Kate McCarthy | 1917–2015

by Barbara Weiss

Feisty. Passionate. Zealous. Determined.

Conservationist, founder, wife, mother, photographer and public speaker.

Kate McCarthy was all this, and more. McCarthy, a long-time Mount Hood resident and ardent advocate for protecting the mountain’s wilderness, died Tuesday, November 3 at the age of 98.

“I come to my love of ‘The Mountain’ honestly, as I was born in the shadow of Mt. Hood,” McCarthy wrote in a biographical statement given to the Mazamas on the advent of her induction as an honorary Mazama member in 2002.

In 1907, McCarthy’s father and lifetime Mazama member, Homer Rogers, settled on land four miles south of Parkdale. McCarthy spent most of her summers at home near Parkdale, but then moved to Portland during the school year to attend Miss Catlin’s School for Girls (founded by her great aunt, now Catlin Gable School.) During her high school years she and her younger sister ran a summer camp for girls on the family property.

After high school McCarthy attended Reed College, Yale Nursing School and Graduate School at Oregon Health Sciences University. In 1943 she married Gerald McCarthy. They raised four sons in the Seattle-Tacoma area and Roseburg, before returning to Parkdale in 1968 where she remained for the rest of her life.

In a 1996 Hood River News article about the 10th anniversary of the National Scenic Act, McCarthy wrote, “When it comes to the Gorge, my enthusiasm knows no bounds. We have a treasure in our midst, almost beyond comprehension, with such a variety of resources – visual, botanical, geological, historical.”

It was that boundless enthusiasm and deep respect for the natural world that drove McCarthy’s involvement with many conservation organizations including the Columbia Gorge Commission, Oregon Natural Resources Council (now Oregon Wild), and 1000 Friends of Oregon. McCarthy was a founding member of Friends of Mount Hood; she served on the boards of the Oregon Environmental Council and Friends of the Columbia River Gorge. After McCarthy’s son Mike returned to Hood River with his family, he became an active conservation in his own right. Together, Kate and Mike and other concerned citizens, founded the Hood River Valley Residents Committee, a land use and environmental group focused on promoting intelligent planning and natural resource protection.

Mazama member, Vera Dafoe recalls working closely with McCarthy on the designation of the Columbia River Gorge as a National Scenic Area. “Kate and I were on the Oregon-based Columbia Gorge Commission in the late 1970s. There was also a seven-person Washington-based Columbia Gorge Commission,” said Dafoe. “We were the only serious environmentalists on the commissions. We believed a bi-state management system would not work because of different regulations in the states. We argued for federal management.”

When the governors of both states requested reports from the commissions to take to Congress regarding the Gorge, the assumption was that both commissions would support bi-state management.
Dafoe and McCarthy wrote a minority opinion for the Oregon commission in support of federal management. “Much to our amazement, when the voting happened at the big public meeting, our minority recommendation for federal management became the Oregon Columbia Gorge Commission’s advisory recommendation to Governor Vic Atiyeh. We had won!”

Another of McCarthy’s staunch environmental efforts includes her decade’s long role as a watchdog over Mt. Hood Meadows Ski Resort’s ongoing development efforts. In 1975, McCarthy began to photograph the impact of man-made development on Mt. Hood in an effort to galvanize support for protecting what remains of the mountain’s wild habitat. Her photos provided Mazamas and other groups with material upon which formal appeals of the resort’s expansion plans have been based. A 2002 article in the online version of High Country News, by Ted Katauskas, describes McCarthy’s two-hour slide show as “a photographic indictment of the developer’s environmental sins on the other side of the mountain: wildflower meadows entombed in asphalt, streams clogged with silt, oil, and logs, an alpine forest of rare Whitebark pine clear-cut for a ski run, denuded slopes ravaged by runoff.”

Monica Reid, a longtime friend of McCarthy, (as quoted in the November 6, Hood River News) said that, “Kate was truly a remarkable woman who worked tirelessly to conserve and protect the Oregon landscapes that we love and cherish.” All of us in Oregon, whether Mazamas or not, hikers, climbers, lovers of our great mountain wilderness—we have all benefitted from Kate McCarthy’s lasting legacy. While we may mourn her passing and celebrate her profound accomplishments—the very least we can do is continue to be good stewards of the land she loved and carry her legacy forward.