Born: 1 April 1867, Canada
Died: 17 September 1957
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA
The following is republished from HistoryLink.org, in line with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
On March 21, 2010, Catherine Montgomery (1867-1957) is inducted into the Northwest Women’s Hall of Fame. She is recognized as a founding member of the faculty at New Whatcom Normal School in Bellingham (a teacher training school that would become Western Washington University), an outspoken civic activist, suffragist, outdoorswoman and conservationist. She is credited with helping spur the creation of the Pacific Crest Trail, the longest continuously developed hiking and equestrian experience in the United States, running through Washington, Oregon and California.
Helping “Birth” a Crown Jewel Border-to-Border Trail
The Pacific Crest Trail – running some 2,650 miles from Mexico to Canada through the lengths of California, Oregon, and Washington – was named a national scenic trail by Congress in 1968. Californian Clinton C. Clarke (1873-1957), an avid outdoorsman, relentless trail advocate, early Boy Scout leader, and founder of the Pasadena Playhouse, has long been dubbed “father of the Pacific Crest Trail.” Clarke’s critical role in helping create and advance the PCT in its early days is long-established. The role of a Washingtonian trail “mother,” however, surfaced more recently.
Leading PCT historian, author, and legendary thru-hiker Barney Scout Mann untangled strands that point to 1926 as the first known written record of a proposal for a border-to-border trail – a proposal sparked by Catherine Montgomery. In addition to being a teacher of teachers at the New Whatcom Normal School in Bellingham (eventually becoming Western Washington University), Montgomery was an adventuresome tramper.
Famed climber and early Seattle Mountaineer Joseph Hazard (1879-1965) wrote in his 1946 book Pacific Crest Trails from Alaska to Cape Horn of meeting Montgomery 20 years earlier, in 1926, in Bellingham. While the two were meeting about textbooks (textbook sales being Hazard’s job at the time) Hazard recalls in his book that Montgomery asked him why the Mountaineers wouldn’t do “something big for Western America? … A high trail winding down the heights of our western mountains with mile markers and shelter huts – like these pictures I’ll show you of the ‘Long Trail of the Appalachians’ – from the Canadian Border to the Mexican Boundary Line!” (Hazard, 57).
Mann suggests “these pictures” that Montgomery showed Hazard in 1926 may have come from a feature on the Appalachian Trail in April 1924 in the national journal American Forests and Forest Life. Mann’s research notes that Montgomery’s close friend and tramping partner, Ida Baker, had written about a Mount Baker trek for the journal years earlier and that Montgomery’s school subscribed to the journal.
Hazard writes that he brought the trail idea that same 1926 evening to Bellingham’s Mount Baker Club, where he was a featured speaker. “Favorable action was taken,” Hazard writes. “The rest of the mountain clubs of the Pacific Northwest promptly contacted all other outdoor organizations. All adopted the project with enthusiasm and organized to promote it. Forest Service cooperated from the beginning, with stress on the north unit from Canada to Columbia River” (Hazard, 57). Sleuthing the Seattle Mountaineers archives, Mann found confirmation that in 1928 the club’s trails committee was discussing a trail from the Canadian to the Mexican border – before the “father” of the PCT proposed the same in 1932.
A Civic Dynamo and Adventurer
Montgomery and her legacy, meantime, are about more than the PCT. She was an adventurer, conservationist, suffragist and civic activist. Born in 1867 on Canada’s Prince Edward Island, she was reported to be related to famed writer L. M. Montgomery (1874-1942), author of Anne of Green Gables. (The author is named a cousin in several sources, an aunt in another.) In her 20s, Catherine Montgomery moved from Nebraska to Washington to start a teaching career. From 1899, when she joined the inaugural faculty at New Whatcom Normal School, until her retirement nearly three decades later, Montgomery taught hundreds of future teachers for the new state of Washington.
Montgomery helped found two of Washington’s earliest women’s clubs, including Bellingham’s Progressive, Literary and Fraternal Club (PLF), in 1900. The PLF was a member of the increasingly influential Washington Federation of Women’s Clubs, developing women’s political and cultural power. (The inaugural president of the PLF was Frances Axtell [1866-1953], who would become one of the first two women elected to the Washington legislature). Montgomery advocated for woman suffrage, as Washington women recouped the right to vote in 1910 after losing it under the Territorial Supreme Court in 1887. She also advocated for Prohibition, libraries, and other causes. Montgomery ran (and lost) as a Democrat for state superintendent of schools in 1920.
And, unsurprisingly, Montgomery’s outdoor adventure credentials were impressive. A 1955 Sports Illustrated story recounts Montgomery as part of a 1906 expedition of the Portland-based Mazamas mountaineering club. (This expedition was where the idea for The Mountaineers of Seattle was conceived, according to a 1988 Mountaineers history.) Composed of eight women and 71 men, the expedition attempted to climb the 10,750-foot northeast face of Mount Baker. The magazine dubbed the “Lady Mazamas'” trek “joyous victory over convention and the wilderness,” noting the women’s “feathery display of hats” poking from their sleeping bags and hours spent on Mazama Dome “sliding fearlessly down its 1,000-foot snow field in tin washbasins, using cedar poles as rudders” (“Bloomers Aloft”).
