Pacific Northwest Trail Association

A Memorialto Max Eckenburg

Max Eckenburg-trail blazer, CCC worker, scout leader, search-and-rescue volunteer, and staunch PNTA supporter passed away after a long battle with cancer on April 6, 2001 on Camano Island WA. He was born on May 17, 1916 in Everett WA. He was about 6 weeks short of being 85 when he died.

This page is a tribute to Max.

In honor of all that Max has done for the PNTA over the years, the Board of Directors voted to set up a memorial fund to purchase a minimum of one quarter mile of trail in Max's memory. The section will be on Max's Shortcut on the west side of Blanchard Mountain in Skagit County WA. Donations may be sent to the PNTA, 24854 Charles Jones Memorial Circle #4, Sedro Woolley, WA 98284.

Max saved the PNT project in the autumn of 1982. He used to drive from his Scout camp at Mount Rainier three times a week to locate the PNT route on Blanchard Mountain. He began when the PNTA did not even have a proper road map of the area. He transformed the project from a paper trail into one that went directly to location and construction of new segments.

It took 10 years to complete the Blanchard Mountain PNT trail system. Max was the main person who was out there every week, come rain or shine-"Don't wait for the sun to shine in this country or you'll never go out in the woods" he said. When the area below the Samish Overlook was scheduled for logging, Max was instrumental in persuading the WA Department of Natural Resources not to log a small area in order to preserve a patch of white fawn lilies. Max and wife Carol Hull discovered a new variety of trillium growing in the middle of the trail in the woods directly east of the Samish Overlook. They saved the plant from destruction and successfully propagated it. Max was very proud of this.

PNTA founder and guidebook author Ron Strickland said: "Max was a master craftsman of trail design from his decades in the CCC's, Forest Service, and Scouting. He'd mentored hundreds of boys and been a mainstay of Mountain Rescue. He was also stubborn, moralistic, inflexible, and very lovable. We all treasured his sayings as 'Maxims'."

Max loved Mount Baker. He started working in the Mt. Baker area as a CCC member of Camp Glacier in 1935 and became the Assistant Ranger handling fire control and recreation. Max said in 1997: "I don't know if anybody alive knows the terrain of the old Glacier District better than I. It took much of my lifetime to learn it-I'm proud to have had something to do with every trail in the district, and many that did not get built, like the east traverse of Mt. Baker, which our PNT needs so badly."

Max was a strong proponent of a Round-the-Mountain (Mt. Baker) trail. Max said:

"I have covered every foot around Mt. Baker except one little pocket of the Rainbow basin. I was in the CCC's in 1935, stationed at CCC Camp Glacier just down the road (Mt. Baker Highway, now the site of a Bible camp) from the Glacier Ranger Station, when we reconned a trail location around the mountain. What a wonderful experience then, what a heartache it's not there today. Of course, if it were, it would be one of the outstanding alpine areas of the PNT."

"I remember the four day trip from Camp Kyser down into the Rainbow was postponed because we had to go to a fire down on the Cowlitz near Packwood, WA. We never did get to make the Camp Keyser-Rainbow basin traverse."

"Sometime later a professional forester put a round-the-mountain trail together based mostly on our CCC recons and the trail location was entered on the Mt. Baker Recreation Area Trail plan."

Here are two poems, one written by Max and one written by a friend:

Winds & Rain
by
Max Eckenburg

Soft winds and rain were back again,
Passing their time away.
Bringing their windfull moist refrain,
In their usual melodious way.

Notes and strains of an unsung song,
Lives in their passing sighs.
One falls in tune and hums along,
In spite of stormy skies.

Yet to some, all the world is down,
and life is miserable cooled.
Discouragement sometimes that brings a frown.
But if so, aren't we fooled?

For its here in song; in wet, and in cold,
We know, but can't understand.
That winds and rain to life unfold,
The powers of God's command.

Commands that seeds grow and takes care
Of life that springs from the ground.
Our flowers, our trees; it's everything there.
Their method is thorough and naturally sound.

And I think that's why we should manage to find,
A way to enjoy their stay.
Though wet, though cold, we should bear in mind
The good that they do in this natural way.

Max William Eckenburg
Written by Lela Turner
in honor of Max's 80th birthday

The hero of this poem's name is Max.
In eighty years he's left some tracks.
He was born the youngest child of three.
His mother chose knee pants of white pongee.
In logging camps in the west of this State
Lived young Max who found them great.
He dug out a log canoe to explore the bays
and the other waters where he spent his days.
Max climbed Olympic peaks one by one.
Before high school graduation he had it all done.

His appendix burst while on a peak.
He hiked two days, relief to seek.
By the time he entered the hospital room,
everyone feared he'd met his doom.

Max and his dad cut down lots of trees,
Just making firewood for Tillamook cheese.
His junior college was in Pasadena CA.
In Bellingham Normal spent many a day.
When he saw a teacher letting a student cheat,
He shook Bellingham dust right off his feet.

He was in Boeing's Engineering Department in
World War II
After twenty years he said he was through.
The Forest Service next hired Max.
In Mt. Baker's snow he made his tracks.
His skiing form was pretty rare.
He resembled closely a skiing bear.
Forest Service retirement didn't slow him a bit.
In the Boy Scout Council he really fit.
As a Camp Shepherd ranger he helped make a plan
To have a boy climb Mt. Rainier and come down
a man.
Teens came the world over to make this climb.
They still honor Max for their wonderful time.

Carol joined a trail building group with Max as its head.
'Twas love at first sight'; in two years they wed.
On Tamarack Hill Max has a scheme
To build a log house and realize a dream.
The Common Sense Resource League enjoys Max.
He doesn't spout nonsense; he just talks facts.
May the Lord bless him with a long, happy life
Of many more years with his talented wife.

