Ever Wild: A Lifetime on Mount Adams

Darryl Lloyd
5
decades of off-trail ramblings by the Lloyd brothers on Mount Adams
and in many other wild areas of the world.
Our deep involvement with the mountain has been almost continuous,
from our 1940s childhood to the 1970s, when we founded and for ten years
directed the Mount Adams Wilderness Institute (MAWI), to the present.
We’ve observed profound physical changes on Mount Adams and played
different roles in imparting a greater understanding and appreciation of it.
We’ve advocated its protection for a half-century. It’s been an exhilarating
odyssey of love for a place. And as elders, our association with the great
volcano continues to enrich, always a learning experience. I can’t imagine
a life without Mount Adams, and on clear days, I still view it from my front
window in Hood River, Oregon.
Darvel and I look back and marvel at how the best parts of Mount
Adams have remained essentially wild and pristine through the decades
of our ramblings. In the year that we were born, 1942, the chief of the U.S.
Forest Service designated Mount Adams a “Wild Area” of 42,411 acres. Its
boundary, which would change three times in the following decades,
reached as low as 4,000 feet and included the wondrous eastern flanks.
Forest Service management centered on providing “a wilderness experience
to all who wish to enjoy it.”
Eight famous words from Henry David Thoreau’s 1854 Walden—“In
wildness is the preservation of the world”—led to Congress passing the
At 12,276 feet, Mount Adams,
or Pahto, rises as a noble
sentinel to the south of Goat
Rocks Wilderness.