1996 Honorary Member Profile : Priscilla Wopat

Priscilla Wopat walked into her first Mountaineer board meeting in 1976. "Mike (my ex-husband) and I went to see what the Mountaineers were like," she recalls, "and I volunteered to help with the Kinnikinnick. Before I knew what was happening, I was the Kinnikinnick editor. I had no idea what I was getting into."

Newcomers to Spokane, she and Mike had hiked around Bead Lake with the club on May 16th. "Leader Marion Krauss signed us up while we were sitting around eating on the dinner stop on the way home."

What brand-new honorary member and current editor had "got into" was 15 years at the Kinnikinnick helm. She took a break from 1981 to 1986. "I just don't type up the schedule any more," she points out.

She's been versatile. December Board meetings at the Wopat house began on December that year and became a Club tradition. Members have sipped hot spiced wine and munched Christmas goodies there 13 times. She was Club secretary for 6 years (1983-1989). Schedules show Priscilla as leader or assistant leader on day hikes, backpacks, ski tours, and spelunking trips. She has hosted holiday dinners and many other events at her home, and presented several general membership meeting slide shows. There have been innumerable "little things": arrangements for annual meetings, T-shirts for the 75th Anniversary, the Mountaineer phone in her home....

"One of the things I'm really proud of was instructing in Mountain School," she beams. "It was extremely rewarding. I got a lot of beginning rock climbing students going up Beginner's Crack at Minnehaha. They'd get part way up and feel a lot of trepidation. I'd tell them where to put their feet. Once they got to the little slanting crack they usually gained confidence and went on up. One time a beginner came over and told me that 'So-and-so said to climb with Priscilla and she'd get you to the top because she had lots of patience.'"

A passion for mountains began in the 4th grade when a former student of her teacher showed slides of Oregon's Crater Lake to the class. "It was one of the definitive moments in my life," Priscilla says. "I told myself that one day I was going to see Crater Lake. I had fallen in love with mountains."

"Hoosier's don't travel," she points out. "When I was a teenager, you'd go 50 miles and it was a major outing. "Her mother, raised on a farm, did take Priscilla and her younger brother hiking through woodlands, however.

An almost lifelong fascination with horses developed earlier, when she was 3. Impatient because her father could read only a chapter a night of animal books, she taught herself to read 2 years before she entered kindergarten in Muncie, Indiana. "But if a book didn't have a horse or a dog in it, it wasn't worth my time," she says. (She flunked reading in the first grade because the Dick and Jane books had no horses in them and she never paid any attention in class.)

Her first job out of high school was a maid for a private concessionaire in Rocky Mountain National Park. Four summers at Yellowstone selling groceries and other sundries while attending college at the University of Colorado at Boulder prompted an interest in photography; the company where she worked, Haynes, sold more Kodak photographic supplies than any other place in the world, and so Kodak gave seminars to Haynes people to help them sell even more.

"I learned a lot about photography," Priscilla says. She certainly did; in the early 1970's, her photo of Yellowstone's Tower Falls was the back cover of the Sierra Club's engagement calender.

Though days off in Yellowstone were spend roaming the park (with an occasional hitchhike to the Grand Tetons for some horseback riding), Priscilla didn't begin rock climbing until 1964, when she roomed with a member of the Colorado Mountain Club. "I didn't have money and I didn't have a car," she points out, "so I couldn't go skiing, which was really the thing to do at Colorado. So I tagged along with Merle and learned about climbing." Canada's Banff and Glacier National Parks beckoned one summer when Priscilla and two friends left Yellowstone early to "go up and stare at the snout of a glacier once or twice."

She climbed above and below ground during years earning a Master's degree in cultural anthropology from the University of Wisconsin in Madison. There she joined the University of Wisconsin's outing club, the Hoofer Mountaineers, and met husband-to-be Mike Wopat, then president of the caving group. Mapping caves for the Wisconsin Geological Survey and Mystery Caverns in Minnesota led to underground adventures of a unique type. Priscilla recalls one incident. "I had really long hair. Once, while really stretched out and slithering along on my stomach, I smelled this funny burning smell. My carbide lamp, which had weighted down my helmet, was beginning to singe my hair. It was one of the few times I ever felt claustrophobic."

