We Were Mazamas: A Profile of Don Eastman

Don Eastman. Photo: Mazama Archives.

by Bill Mosser   

Published in the June 2014 Bulletin. We were lucky enough to have Don Eastman, Priscilla Eastman, and author Bill Mosser drop by the MMC on June 23, 2014.

Although I am not a member of the Mazamas and I’m not a mountain climber, I know one. His name is Don Eastman and he married my mother, Priscilla Mosser, in 1987, about the same time he stopped climbing mountains. Now, at 91, he is more likely to take the elevator than the stairs. Last year, Don and Priscilla moved to a senior living community and I helped them distill their three-bedroom house and garage into a one-bedroom apartment. While going through Don’s things I discovered that he gave a lot of his time to serving organizations and that the Mazamas was at the top of the list.

Don served on the Mazama Executive Council from 1962 to 1966 and again in 1975. He served on the Budget Committee in 1965 and 1966, the Finance Committee in 1962 and the Long Range Planning Committee in 1965 and 1966. He was on the Climbing Committee in 1959, 1967–1969, and chaired that committee in 1969. In 1962, Don was the club vice-president, treasurer in 1963 and president in 1964. In addition to these commitments, he led Mazama climbs, and climbed his way to the top of over 300 peaks. I don’t know how he found time for his dental practice.

Serendipity has a way of taking you down a path you never could have envisioned. In 1954, while hiking and fishing at Green Lake, Don and Jim Craig met a Mazama group climbing South Sister and Broken Top. Later, when the two arrived home, they made a quick trip to the top of the Pacific Building in downtown Portland where the Mazamas office was located at the time. They spoke to Don Onthank, known as “Mr. Mazama,” and signed up for a Mt. Hood climb with Phyllis Neuberger as leader. During the climb snow conditions were such that they did a sitting glissade down to Silcox Hut. They had become Mazamas! Don’s first wife Sibyl supported his passion and joined him when she could. Many times in his journals he noted, after a climb was logged, “I owe Sibyl.”

A Mazama party on the Ptarmigan Traverse. Don is second
from the front. Photo: Mazama Archives

Don’s daughter Kim Henson remembers her father as a man who loved the outdoors, especially the
mountains, and shared this love with his family. Kim told me, “So many of my best childhood memories involve the Mazamas.” When Kim was too small to make a climb, Sibyl and Marilyn Craig and their small children would hold down the fort at camp while Jim Craig and Don climbed. By the age of 8, Kim found herself roped to her father and making her first climb. When the time came for Kim to make her official Mazama climb up Broken Top, she was 11 years old and one climb away from getting her 10 peak award. Don took her out of school for a day and they climbed Mt. Thielsen so she was able to receive the award at that year’s annual banquet.

Don enjoyed leading climbs and derived great pleasure from the detailed planning. He was a cautious leader and instilled trust in those who climbed with him. The people he met climbing, skiing and serving on committees he considered some of his best friends.

Vera Dafoe met Don when she took the 1959 Mazama Basic Climbing School. She recounted a memorable (non-Mazama) trip to the Swiss Alps in 1974 with her husband Carmie, Don and Sibyl Eastman, Jim and Marilyn Craig, and Clint and Dorothy Harrington.

Don and Jim planned the trip for six people and purchased two Volkswagen Beetles—one orange and one yellow—to be picked up in Brussels and used for traveling in Europe, then shipped home. At the last minute, the party grew to eight, and you can imagine how crowded they were with their luggage, duffel bags, climbing gear, ice axes, and packs!

Don Eastman. Photo: Mazama Archives.

The primary goal of the trip was to hike the historic Haute Route of the Swiss Alps with an overnight side trip into Italy. Sibyl and Marilyn dropped the climbers off at the trailhead and drove the cars back to Zermatt. The first night the climbers stopped at the quaint Chanrion Hutte and the second night at the larger Vignetta Hutte. The first two days were sunny, but by the afternoon of the third day they were socked in.

Our schedule wouldn’t allow us to get stranded at a high hut, so we eliminated the Italian detour and added to our day three what would have been our fourth trekking day,” Vera recalls. “By the time darkness fell we were worn out and still struggling through glacier rock debris under the west side of the Matterhorn. We could see the lights of our immediate goal, the Schoenbiel Hutte, half a mile away. That’s when we gave up to reality and made an unplanned, unpleasant bivouac. No dinner, no sleeping bags. The clouds lifted and a very cold, clear night took over. Still, we had survived and we had done the Haute Route!

