Guidebook Writers Walk Their Talk About Wilderness Preservation

Their guidebooks get hikers from point A to point B on the trails that wind through the woods of the Pacific Northwest.

But the dozens of volumes writer Harvey Manning and photographer Ira Spring have published over the years prod readers to do more than just strap on a pair of boots and set out for a stroll through the wilderness.

They call out for foot soldiers willing to walk the extra political mile it takes to preserve the forests in their backyards and beyond.

And they do it with attitude.

“We do not step around gross and immobile obscenities blocking our feet but crank up and kick butt,” Manning writes in the introduction to “100 Classic Hikes in Washington.” “We heartily wish the same would be done by the row upon row of newcomers to bookstore shelves. Why else are they there?”

Manning talks the way he writes --with a fiery edge.

He’s a 75-year-old Santa Claus look-alike who wears faded T-shirts and corduroys instead of the red suit, and he laughs jovially as he tells stories about how he has infuriated politicians, developers, loggers and anyone else who has stood in his way.

Spring is different. Slender, gray-haired and 81, he is a mild-mannered diplomat. He shakes his head when Manning calls bureaucrats and others who disagree with him “marginal in the brain department.”

But together, they get things done.

They’ve taken their message to Capitol Hill and helped push bills through Congress. They’ve led the push to preserve and expand trail systems and create more national parks.

It all started in 1966, when Manning and Spring published their first guidebook together, titled “100 Hikes in Western Washington.” The Mountaineers Books, an offshoot of the Mountaineers, a Seattle-based outdoor activity and conservation club, printed 5,000 copies--enough, they thought, to last a couple of years.

“Well, they sold out in three weeks,” Spring recalls. “And then again five weeks after that.” So they expanded, publishing “101 Hikes in the North Cascades,” then “102 Hikes in the South Cascades.”

“It’s been like a marriage ever since,” Spring says, rolling his eyes with a smile.

More than 400,000 copies of their books have been sold. They’ve published more than 20 titles, updating them about every five years.

The books explore trails all over Washington as well as Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Northern California, British Columbia and the Canadian Rockies. Their current project is a guide for trails in the Snoqualmie area.

Helen Cherullo, director of The Mountaineers Books, calls Manning and Spring pioneers in their field, praising them for their political activism.

“They have also hiked all of the trails that are in their books,” she says, “which is another thing that sets them apart from most guidebook writers.”

Their distinct styles jump off the pages.

Spring’s photos offer glimpses of some of the Northwest’s most awe-inspiring landscapes--craggy glaciers, hillsides speckled with flowers, lakes reflecting the evergreens around them. They are the work of a calm, introspective man.

Manning’s narratives are full of passion, but he doesn’t always spout vitriol. His descriptions of trails often read like campfire oratory, with equal amounts of tale-telling and practical detail.

When he does rant and rave, Spring says: “I call it to his attention, so he says, ‘OK. I just wanted to get it off my chest.’ So he tones it down, but it says the same thing.”

Once a book salesman, Manning spent 10 years writing for the University of Washington’s public relations department and editing the alumni magazine. His oddest stint was writing missile operations manuals for a company contracted by the U.S. Defense Department.

Spring, co-founder of the Washington Trails Assn., has been taking photographs since he was 12, when he and his twin brother, Bob, were given Box Brownie cameras. For years, the Spring brothers made their living shooting advertisements for everyone from Eastman Kodak to Canadian Club Whiskey.

Now he and his wife, Pat, live in Edmonds, 20 miles north of Seattle. And, he says, “there’s always some book” he and Manning are working on.

Manning and Spring each grew up with a love of the outdoors, but they haven’t always been environmental activists.

Manning was reared in and around Seattle, where relatives worked in the timber industry. Spring grew up in Shelton, a small logging town south of the Olympic National Forest.

“I used to say, ‘Why don’t you just accept reality? This is timber country,’ ” says Manning.

Eventually, though, they realized that lands they cherished could be clear-cut if left in the wrong politician’s hands. So they got involved and started making noise.

They fought for the passage of the 1984 Washington Wilderness Act, which added more than 1 million acres of land to the state’s protected wilderness.

A few months after Spring delivered marked-up copies of their books noting that most of the trails were unprotected, the law sailed through Congress with bipartisan support. President Reagan, Manning writes, “was so disgruntled that he signed the measure in secrecy.”

Manning and his wife, Betty, live about 15 miles east of Seattle on Cougar Mountain, an area he helped preserve as founder of the Issaquah Alps Trail Club. He also played a key role in preserving the Alpine Lakes area and establishing North Cascades National Park.

These days they’re pushing for better maintenance of trails, which they say have suffered from budget cuts to the U.S. Forest Service. Spring donates royalties from his books to trail organizations and recently set aside more than $100,000 for a trust fund dedicated to enhancing trails.

It’s that kind of activism, not just greater awareness of environmental issues, that’s needed to preserve wild areas, Manning and Spring say.

The fights they’ve won, big and small, are their greatest source of pride, Manning says.

“All over the Cascades, we can site a trail that was doomed that we saved,” a trail that “wouldn’t have been in the wilderness if it hadn’t been in our book.”

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On the Net:

https://mountaineersbooks.org/