  Today a historical marker at Santiam Pass commemorates Hogg’s efforts.  Remnants of the railroad right-of-way can be seen from the PCT west to beyond Hogg Rock.

Hogg left Oregon, ending up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he died of “apoplexy”, appropriately on a streetcar, on December 8, 1898.   Hogg’s boxcar survived him, remaining at the pass for nearly 50 years.    

[pcttrailsidereader]

Nice Try, Peter

Visible from Hat Creek Rim to Crater Lake, Mt. Shasta is the dominant feature of the PCT of Northern California and Southern Oregon.  Climbing Mt. Shasta involves an off-trail technical climb to reach the top of the picturesque 14,179' peak that has long been a spiritual, mystical icon.  The Pacific Crest Trailside Reader: California includes two stories focused on Mt. Shasta -- "Lemuria: Mysteries of Mount Shasta" by Maurice Doreal and "A Blistered Kind of Togetherness" by Duffy and Angela Ballard.

By David Foscue 

Mount Shasta is the companion of the PCT traveler from Hat Creek rim near Lassen to Devil’s Peak in southern Oregon, nearly 500 trail miles.  It is one of the few of the trail’s great peaks with a name derived from the original Americans; to our ears it is a beautiful name.  How Shasta got its name is another curious story. 

Shasta was not the native’s name for the mountain.  To the natives the mountain was “Melaiksi,” or Wahkalu,” or “Bohem Puyok” (Great Peak).  Shasta was not even the name the people living near the mountain called themselves.  Although there are competing theories, “Shasta” is believed to be derived from the name the Klamath tribe to the north called the people near the mountain.

We do know who first applied the name “Shasta” to a mountain —  Peter Skene Ogden. Ogden is credited with being the first Euro-American to have seen Mt. Shasta. He was a seasoned trapper in the employ of the Hudson Bay Company.  Traveling  south, roughly (very roughly, I would suppose) down today’s I-5 corridor, Ogden noted in his diary on December 25, 1826: 

. . . One [mountain] in particular high above all others pointed and well covered with snow — and from its height must be at a considerable distance from us.  Our Guides inform’d us beyond these Mountains reside the Sastise a nation they are present at war with.                                                               

On February 14, Ogden made the journal entry which first linked the name “Sastise”to a mountain:

I have named this river Sastise River.  There is a mountain equal in height to Mount Hood or Vancouver, I have named Mt. Sastise.  I have given these names from the tribes of Indians.

Back in Peter Ogden’s time it was not unusual for geographic features to be known by several different names, for spelling to change, or for names to change over time.  The name “Sastise” became “Shasta.”  But the mountain we know as Shasta wasn’t the mountain named Shasta or Satise, it became known as Pit Mountain.  What happened?  Where did Peter Skene Ogden go wrong? 

Peter Skene Ogden was not in California when he named the mountain “Sastise” — he was further north looking at another PCT mountain, the highest mountain in southern Oregon (9,495) which we now know as Mt. McLoughlin!  Mt. McLoughlin  was the first Mt. Shasta.  And this is where the curious story begins.                                                                                                                                                 

So, in 1827, Peter Ogden gave the name Sastise (Shasta) to Oregon’s Mt. McLoughlin.  In 1829 the name became attached, temporarily, to the 'right' mountain.  Alexander McLeod, another Hudson Bay trapper was exploring using notes from Ogden’s journals.  He was caught in a blizzard and forced to cache his furs.  Using Ogden’s journals, he reported the cache was near “Chaste Mount” on a tributary of the upper Sacramento River.  McLeod thus became the first person to transfer the name from Ogden’s Mt. Sastise to our Mt. Shasta.  But the more common name for Shasta was Pit Mountain, a name given to the mountain by George Simpson, for the pits dug by Indians to trap game.  Simpson was the Hudson Bay Company Governor in the Pacific Northwest and the ultimate boss of McLeod and Ogden. 

Shasta became Shasta for good after cartographer Henry Eld inadvertently transposed the name “Shaste” from McLoughlin to Shasta on a map in 1844.  What became of Pit Mountain?  Curiously enough, Charles Preuss, cartographer for “The Pathfinder”  John C. Frémont, also inadvertently shifted the name “Pit” as “Pitt” from Shasta to today’s Mt. McLoughlin on a map in the 1840's. 

Pit became Shasta and Sastsie became Pit.  How did Pit become McLoughlin? . . . and who was McLoughlin?            

In 1905 an act of the Oregon Legislature gave the name McLoughlin to Mt. Pit.   The name honors Dr. John McLoughlin, who is often referred to as the Father of Oregon.  Actually he was the Chief Factor of the Hudson Bay Company at Ft. Vancouver from 1824 to 1846.  As Chief Factor, it was McLoughlin who sent Peter Skene Ogden south where he first saw Mt. Shasta (Mt. Pit) and where he named Mt. McLoughlin (Mt. Pitt), Mt. Sastise.             

Chew on this as you hike from Shasta to McLoughlin.

[pcttrailsidereader]

The Piñon Pine - The Indians Own Tree

When I section-hiked the PCT from Tehachapi to Walker Pass several Mays ago, as we neared the northern end of that trip we took a lunch break one day under a grove of piñon pines.  As we reached into our pack for our usual lunch of cheese, rye crackers, and salami, we began to notice that the forest floor was littered with pine nuts.  While some had become food for rodents, squirrels, and other foraging animals since dropping to the ground the prior autumn, most were so very edible.  Soon we were each on our hands and knees collecting cones and harvesting their delectable contents ($29 a pound a the co-op). I ate my fill and packed an empty bag with more nuts which I brought home with me when I left the trail.  This is David Foscue's story of the pine nut. 

