Ever Wild: A Lifetime on Mount Adams

Darryl Lloyd
17
were scattered around the high country; artifacts were found at many
sites up to 6,000 feet and higher. Cheryl Mack and Rick McClure of Trout
Lake—married and now retired career archaeologists for Gifford Pinchot
National Forest—analyzed many of those finds while remaining cautious
about sharing specific site locations.
High in the Goat Rocks, twenty miles north of Mount Adams, archaeologists
investigated a rare obsidian quarry for stone tool manufacturing,
first discovered by William O. Douglas in 1915. Carbon dating of charcoal
fragments indicates the site was in use about 6,260 years ago. Tools fashioned
there were then transported to seasonal encampments throughout
the upper Cowlitz River drainage. In the late 1980s, a Forest Service field
crew discovered a chalcedony (type of quartz) quarry near Council Lake
a few miles northwest of Mount Adams. The quarry, documented and
recorded by McClure, was apparently an additional source of hard stone
used for tool-making by early Indians.
Native hunters made projectile points and stone knives near the base
of Mount Adams to target and kill prey much higher on the mountain’s
slopes. In 1977 one of our Wilderness Institute participants found an artifact
on the north shoulder of Mount Adams at around 7,300 feet. After
examining my photograph, both Mack and McClure agreed it was likely
the tip of a thrusting spear or hafted knife, used to dispatch a wounded
mountain goat. Its function and age were difficult to determine from a
photo, McClure said, adding they would need to examine the artifact for
use-wear patterns and other characteristics. Mack believed the point was
made from a bifacial blank of high-quality chert or another microcrystalline
silicate. Her team had found a very similar thrusting spear point—most
likely used to hunt bear—in a cave elsewhere within the Gifford Pinchot
National Forest. One beautiful point photographed in their collection was
dated at 9,700 years BP.
In 2008 McClure found a broken projectile point at the 10,900-foot level
on Suksdorf Ridge of Mount Adams. The artifact is the highest archaeological
discovery made in Washington up to 2018. One wonders if the hunter
was chasing a mountain goat. This amazing find convinces me that the first
person to climb Mount Adams was probably a Native American hunter
of long ago. The urge seems eternal for certain hardy, inquisitive people
of any race to scramble higher and higher on prominent peaks such as
Adams, and then go for the summit. Perhaps two bull elk that I saw near
the top of Mount Adams in the mid-1970s had that same instinct.
Native Americans traveled in large numbers to the mountain until the
end of the nineteenth century, when sheep came to dominate all flanks
of Mount Adams. The indigenous people would gather basketry materials
(cedar bark, etc.), dig roots, pick huckleberries, fish, and hunt game. Large
mammals, including deer, bear, elk, and mountain goat, were important
to the early peoples’ survival. Mountain goats were especially prized for
their meat, wool, horns, and hooves.
A billy mountain goat in
alpine habitat on the north
side would have been a
prime target for early Native
hunters.
Natives have long used beargrass
leaves to weave baskets,
while its fibers were used for
clothing. Rhizomes were
roasted and eaten.