The following is written by Ron Strickland for his in-progress memoir book. This deals with an experience Max had in the Upper Chilliwack area northeast of Mount Baker in the North Cascades when Max was boss of the Forest Service trail crew. Copyright Ron Strickland 2001.

"Never can a packer, Ron, at the end of the season." That was Max talking to me across the miles.

Three weeks before the end of the 1941 trail season Max had fired his horse packer for cruelty to his overworked and underfed animals. But that meant that Max, no horseman himself, had to do all the boxing, loading, and wrangling a month and a half later when it came time to pack out the trail crew's equipment.

It was already November when he began. Hannegan Pass was not yet blocked by snow though there was already more than a foot of wet stuff on the ground. Max was very nervous about getting trapped by winter down in the Chilliwack.

Indian Creek Camp was 4 1/4 miles downstream from U.S. Cabin on the opposite side of the river. As Max explained to me:
"I was down there alone with this seven-horse pack string, cleaning up stuff and getting ready to come out. And I was thinking that, hey, if something happens here, I might have to take the horses down the river and take 'em out on a flatboat on Chilliwack Lake in Canada and, boy, would that be a heck of a job!"

"When you get a foot and a half of early snow laying all over the place and then you get a warm Chinook rain, that stuff's gonna come out of there like flushing a toilet. And, boy, they flushed it on me that night! (Laughter.) It was a real bugger!"

"Well, it rained and it rained and that snow began to melt all through that watershed and that river came up. So I finally made up my mind that, hey, if I was going to go, I'd better go."

"By the time I got the horses packed, the river was roaring from one side of the valley to the other, all down through those low woods. Of course, you can usually see sand all over the valley floor and know that this flooding happens from time to time. In fact, we even built our shelters down there on stilts so the water could run underneath."

"Anyway I started out of there on the horses about an hour after dark. I couldn't wait until the next day because by then that water would be too deep in the valley and that rain might turn to snow at the pass and then I couldn't get through up there at all. So I had to leave. There was no choice. It was getting worse by the hour."

"Well, here we were trying to cross the Chilliwack above Indian Creek and the horses were just skipping along and their feet were barely touching here and there and the lead horse King (that I was riding) stopped. Right out there in the bloody water! And he was not quite being lifted and pushed downstream."

"I turned on my headlamp and here was a whole dang tree going by!"
"So King kept stopping and then he'd go ahead. It was pitch black. Just raining and blowing horizontal and all that debris in the river. Oh God, one tree in the middle of that seven horse string and you can see where I'd be. Oh, we were living by the skin of our teeth!"
"When we finally got across we found that the trail on the north side had washed out. It was gone!"

"But there was an old trail above that one because the lower one had washed out before in years gone by. King remembered where that old trail was! So up through the huckleberries we went."

"That son of a gun! I just gave him free rein because King knew more about the terrain than I did. He'd been down in there eighteen years.!"
"Then the minutes went by and the half hours went by. And the dang hours went by. The whole thing from the time I left Indian Creek till I got up to US Cabin was probably three hours. But it seemed like a week because there was so much happening."

"So finally I just hung onto that saddle and dozed off. Not asleep but hunched over and staying just as warm as I could. (Laughter.) I was wondering how long this was going to go on."

"Finally, why, King stopped and everything was quiet. I gave him a little nudge to keep going but he wouldn't budge."

"Then I began to come alive a little bit. I turned on my headlamp and I was looking right at the eaves of US Cabin. And just inside that was the door to where the oats were. An that's where King was planning to stay." (Laughter.)

"So I just got off and hugged him. I just felt like getting up there and kissing him right on the lips, ya know, because without him in that mess...Oh, I tell ya!"

"But after I fed the horses and got something to eat myself, it was beginning to get cold again. We had to continue out of there quickly to try to get over Hannegan Pass."

"Four or five hours later we got through Hell's Gulch just before daylight and the snow was really coming down. God, I got up there in the big open meadows of Hannegan Basin where we had tripods holding our phone lines up in great big sweeps. The snow was already a foot and a half deep when we stopped for a break at Hannegan Shelter."

"It was daylight and snowing like a bugger when we started up to the pass. Just before I started up the final switchbacks, a mare went down on her back, all tangled up in No. 9 telephone wire. She had a couple of bad cuts and, oh, what a mess."

"So I said, boy, I'm gonna leave that doggone load. I'm not going to try to repack that horse if I can get the load off her and get the wire off. So I got in there with the pliers which I always carried and cut the wire away and got everything straightened out. And I left that load."
"Well, it was getting to the point where just a few minutes were going to make the difference. Up toward the top, the horses were lunging. I mean when the snow gets deep enough a horse is going to lunge. He's got to."

"Now I had no feeling in my hands."

"But I got just over the top of the pass and here came the guys from the ranger station. They were coming in because they knew I was in trouble."

"And so we went back with one horse and got that load and brought it on up. And we got everything out to the road by dark that second night."

"But that whole thing started just because I canned a packer. And I canned him because of cruelty. But it backfired on me."

"When I look back at the night, there was a lot of luck but the only reason I came through at all was because I had a horse down there who after eighteen years knew where all the old trails were. He'd been through some of those high waters before. He was just fantastic."

"Crossing the river, finding a trail, and bucking that snow, all in the dark, that night was a bugger! (Laughter.) I tell you, I made up my mind I'd never can a packer just before the end of the season again. No matter what!"

When Joan Melcher visited Max in the summer of 2000 and she and Max talked about the above episode, tears came to Max's eyes when he spoke of King.