I was born and raised on the south side of Spokane and graduated with the Lewis and Clark class of 1965. Our family camped frequently and had taken several camping trips to Glacier National Park. In the summer of 1964 my cousin Mike and I spent a week or two camping in the Many Glacier area (locally referred to as "Many") where we hiked the trails radiating from Swiftcurrent Lake up several glacial valleys. In those days - even though grizzlies came into the campsite fairly regularly, tent camping was still permitted. Mountain sheep and moose were common.
Lewis Sabo was a (summer) ranger naturalist at Many in those days and we made a point of taking the hikes he was leading - largely to pick up on his knowledge of the natural history and geology of the area, but also because he had an attractive daughter who was in our class at LC. Terminal shyness prevented actually talking to her.
Mr. Sabo knew his stuff, and had stories about grizzly and moose encounters, as well as the names and identities of the local plants, habits of critters and location of various rock formations. I remember especially a hike to Cracker Lake - a lake with a strange copper-blue tint inhabited by long, thin primordial-looking trout. Nearby there was an abandoned mine and its slowly rusting machinery. We carried candles into the mine picking our way between heaps of soldered tin cans from the early 1900s.
One odd detail I recall is that he was left-handed and wrote with a very neat back-handed script.
During the summers of 1965 and 1966 I got entry-level jobs in Glacier Park in fire control and as a lookout up the middle fork of the Flathead River - often driving to Many Glacier on weekends to hike that especially alluring part of the park.
At any rate, between the hikes and campouts of my childhood and adolescence (often with family or Scouts) and the influence of LC biology teachers, Lewis Sabo, and a handful of professors in college - I ended up taking an undergraduate major in Zoology, followed by graduate degrees in Environmental Science and Environmental Engineering. These led, eventually, to work in the environmental field - mainly conducting and directing scientific studies for the Washington State Department of Ecology - until retiring in 2002.
Fatefully, those studies often included testing fish for heavy metal contamination - an echo of that Cracker Lake hike, but I never got back to Cracker and lost touch with Lewis Sabo after the summer of 1966. Still, I continue to be grateful for his influence.
About Bill Yake
"I live with my wife just north of Olympia at the edge of a ravine that carries a small salmon-bearing creek down to Puget Sound. I was born exactly one year after Gerry Lindgren, but it didn’t do much for my running as I barely broke 3 hours in the marathon (some years ago); volunteer for The Nature Conservancy, Capitol Land Trust, the Olympia Poetry Network; have a homepage at http://home.comcast.net/~yake/ and a Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1415775781&ref=name; and play a little folk-blues on the acoustic guitar.
Those degrees in Zoology (’69), Environmental Science (’72), and Environmental Engineering (’77) were from WSU. "