One good story can lead to another, which is why Bob Scott was recalling the night he and his bride probably should have plummeted off a cliff.
The Columbian recently told the story of Virginia Baccus and her husband, John, who spent 18 months staffing a lookout tower on Silver Star Mountain during World War II.
After Bob read the story, the longtime Vancouver resident passed along a similar account. He was called away from Eastern Washington State College in 1942 to help turn Forest Service lookouts into aircraft warning stations.
Bob was dating Olive, another student at Eastern Washington. It occurred to him that a lookout in the North Cascades would be a great place for a honeymoon.
Two weeks after they were married, the Scotts headed up 8,685-foot Remmel Mountain.
Olive had staffed a Forest Service tower with her brother, and knew what the living conditions were like.
But she wasn’t quite ready for that 12-mile hike. Daylight was draining away when Bob saw how Olive was struggling up the trail. She was grabbing her pant leg to lift her foot off the ground, swinging her leg forward, then planting her foot for another step.
They still had three miles of trail, 26 switchbacks and 2,000 feet of elevation gain to go, so Bob decided to try a more direct route along a ridge.
It continued to get darker, and “I couldn’t even see my feet,” said Bob, who had a long career as a Vancouver science teacher.
“Finally, we reached a place where there was no sense of anything solid in front of us,” he said.
He tossed a rock over the edge; when he didn’t hear anything, Bob figured it had landed on some moss or grass. Then a clatter indicated that the rock finally had hit the bottom of a sheer cliff, several hundred feet below the trail.
“We got to the lookout station about 1 o’clock in the morning,” said Bob, who credited guidance from a higher power with their safe arrival.
High cuisine
Olive, a former Columbian proofreader who died in 2007, quickly learned about mountaintop cooking.
When a packer brought up a string of horses with their supplies the next day, Olive fixed macaroni and cheese for lunch.
At nearly 8,700 feet above sea level, unsalted water boils before it’s hot enough to cook macaroni, Bob said. Even though it was extra-chewy, “We were hungry enough to enjoy it,” he said.
Off Beat lets members of The Columbian news team step back from our newspaper beats to write the story behind the story, fill in the story or just tell a story.
