Good morning neighbors,
Just a quick note to remind you of a couple of upcoming events and to give you an interesting tidbit.
Everything is better when you’re with your friends, so the presidential debate will be streaming tomorrow evening at Dem HQ. Please bring a pot luck dish to share, a friend to meet, or a $15 donation to help out. Doors open at 5:30PM.
The 4th of July is coming up and there are multiple parades going on. We have some Dems heading out to the Forks parade, later in the day we’ll be marching in the Port Angeles parade, and in the middle, I’ll be in the boat parade with lots red, white, blue, and a Biden flag to boot. If you’d like to join me in the boat parade, please let me know. If you can help out with either of the other two parades, please let me know or contact Clallam Democrats.
I got an email from Mossback Den with Seattle PBS and he mentioned a 1958 hike led by Forks native and Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court William O. Douglas to stop a highway being built along the coast. Thankfully, the road was never built. You can watch a 1958 documentary of the hike from Cape Alava to La Push at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6oPkZsX7S4
After watching the documentary, you can listen to a recent podcast about it at https://crosscut.com/podcast/mossback/5/5/podcast-protest-hike-stopped-olympic-coast-highway
In 1964, Justice Douglas led another hike from Oil City to La Push. I’ve copied text from participant Marc Sterling below.
As always, I hope you have found this helpful. Please let me know what I can do to improve this email, join me at some of these events, and please have your friends sign up to help build our community.
Thank you very much,
Paul Kolesnikoff
PA 108 Democratic Party PCO
(720) 409-6070
| Douglas beach hike: I was there Mr. Berger, Hello, [Social Media Editor] Alli Rico contacted me about your interest in hearing my memories of the William O. Douglas hike from the Hoh River to LaPush in August 1964. I was 15 at the time when I joined my father, E.M. Sterling, who was the reporter for the Seattle Times … My memory was that the hike was to bring awareness of a proposed highway on this section of the beach, and to secure it as a permanent wilderness area, and to not to allow a road to be built on it. The opening evening was a meeting of all hikers at the gravel bar at the mouth of the Hoh river, referred to as Oil City. You could drive all the way out there then. Douglas had arranged a salmon bake … as the evening’s get together. He spoke and drew attention to this amazing stretch of wilderness beach we have in Washington … It was quite a large event, it might have been a hundred or more hikers and attendees. My father got to interview Justice Douglas about the hike for the Seattle Times that evening. It was quite a pleasant warm evening and there were many tents scattered about the gravel delta of the Hoh river. The next morning, we all packed up to start the hike and a trail of hikers stretched along the beach and headed around the rocky points at the end of the sand beach at the Hoh river. I was a young photographer and so I was shooting photos of the trip for the Times. After an hour or two of hiking difficult and slippery, rocky beaches we came to the Hoh head. At this point there is a large cable and wood ladder to scale the cliff and take the trail over the Hoh head which is impassable. We all went up, one by one and made the tricky step onto the cliff top and trail head. I stayed to photograph the Justice and his young wife as they came up the steep ladder. I imagine we camped at Mosquito creek that night. Because of the amount of hikers, we were all stretched out into small camps on the sand near the trees and above the high tide line. That evening was lovely, and the smell of campfires and the salty air was wonderful. As I recall, Justice Douglas and his wife were often hiking and in conversation with others on the hike. And I also recall them peacefully hiking together along this amazing stretch of wilderness beach, everyone enjoying the wilderness beauty. I believe we hiked two or three days for the entire trip and exited at the trail to the parking area near LaPush … An odd footnote to our trip is that the Seattle Times decided that we would carry a two-way radio and radio back reports from the hike to another reporter, Bob Barr, back in LaPush or somewhere. The radio was a massive Motorola, taking up most of my dad’s pack and so I carried much of the camp gear. It never did work and we spent much time trying to make contact. I don’t have much more details of the rest of the hike except that there tends to be a bond among the hikers in sharing such a beautiful and rugged world. It was very peaceful and friendly, and we were in awe of the beauty of the wilderness beaches and headlands and sea life and birds and shorelines and forests and ever-changing shores. When we returned, my dad filed his story, and I turned in my photos. I believe the story and photos ran in the Sunday edition of the Times just after the hike and my photos covered the entire A page of that edition. My dad got a byline and I got credited for the photos. I have been dying to look up that issue on microfilm at the Seattle Public Library. I imagine the hikers included many wilderness and outdoor advocates and reporters and some interested hikers. It was quite an honor and a gift of a hike. I continued to hike those beaches the rest of my life. Later in life I read some of the books of William O. Douglas. Great reads. Thanks, — Marc Sterling Marc: Wow. Thank you so much for the eyewitness account of the ’64 hike. The Times did cover it extensively. You don’t need to look at microfilm: If you have a Seattle Public Library card, you can usually access the old Seattle Times online via the library’s online resources. Unfortunately, at this writing, the system is down. Also, paid subscribers to the Times can access articles via the paper’s website, such as the front page story above. By the way, the newspaper estimated that some 150 people were on that hike — a large group, but you were part of something very special. |
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