Ever Wild: A Lifetime on Mount Adams

22 Ever Wild
In August 1869, two young Yakama Tribe members named Abe Lincoln
and Charley Olney wanted to pay a visit to their people camping in the
great huckleberry fields on Mount Adams’ northwest side. An accident
while crossing a glacier resulted in an unusual survival story of bravery
and heroism, documented by C. E. Rusk in the 1946 American Alpine
Journal
Starting their journey from the Yakima Valley and riding racehorses,
Lincoln and Olney made rapid progress. They forded the Klickitat River
and by mid-afternoon were high on the mountain’s northeast flank in
Devils Gardens. Instead of following a well-traveled Indian route across
that side of the mountain (today called the Highline Trail), Lincoln
decided to take a shortcut across the lower part of the Lyman Glacier,
which was vastly larger and thicker in 1869 than it is today. His friend
Olney reluctantly followed. As Lincoln foolishly rode across a crevasse
on a “snow bridge,” the icy bridge collapsed and both horse and rider
plunged between thirty and fifty feet into the abyss. Although his horse
died immediately, Lincoln was only bruised but extremely frightened,
wedged in as he was on top of his dead horse. Olney attempted to haul
Lincoln out with a spare rope, but the rope hung up on the lip of the
crevasse. He then had no choice but to head down the mountain for
help—the closest being the huckleberry encampment at least twelve
miles away and about 3,500 feet lower in elevation.
Olney rode all night, finally reaching his relatives’ camp about nine the
following morning. A party of thirteen hardy men with five horses quickly
set out for the rescue. Over difficult glacial till and lava terrain, they reached
the scene of the accident about noon. Lincoln was alive but extremely
weak after twenty-one hours of waiting deep inside the frigid crevasse. His
rescuers lowered two ropes with rawhide lariat loops. Lincoln managed
to place the loops around his upper body, while the men on top lined
the lip of the crevasse with blankets. They hauled him up almost within
their reach, grabbed him by the hair and dragged him over the crevasse lip
onto the glacier surface. After two hours of rest and food, Lincoln finally
regained his body heat, and the party slowly rode and walked back to the
huckleberry camp.
Abe Lincoln was a very lucky and a very tough young man. The two
men were not mountaineers and they never intended to be. And they
never forgot the lessons of that day. Fifty-two years later, Lincoln was an
elder living in the Yakima Valley when he heard about C. E. Rusk’s plan to
lead the new Cascadians club outing to “ramble over the big glaciers” and
climb Mount Adams. Rusk retold Abe Lincoln’s response in his article in
the American Alpine Journal: “The Cascadians are fools,” he said. “I know
they are fools—I’ve been there, I know!”