I met Jim Harris 30 years ago on one of my first hikes up Thunder Creek into the North Cascades when I was a young, brand-new backcountry ranger. Who was this guy who seemed to have been around forever, since “before the park,” and had all these stories about logging and mining and cougars? At first I found Jim intimidating. He wasn’t cut from the same “the most important thing is wilderness” cloth as most of my friends. And he wasn’t shy about sharing his opinion about those of us who didn’t have much use for the old days when the story of the North Cascades was written by explorers and loggers. But we shared a deep love of these mountains, and over the years, Jim, along with Bill Lester, backcountry area ranger, became one of my most important mentors. He helped shape my understanding of the North Cascades as a place where people lived and raised families, as much as a place of wild summits and raging river valleys. He was a great friend and supporter of North Cascades Institute – one of our most popular instructors, contributor to many of our curricula and always good for a story and a laugh. I miss him.
– Saul Weisberg
ps. A tribute to Jim Harris is planned for Sunday, August 16, at 2 pm at Howard Miller Steelhead Park in Rockport. More information at orcasfireval@live.com. If you have a special Jim Harris memory or remebrance to share, feel free to leave a comment at this end of this post.
They Claimed these Mountains : An Interview with Jim Harris

Bacon and Nip and Tuck Claims were the ones that started all of the excitement up here, around 1878. Most people didn’t stay long. For so many it was the lust for gold and the adventure. When they saw that it wasn’t easy, they left. The few that stayed, like George Holmes, John and Emma McMillen, Lucinda Davis and Lillian Bulldog Brown, really left their stories. When I was a kid, we had neighbors that had claims up here, were trappers and so on, who’d come by and often spend the evening at our place in front of the fireplace telling those stories.
In ‘68 the Park bill was signed and I quit teaching school and went to work with the Park. Today is my birthday; it’s also the birthday of the Park. It was created in 1968 and I’m 68 years old. Just days before the Park bill was signed, Rocky Wilson and his wife Lenore were up on the high hunt in Fisher Basin. Rocky was, at that time, in his mid to late seventies. They had spent years mining, prospecting, hunting and fishing in the backcountry. In the evening they set up camp and a big bear came down off the hillside to the creek. Rocky was able to get off a good shot and it dropped. It wasn’t only a big one, it had grizzly grey all up over the front with a big hump! A neighboring camper came by and took pictures. They skinned it out and stopped by school to show us teachers and the kids. It was part of the story of their life. I wondered how they felt about it. Years later, I asked Rocky, “What if this was the last grizzly bear in the whole country?” I remember him sitting there quite a while before he responded. The Park was created by that time, and that eliminated hunting, eliminated their lifestyle. He said, “Well, my life will never be the same. These are all things of the past.”
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