Montgomery homesteaded in today’s Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest with her fellow tramper and founding faculty member Ida Baker. Each built a log cabin a day’s hike from the nearest train, according to Mann. Records suggest Montgomery fought off officials interested in timber to keep the homestead. Montgomery was well-traveled, with several documented trips overseas and to Alaska, in the company of her friend and famed writer Ella Higginson (1862?-1940), author of the 1908 Alaska the Great Country and Washington’s first poet laureate.
A Conservation Legacy
As to Montgomery’s conservation and outdoors legacy in Washington, it is visible today beyond the state’s roughly 509 miles of PCT. In 1924, the Washington Federation of Women’s Clubs launched a campaign to preserve a section of old-growth forest, selling “Save a Tree” buttons for $1. The original tract near Snoqualmie Pass proved problematic to save over time (thanks to felling by windstorms, logging companies, and the state highway authority). So a new old-growth tract in the lowlands along the White River was selected, with giant trees that were more protected from windstorms. Today, that land is the 574-acre Federation Forest State Park in Enumclaw. Montgomery personally bought and donated two additional acres for a grove to honor Higginson. When Montgomery died in 1957, she left money for the park in an amount worth nearly $1 million today (2025). The interpretive center, completed in 1964, carries her name. Fittingly, the PCT is within striking distance, with main access hubs at White Pass and Chinook Pass. Intrepid hikers today could conceivably travel on foot from the Catherine Montgomery Interpretive Center to the super trail Montgomery helped inspire, using Forest Service roads and feeder trails like the historic Naches.
When Montgomery died, at the age of 90, The Bellingham Herald described her as “a somewhat militant crusader” and “one of Bellingham’s outstanding women” (“Miss Montgomery …”). No mention was made of her as an outdoorswoman.
Mann submitted Montgomery’s name to the Northwest Women’s Hall of Fame as a legacy nominee in 2009. Montgomery’s friends Ella Higginson and Ida Baker had already been inducted as “legacies” a few years prior. In Mann’s nomination, he writes: “But if she had done nothing else, this nomination would be warranted by one thing – her recently acknowledged role as ‘Mother’ of the Pacific Crest Trail … Her lasting effect here may well be measured in centuries, not decades” (Mann).
The following is republished from the Badass Womxn and Enbies in the Pacific Northwest Volume 3, in line with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. It was written by Elizabeth Young.
Catherine Montgomery was born on Prince Edward Island in 1867. At the age of thirty-two she came to Bellingham, Washington to become a founding faculty member of New Whatcom Normal School, which would eventually become Western Washington University. Over her career of 27-years, Montgomery was an educator of teachers. She supervised the educational program and trained a significant amount of Washington state elementary school teachers.
In 1900, Montgomery was a founding member of the Bellingham’s Progressive, Literary and Fraternal (PLF) Club, which encouraging womxn to be involved in cultural and civic activities. Disregarding social norms at the time, Montgomery was described as a fearless adventurer that blazed the trail for countless people to follow in her footsteps both socially and environmentally. She could commonly be found hiking or as she referred to it “tramping” the mountains of Washington with her best friend Ida Baker. As a single womxn in 1902, she homesteaded 160 acres, which one day would become Mt. Baker National Forest. Along with a group of 47 womxn, Montgomery was one of the first womxn to attempt to climb the northeast face of Mt. Baker. Her adventures were featured in a 1955 Sports Illustrated article, which described Montgomery’s expeditions as a “joyous victory over convention and the wilderness”.
Inspired by an article about the Appalachian trail, Montgomery founded the idea of the Pacific Crest National Recreation Trail. Montgomery spread word of her idea to environmental enthuses and soon a Mountaineers’ trail committee was formed. Members of the committee traveled to Los Angeles and pitched the idea to Clinton C. Clarke, who submitted approval to the National Government. In 1977 the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) became a part of the United States National Trails System, a federal organization established under the 1968 National Trails System Act to protect the link between history, culture and the natural landscapes of the United States. The PCT trail begins at the Southern California and Mexico border and travels north 2,650 miles along the Pacific crest through California, Oregon and Washington to the northern Washington and Canadian border.
Catherine Montgomery died in 1957, at the age of 90. Listed in her obituary, she was a suffragette, philanthropist, founding faculty member, environmentalist, leader of the womxn’s club movement in the 1890’s and a 1920 Democratic candidate for state superintendent. She left her estate of over 600 acres to the Federation State Park located by Enumclaw, Washington, where the Catherine Montgomery Nature Interpretive Center was built to welcome guest to the park. To honor her accomplishments, Catherine Montgomery was inducted into the Northwest Womxn’s Hall of Fame and given a Legacy Award.
IW note: Montgomery and Baker lived together, with Montgomery writing in her eulogy for Baker, “Memories of financial struggle, of trans-continental trips, of farming together, come to me as I recall the locking of Ida Baker’s life with mine, but above all comes the memory of tramping together.” This could certainly indicate a romantic partnership in addition to deep friendship.