Local man was 'tester' for Pacific Crest Trail

Sisters resident Gordon Petrie looks at a modern map of the Pacific Crest Trail that he first traveled 67 years ago. photo by Jim Fisher Several long-distance hikers have stopped at Sisters for supplies this summer on their way from Mexico to Canada on the 2,600-mile Pacific Crest National Scenic Trail. For one Sisters resident, stories of these visits have made him look back some 67 years to when, as a young boy, he participated in a four-year-long event promoting the building of the trail.

Gordon Petrie was a 15-year-old member of the YMCA in northeast Portland when he was given the opportunity to hike portions of the proposed trail route.

Clinton C. Clarke of Pasadena, California is credited by most with being the father of the Pacific Crest Trail. Clarke was a Harvard graduate in literature, an amateur photographer, Boy Scout advisor, and co-founder of the Pasadena Playhouse. In 1932, Clarke proposed to the National Park Service and the USDA Forest Service that they construct such a trail with the help of volunteers.

Clarke planned his border-to-border trail on maps and formed the Pacific Crest Trail System Conference. He convinced outdoor clubs in the three Pacific coast states to join him in completing his vision. A young YMCA staff member, Warren Rogers, read about Clarke's dream, visited him in Pasadena and became the conference's secretary.

In 1935, Rogers talked with other YMCA camp directors and came up with the idea of relay teams of YMCA hikers to explore routes for a future trail. Within a week, the first relay team left the Mexican border and headed north.

Over the next four summers, some 40 teams of three to five boys ranging in age from 14 to 18 made three-to-four-day trips. They averaged 50 miles a trip to determine how a trail could be connected. They carried their own food, clothing and equipment in 70-pound packs.

Rogers guided the relay teams on all but two of the hikes. One of these hikes that he missed was the hike made by 15-year-old Gordon Petrie and other Portland boys, guided by a YMCA staff person.

Petrie remembers volunteers driving the hikers up the South Santiam Highway from Albany. With Gordon were Bob Morrison, Bud Moran, Norman Rupp, and the 25-year-old staff person, Lloyd Craft, Jr.

Much of that trip was on gravel road. They drove on a plank road over loose sand to Big Lake at the base of Mount Washington. They camped there one night before starting out.

"We were first signed up to hike the section from Ollalie Lake to Mount Hood," Petrie recalled. "When two of the group for the section to the south of us backed out, we were asked if we wanted to do two legs, starting at Big Lake to Ollalie Lake and then on to Trillium Lake near Mount Hood. We agreed to do that part, too."

While staying at Big Lake, Petrie and the others started a walk around the lake and then decided to swim back the half-mile to camp. This upset Craft, the staff person who ran along the lakeshore shouting at them and threatening to send them home (The car had already left for home).

The next day, July 15, 1937, the group started north on the relay team for trail segments 31 and 32. There was still snow in the high country producing lots of mosquitoes at times. In Jefferson Park at the base of Mount Jefferson, they had trouble getting across Whitewater Creek. Later, they went swimming in Russell Lake after breaking the ice.

On July 21, they reached Ollalie Lake and picked up a cache of food. Here, another YMCA youth, Bob Nelson, joined the hikers. Gordon and Morrison enjoyed nighttime "swimming on the moonbeams" under the brilliant moonlight.

One day the hikers met an old man with a long hiking stick and wearing coveralls and hiking in bare feet. They learned he was a Salem resident who was the town's perennial Santa Claus. They visited with the man who smoked a pipe, scratching the matches on the bottoms of his feet.

The hikers reached the end of their second segment at Swim, an early-day resort near Mt. Hood, on July 25 after covering 111 miles.

They kept a daily diary of their trip as proof of their accomplishment. At the end of their trip, they met the Mayor of Portland and delivered a letter to him from the Mayor of Sacramento. A photograph of the boys with the mayor and an article on their trip appeared in The Oregonian.

Petrie later attended Oregon State, graduated in 1943 and spent three years in the army, traveling throughout the South Pacific. Gordon and one of the hikers, Bob Morrison, attended college together.

After a career in paper manufacturing, Gordon and his wife Shirley moved in 1985 to the home that they had purchased three years earlier on South Pine Street in Sisters. Gordon served on the Sisters City Council for six years.

Today, Gordon can look out the large windows of his Pine Street home and see the Cascade Mountains reaching from south to north, including much of the country that he hiked some 67 years ago.