By David Foscue

David Foscue

An Evolutionary Feat

 As far as trees along the PCT go, it is not impressive. It may be three or four times your height -- pretty shrubby. A tree with a trunk six inches in diameter may be over a century old.  Its cones take three seasons to mature.  But it is a proud little tree, the piñon.  John Muir wrote: “A more contentedly fruitful and unaspiring conifer could not be conceived.” 

Piñons are coveted for their nutitious seeds.  One pound of seeds may contain 3,000 calories.  The pine nuts were collected by Indians as stores for the winter.  Listen again to Muir: "This is undoubtably the more important food-tree on the Sierra, and furnishes the Mono, Carson, and Walker River Indians with more and better nuts than all the other species together.  It is the Indian's own tree, and many a white many they have killed for cutting it down."

A diligent collector in the prime collecting time can gather up to seventy pounds of the seeds.  Humans, of course, are not the only beneficiaries of the piñon's largess. Pine nuts are a favorite of many animals from the piñon jay to the pack rat — it is reported that over forty pounds of nuts may be found in a pack rat’s cache.  The wide popularity of piñon nuts is a matter of survival, for the seeds of the piñon lack wings and depend on animals for distribution. 

The piñon of the Sierras is single-needled pine. It is a mutation of the piñon found further east on which the needles appear in bunches of two.   The two-needled piñon is subject to infestation by the piñon spindle gall midge which appears to have evolved with the tree.  The insect lays its eggs on the flat leaves, when they hatch the larvae crawl into the crotch between paired needles.  The irritation caused by the tiny larvae simulates the plant to grow tissue forming a gall over the larval wound.  The gall covers the wound but it also protects the enclosed larvae.                

The gall midge evolved to inhabit the single-needled piñon which lack the needle crotches to shelter the larvae.  According to Ronald Lanner, the single-needle piñon developed from the twin-needled variety but “one of the potential needle sites is suppressed by the . . . mutation.  Our gall midge neutralizes the mutation.  The feeding of the larvae suppresses the needle-suppression mechanism, allowing both of the potential needles to develop, though they reach only a fraction of their full length.  The needles are galled and the larvae grow up in the same type of needle-crotch home as those in . . . two needled pines.”  Needles at unaffected locations on the tree remain single. 

Kit Carson, John C. Frémont and the Piñon Nut

The piñon played a supporting role in two dramas that have become part of the lore of the PCT.  One involved “The Pathfinder,” John C. Frémont, extraordinary adventurer and the first Republican presidential candidate.  The other tale involves the ill-fated Donner party. 

Frémont, and his scout, Kit Carson, led the first recorded winter crossing of the Sierras.  What Frémont expected to take a week became an ordeal of five weeks.  As they faced the Sierras their supplies were running low.  Fortunately Indians supplied them with pine nuts!  On January 24, 1844, Frémont wrote: 

A man was discovered running towards the camp as we were about to start this morning, who proved to be an Indian of rather advanced age--a sort of forlorn hope, who seemed to have been worked up into the resolution of visiting the strangers who were passing through the country. He seized the hand of the first man he met as he came up, out of breath, and held on, as if to assure himself of protection. He brought with him, in a little skin bag, a few pounds of the seeds of a pine-tree . . . .   We purchased them all from him.

The Indians tried to discourage Frémont from crossing the Sierras believing it impossible in winter, but Frémont was nothing if not rash.  Frémont mentions trading for pine nuts several more times before reaching the snows: “The Indians brought in during the evening an abundant supply of pine-nuts, for which we traded with them.”  Fueled, in part, by pine nuts, the expedition fought through the winter snows, eventually cresting the Sierras on February 20, 1844, at the pass that now bears Kit Carson’s name.  

The Donner Party - Rescued by Pine Nuts?

George Donner’s group was not as successful in its attempt to cross the Sierras two winters later.  In a snow storm, the party reached what is now known as Donner Lake in early November 1846.   Attempts to reach the pass failed and the party returned to the lake and settled in.  Although many of their animals froze providing unexpected food, their provisions were soon exhausted and the new settlers faced slow starvation. 

On December 16 a group of fifteen left the lake in an attempt to cross the mountains for help.  Using the same term Frémont applied to the old Indian who first provided him piñon nuts, they called themselves the “Forlorn Hope Party.”  Death reduced the group to seven.  As we now know, the dead sustained the living. 

The forlorn and depleted party finally came to an Indian village on January 10.  The Indians provided acorn bread to the party but the group was so weakened their strength could not be restored.  The leader, William Eddy, became sick on the bread.  Donner’s Daughter, Eliza, writes how Eddy regained his strength: 

. . . the chief with much difficulty procured for Mr. Eddy, a gill of pine nuts which the latter found so nutritious that the following morning, on resuming travel, he was able to walk without support. 

Eddy walked fifteen miles that day to a small settlement where he was able to organize a party to rescue the other six surviving members of  Forlorn Hope.  Eventually three rescue parties, including one led by Eddy, were organized to return to Donner Lake.  Forty-six members of the Donner party were rescued.  Forty-two did not make it.  The toll surely would have been greater but for the pine nuts given by the Indians to Eddy.  

Think about the Donner party the next time you sprinkle piñon pine nuts on your salad.