A Range of Glaciers: The Exploration and Survey of the Northern Cascade Range

Rating:
Summary: 54 - 40 or fight
Review: The primary accomplishment of this book is its 500+ page discussion of the Washington Cascades without mention of The Mountaineers club! The first 140 pages deal with indians, immigrant trails and the Hudson's Bay Company. Nothing new here, a lot of references to Winthrop's Canoe and Saddle and a discription of Ross' trip over Cascade Pass. The next seventy pages are about the first boundry survey fron 1857 - 1862. This is the guts of the book and it is really good - vintage Beckey. It's researched from original sources and well footnoted. The next sixty or seventy pages are basically about the railroads. These stories have been told before in more detai but the recounting is interesting with an attention to the geography that is usually overlooked. (Yakima Pass?) The third part of the book is a superficial presentation of mining in the Northwest, early mountaineering on the volcanoes and the beginnings of the forest service. None of these are done particularly well and none of them have enough detail to complement the first part of the book. This section does have a thirty page section on the USGS topographers and the second boundry survey in 1901 - 1908. It was during this era that many of the first ascents in the cascades were done but the discussion is brief and clearly omits the majority of what Beckey wrote about these efforts in the CAG series. Overall I have to say that I was disappointed. I understand that the Oregon Historical Society lacked the funds to publish and held it up for a long time but I started hearing about this book in the early '90s and saw a mock-up of it's cover at their booth at bookfest in about 1995. I got very excited reading the first part of the book but ended up feeling like Fred got tired about halfway through, or that he lost interest and just glossed over everything after the boundry survey. Read Woodhouse about mining. Read Molenar and Haines or Rusk on mountaineering. Read Beckey's own Challenge of the North Cascades and the introductions and footnotes in the Cascade Alpine Guide series. Read Bates Three Fingers to get a flavor of the early forest service era - and there are probably better sources for people interested in that topic (Even Beckey's CAG intros and notes have more information that this book does.) Read Tabor & Crowder Routes and Rocks about the geology. Read Roe and Praether about the railroads (again, also covered in CAG). Read Miles Kolma Kulshan about Mt. Baker. Finally, read Carlos Schwantes. His railroad discussion and his regional history are a lot better than Beckey's. But read Beckey about the boundry survey. There's nothing else like it.