Bill Mosser, Don Eastman, and Priscilla
Eastman at the MMC (June 23, 2014)

Prior to this trip, Don and Jim had climbed the Matterhorn by the Hornli Ridge route. This time, they went over the pass to Italy to engage guides and climb the longer, more difficult south-side route. When they reached the Italian summit, the weather indicated it would be better to descend the shorter north-side route. So Don and Jim climbed a Matterhorn traverse. Carmie and Vera climbed the Matterhorn from Zermatt the same day—Swiss Liberation Day—Aug. 1. There were fireworks and celebrations in the town that evening.
Jim Craig became Don’s best friend.

“For over 30 years, Don Eastman and I have not only been friends, we have entrusted each other with our lives by sharing a climbing rope while summiting glacial mountains,” Jim wrote.

In 1955, when not very skilled at climbing, Don and Jim were supposed to meet the climb leader Bill Oberteuffer and climbing party at their bivouac on Glacier Peak. They took the wrong ridge and ended up, at dark, across the valley, far from the party’s campfire. They failed to catch the party the next morning. However, they did find a parachute cord left for them to belay up the glacier and around the rock pinnacle near the top, arriving at the summit just as the party was leaving. “Obie” wasn’t too happy with them.

Climbing presents many challenges. One, which could have been fatal, occurred during Don’s last climb on Mt. Rainier via the Nisqually Ice Falls. Just below the last ice cliff, before the summit snowfield, the party stopped for lunch. While they were sitting there, a portion of the wall caved in and large blocks of ice fell down among the climbers, crushing packs and creating pandemonium. Not wanting to alarm his parents, Don never mentioned this, but he did write it up and his parents, unfortunately, managed to read about it!
In a 2007 interview with Tim Kaye, Don describes his climb up the Devil’s Tower in Wyoming with an experienced guide:

What really made the climb possible was that we could get in the gully between ridges and find enough crevasses or cracks and footholds to make our way up through there. But then we had to cross over to get a little bit to the east because we were blocked and couldn’t go any further. My guide said, ’Follow me,’ and so we went across a ledge and got over about 30 feet, when the ledge ended, and I looked straight down hundreds of feet. 

Over on the other side of the gap instead of a ledge being there, there was a kind of a wall with a groove in it ... and up above, there was a ledge. We had to jump (from) that four inch wide ledge we were standing on and grab that upper one with our hands, swing our feet over there against that rock wall and then pull ourselves up.

My guide had done it quite a few times so he knew how to do it and went over and climbed up on a ledge right above this crack. Then it was my turn.  

I didn’t think too much of that! I’ve climbed lots of mountains but I didn’t like that at all. He had a belay on me and so I had to go to that same place and jump across that thirty inch gap to that rock and grab the top with my hands. 

I did, but I couldn’t find any place to put my feet to help lift myself up onto that ledge and I couldn’t do it with only my hands. So the guide gave me a little pull with the rope and I made it. Then, coming down, we just rappelled right over that.

Don Eastman display at the MMC. 

Some of the last major climbs Don and Jim made were in 1984. They summited the Gross Glockner, the highest peak in Austria, the Triglav, the highest peak in the former Yugoslavia and Mt. Olympus, the highest peak in Greece.

Don’s love of the natural world and sharing that love with others continued after he stopped climbing mountains. He began his second professional career as a photographer after retiring from his dental practice.

My mother, Priscilla Mosser, met widowed Don Eastman on a Native Plant Society hike in the Columbia River Gorge, where they were both photographing wildflowers. Don was determined to capture as many plants on film as possible and, eventually, my mother joined him in that hunt. Their search resulted in the publication of Don’s book, Rare and Endangered Plants of Oregon, in 1990. They traveled all over the world photographing nature, cities and people, and made a career selling these images to publishers of catalogs, magazines, postcards and travel guides. They retired in 2008, but that didn't keep Don inside. He enjoyed going on long walks almost every day until last year, and his generous spirit and love of the outdoors remain undiminished.