Honorary Member Profile :: Lorna Ream

"A twinkle came into Nancy Drew's blue eyes. She tossed back her reddish gold hair, and laughed.”¹

“This is supposed to be an honorary member profile of Lorna Ream, not a detective novel I read as a kid! ", you think. "What's the connection?"

Well, despite the difference in coloring–slim, vivacious, laughing Lorna Ream with her zest for life and detail reminds me of the girl detective in Carolyn Keene's books. I wonder if, somehow, Nancy Drew didn't mature into the Lorna that we know...

Why was Lorna nominated as Honorary Member of the Spokane Mountaineers in 1992? "Because she's been around since before there were mountains", responded the first person I asked. If that's the case, she’s remarkably wel1-preserved. However, "a lifetime of service" characterizes Lorna's participation with the club, including being club treasurer and editing the Kinnikinnick and Peaks and Valleys (an annual that the club published for several years). She has led many trips, including hikes, climbs, and ski trips to Big Mountain in Montana. She served as a board member and on the Climbing Committee and hosted numerous meetings and events in her home, which was the repository for club ropes and other climbing gear for several years.

Lorna was extremely active on the Winter Sports Committee for the Chalet in the early years of her membership. There were Chalet activities virtually every winter weekend, including potlucks, spaghetti feeds and Scandinavian meals. When the club built the Elwood Ryker ski tow in 1961, Lorna sweated alongside everyone else in the work parties. She was also the purchasing agent for the project, selling the bonds to pay for it.

Lorna served on the committees for the 50th and 75th anniversaries of the Spokane Mountaineers and worked on slide shows for the celebrations. As club historian she has spent many hours poring through the archives to write profiles of honorary members and securing pictures for the past presidents' photo panels. I remember board meetings where she recalled pertinent details from board decisions made a number of years ago. Lorna tells that she was delighted with the Honorary Member award. She treasures the watch she received and has worn it ever since.

More recently, the Spokane Mountaineers chose Lorna as Volunteer of the Month for July 2003 to honor her conservation work. She has co-chaired the club's Conservation Committee for the past couple of years, and she is one of the Mountaineers working diligently to bring to reality the Dream Trail connection between the Dishman Hills area and the Rocks of Sharon. Her work was instrumental in the successful 1997 and 2002 campaigns to pass Spokane County's Conservation Futures fund. She also represents the Mountaineers in the collaborative decision-making process for the re licensing of Avista dams on the Spokane River .

Cherry trees were significant in the lives of both George Washington and Lorna Ream, but Lorna's tree really existed, and she didn't cut it down. She climbed it in the back yard of her early childhood apartment home in Portland, Oregon, and dreamed of climbing the four volcanoes (Mt. Hood, Mt. Adams, Mt. Rainier, and Mt. St. Helens) she saw from its branches. And, climb them she did, beginning with Mt. Hood as soon as she was 15 and had parental permission to join the Mazamas. It seems her fascination with mountains was in her paternal genes; her father had topped Mt. Hood and her uncle also climbed, but her mother didn't think much of the sport.

During high school Lorna began working in the newsroom of a local paper. After college, in a southern Oregon daily newsroom, she met her future husband, Joel Ream, who was from southeast Alaska. They discovered a mutual enjoyment of beach swimming and rock scrambling. The couple reminisced this year on their annual ski trip to Big Mountain about the first visit: their honeymoon 50 years ago. Congratulations!

It was Joel who introduced Lorna to the Spokane Mountaineers. In 1959, the Reams were living in Spokane, when Joel came home from work at the newspaper one evening with a news story about the club's climbing school. He encouraged her to get a baby sitter for their children, Lyn (5) and Joel (3), and go. Thus began Lorna's long association with the Spokane Mountaineers. At times, family and work commitments (she was transportation planning coordinator for the Spokane County engineer's office and served on the State Highway Commission) prevented her from participating as fully as she would have liked, but she has been a stalwart participant in many, many club activities .