Skiing was less adventurous. The first winter she joined a group of library employees (she was working for the library at the time) on a ski day at a local ski area. "I had to tell myself not to laugh when I saw it. It wasn't as high as the hill where the Boulder City Parks Dept. had set up a rope tow." (Cross-country skiing was not yet in vogue.)

After she met Mike, she started to rock climb in earnest. "There are not a lot of mountains in Wisconsin, so we went out every Sunday in the summer to rock climb on the beautiful quartzite at Devil's Lake."

"When Mike and I got married," Priscilla remembers, "part of the deal was that we'd go West." So after Mike received his Master's degree in geology in 1974, "we packed our skis and set out." They hiked to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, explored the Oregon Coast, saw Crater Lake ("Finally made it."), and spent 3 months working in Wenatchee before Mike got a job in Spokane for a contractor to the Dept. of Energy. Priscilla worked for School District 81 investigating new reading and math curricula. And they joined the Spokane Mountaineers.

"Our graduation climb was Mt. Hood. It was miserable foggy, windy, icy, and lots of people on the mountain who had no mountaineering manners. When we reached the top, trip leader Gary Cassel yelled out, 'We're at the summit!' We had to trust him because he'd been here before, we sure couldn't tell!"

Experience brought confidence. After feeling, "really scared" descending the steep, loose snow of Canada's Mt. Brennan during one Mountaineer Graduation Climb, "It was really neat" the next time. She fell in love with BC's Lake of the Hanging Glaciers after a climb of Mt. Starbird led by Will Murray and wanted other people to see the place, but later trips she scheduled were frustrated by washed-out roads, broken bridges, flooding rivers, and generally miserable weather. "I had to be flexible. There always had to be a back-up trip planned." Once she diverted the trip to another favorite, Lake O'Hara. "One of my ultimate trips will be to spend a week at the Lake O'Hara Lodge. But I think I have to win the lottery first."

She remains "sold" on the Spokane Mountaineers after 20 years. "They do a wonderful job of stressing safety," she points out. "And I do love the irreverence of the Club, plus the ability to find something humorous in the most ridiculous, frustrating circumstances." She cites one Athabasca Graduation Climb where clear skies at 2:00 a.m. turned into a blizzard "so bad we couldn't see across the road" and 30 cold, disappointed Mountaineers headed to the Post House for breakfast and beer. "We spent 3 hours singing and telling jokes," Priscilla laughs, "turning an absolutely miserable trip into a great joy."

Her own definition of "class" is "when you go into a restaurant really grungy and they treat you nice." (This was one of her criteria for a "lifesaver restaurant" listing in past Kinnikinnicks.)

Purchase of her own horse, a chestnut mare named O'Pa's J.J., in the mid-1980's fulfilled a childhood dream. Priscilla rode J.J. in four to five shows a year, competing in jumping classes that emphasized "the horse's style, not speed." The three to five 3-hour stints of riding weekly claimed time from Mountaineer activities. Most recently, she fulfilled another long-held desire by heading for England, where she zoomed (ed. note: "zoomed"? English drivers zoom, but I sure didn't!) around on the left- hand side of the road in a rented car getting lost and exploring archaeological sites. Egypt is next, "in a couple of years."

What about the Kinnikinnick? "I enjoy it!" she enthuses. "Being editor gives me a chance to do really interesting things with my computer. And the trip writeups are getting better and better as writers put in a lot of their own dramatic experience and personality."

The Club's newest member is modest (Lorna was drinking too much wine. Modest?) "Usually," she says, "I just provide the place and the others do the work." Club members know there's more to it. As Sid Goodwin said in his nomination speech, "The task has not been to conquer a high peak, but rather to publish the heartbeat of our organization, the KinnikinnickSa volunteer job consisting of untold hours, innumerable phone calls, lost sleep, and unlimited stress, all for the satisfaction of making a worthwhile contribution to our organization."

Lorna Ream