1974 Honorary Member Profile : Mabel Gould

The outdoors-hiking, summer outing, gathering rocks and plants to show her 4th-grade students-was the joy of Mabel Crosby Gould's life between March 1933, when she paid her $2.50 to join the Spokane Mountaineers, and her death at 80 in April 1979. Honorary membership was bestowed in 1974.

"She found love and fulfillment in the outdoors-and wanted her students to love it too," confirms Bernadine McClincy, another 1933 enlistee. "You could tell her enjoyment just by looking at her."

And Mabel always looked good, Bernadine points out. "She was just plain neat looking, but never one to be conspicuous. She wore nice clothes on outings. Her hair was always nice."

"Mabel was on all the hikes," recalls Helen Stowell, who joined in 1947. Club archives prove it. In summer 1950, for example, she's listed on the Annual Breakfast June 4; Abercrombie June 18; Roothaan July 1; she's pictured atop 9675-foot Eagle Cap on the July 15-23 Wallowas summer outing, her 15th with the club. Probably her first club hike (as a guest) was walk 668 on March 12, 1933 (8 miles), to Granite Ridge northwest of Dartford. But Mabel was rarely a leader. She never owned a car, and-especially in the early days-leaders were expected to scout their trips.

Serving at least twice on the Board of Trustees, she chaired the Education and Contact committees and worked on the Lodge and Summer Outing committees. For many years, she stored and checked out the club commissary and other equipment (e.g., snowshoes, cook tent, stove, utensils, half-oilcan dishpans, slat-and-canvas table, etc.). "We often left on trips from her house, where we'd meet to load and organize," Bernadine recalls.

That house on North Washington, built in the late 1930's, was her "pride and joy," says Marion Krauss. "She had a wonderful garden." Mabel scrimped and saved for the house. "I remember her telling me how she would be downtown with a craving for doughnuts. 'No, I can save that 25 cents,' she would think, 'so I went home and saved the money.'" Summer work at Mt. Rainier's Paradise Lodge and other national parks helped too.

Born on a North Dakota farm in 1899, Mabel was the oldest of eight children. After graduation from college, she came to Spokane in 1922 to teach third and fourth graders at Columbia School. Teaching at Hamilton and Arlington before transferring to Ridgeview in 1957, she retired from there in 1964. When not pursuing interests outdoors, she "read all she could" about the English royal family, Marion recalls.

Never a backpacker, Mabel spent many a night in her pale green canvas umbrella tent. Bernadine, often invited to share it, fondly recalls staying dry through days of soaking rain at Canada's Rogers Pass. Much later, Marion remembers the weight of lugging it around at Lake O'Hara.

Mabel was generous in many ways. Bernadine still has the red flannel long-johns that Mabel bought for her at "the Co-op" (REI). Mabel always asked members if they needed anything before visits to her mother and sister in Seattle.

Although, as Marion says, "Mabel didn't like to be in the limelight," some stores are told and retold:

• Her habit of climbing into her sleeping bag atop a table at the Chalet and gently snoring away while other overnighters sipped hot drinks and chatted around the wood stove a few feet away.
• Her topple down the Chalet's basement staircase because of an accidental bump at the top that resulted in two broken ribs and the only known ambulance evacuation from the Chalet.
• Her role in the 1951 exodus of members who opposed spending any more money on the Mt. Spokane cabin and ski tow, leaving the club with only 36 members. The dissidents founded the Spokane Hobnailers. Thirteen years later, in 1964, Mabel (and a few others) rejoined the Mountaineers and became a Chalet regular. She was the one who took the dish towels home to wash. She always brought up yummy homemade cookies to share. She donated furniture. She struggled in through deep snow as a weekend co-manager.

"She never mentioned the exodus," claims Marion, who became Mabel's good pal, summer outing tentmate, and chauffeur during this 15-year second chapter in Mabel's history with the club. "The Mountaineers were her life."

True to her desire to remain inconspicuous, no death notice was printed nor funeral service held after Mabel's heart failed. There's no question of Mabel's deep affection for the Mountaineers' and its Mt. Spokane Chalet property. She instructed her good friend Marion to sprinkle her ashes on the slope. And so she did.

Lorna Ream