Lorna enjoyed a mixture of rock and snow climbing, and she has a considerable list of peaks to her credit. They include Silver Star , Chimney Rock, Mt. Shuksan, Bonanza, Glacier Peak, Mt. Hood, Mt. Shasta, Three Sisters, Mt. Adams, Mt. St. Helens, Mt. Baker, Mt. Rainier, the Grand Teton, Mt. Stuart, Mt. Temple and Comet Spire in the Cashmere Crags, Mt. Borah, Ibex, Trapper Peak Athabasca, Macoun, and Kokanee Glacier’s Cond and Esmeralda. As a Mountain School instructor, Lorna has climbed some of these peaks several times. She was part of the club group that made the first ascent of Mt. Cooper in August 1962. At 10,135 feet it is the highest mountain in the Goat Range of the southern Selkirks of British Columbia. The remote peak took several reconnaissance trips to scout an access route that included a 4'000- ft climb and descent before the group even reached Mt. Cooper. "It was a rewarding event, and I enjoyed the exploring," recalled Lorna. She was also on other Selkirks scouting trips, including climbs of Cascade Peak and Trout Mountain. "You don't always get to the top, but it doesn't diminish the fun or excitement", she emphasized, recalling an attempt on Edith Cavell in the Canadian Rockies where she and two others turned back well short of the summit. They compensated with a 25-mile hike the next day.

Mountaineering and skiing equipment have changed immensely since Lorna first started climbing in the mid-1940s. "No, climbing wasn't an unusual sport for a female at that time," she corrected me. "Remember that the Spokane Mountaineers was started as a walking club in 1915 by an all-women group," she added, slipping into her club historian role. She recalled using tarps rather than tents on mountaineering expeditions, and seeing them shredded by wind on Mt. Rainier . She began her climbing career when the spear-like alpenstock was still in use as an ice axe and staff. "It wasn't a great tool," she commented, thinking of a climber who lost his life trying to self-arrest. Boots were flat soled and came with a pattern available for the wearer to have hobnails (later, triconi nails) inserted until the lug sole was introduced following World War II. Her Army Surplus sleeping bag was filled with feathers that leaked out under the canvas cover, and she wore wool clothing. "We were cold sometimes, but not dangerously cold. I bought my first rucksack from an Army Surplus store for $1", Lorna laughed. "It amazes me what people require now."

Joel Ream was also active in the Spokane Mountaineers. He broke a club record by leading a group of 33 people to the summit of Mt. St. Helens before group sizes were limited. While their children were young, Joel and Lorna never climbed together as one or the other would be home with the kids. However, they did make a family ascent of the 10,147-ft Middle Sister of Three Sisters in Oregon when Lyn and young Joel were aged 10 and 8. It was a straightforward climb, after a pack in. The youngsters already knew how to self arrest with an ice axe and glissade. At that time, many of the active club members had young families, and Lorna did lots of hiking, scrambling, and skiing with children along. When Lyn was 12, Lorna took her up St. Helens via the Dogs Head with two other Mountaineers and their early teens sons. Both the younger Reams have maintained an active interest in the outdoors, which they attribute to their childhood in Spokane. Lorna tells that they camped as a family every weekend from May through October when the children were little and began backpacking when their son could carry his own sleeping bag. Then, in the winter months they spent most of their weekends at the Spokane Mountaineers' Chalet on Mt. Spokane.

When I asked Lorna what she felt contributed to the decline in use of the Chalet over the years, she replied that the club demographics have changed, "People have more money now, and fewer members have young children. "The club had less than 100 members when the Reams joined, and the group functioned more as a cohesive family who did a lot of activities together . Nowadays, snow tires and four-wheel drive vehicles make it easier for people to nip up and down the mountain without having to chain up. It took a lot of time to maintain the Chalet and the ski tow, and use declined as the state started safety inspections and people could afford to ski at area resorts.

Lorna has noticed other changes in the club over the years. As the club membership has increased, so has the scope of activities-including the excellent training schools- but people tend to do more as non club trips. Meetings are more formal, and communication becomes more complicated with more people involved. Liability was something they rarely considered in the earlier days, even with the ski-hill cable tow, which certainly had risks associated with it. She feels that with liability concerns, people have become reticent about leading club climbs. Lorna emphasized that although the faces have changed, Mountaineers are still the same type of terrific people she's always known in the mountains.

Lorna and Joel continue to downhill ski together, and they travel extensively in their retirement. Lorna looks back on the Spokane Mountaineers as having developed an enviable reputation in the Spokane community. She credits the club with providing life-long camaraderie and friendships developed over a mutual enjoyment of the outdoors. She looks forward to the club continuing along the same path in the future, supporting conservation and teaching useful outdoor skills that provide for "great activities, great times, and great people." Lorna has many plans for continuing her involvement with the club. And, while the Honorary Member profiles are currently complete, she anticipates plenty more to write about in the future. Viva Lorna!

--Diana Robert

1 Carolyn Keene, "The Whispering Statue", p. 1.