Immortalizing the History of the Issaquah Alps Trails Club in Print

The casual Issaquah Alps hiker--or even those that hit the trails daily--might not be aware how much the Issaquah Alps Trail Club facilitates access to their favorite park. In fact, they might not even realize that the IATC is the entire reason Squak, Tiger, and Cougar mountains exist as the recreational sanctuaries that they are today. Even within the club, the IATC is focused on the future of the Issaquah Alps: important, consuming work that leaves little time to consider the club’s past and origins. Doug Simpson, however, is working to ensure that the rich history of the IATC--including its founders-- are never forgotten.

The IATC was formed in 1979 out of a need for conservation, access, and shared trail information for Issaquah’s local mountains. The founder, local enthusiast and hiking book author Harvey Manning, for whom the eponymous trails are named, started a grassroots community, focused around the Issaquah mountains that Harvey cheekily named the “Issaquah Alps,” quickly became a serious force for not only the Issaquah Alps but other local trail systems, including the Mountains to Sound Greenway Trust. From its inception, the club’s activity and news were distributed via quarterly articles, forming the Alpiner newsletter that still exists today. These articles, although purely functional at the time, have become a textual time capsule for the club’s history, including both causal community events and monumental conservational wins. Although these charming vintage articles--often embellished with hand-drawn notes or drawings and many written by Harvey himself --detail forest updates, President’s reports, and community meetups, are archived and available to read on the IATC website, Doug Simpson wants to bring them back to life in their original form.

Doug is a retired English teacher who was a dedicated member of the club from 2003-2019, including serving on the board for many years and ambitiously accepting the role of president after only one year in the club. He was also the Alpiner editor and primary author for much of this time, along with early club pioneers Bill Longwell, Ralph Owen, and past president Ken Konigsmark. In 2019, Doug, a self-proclaimed “print-person,” proposed to the club the idea for an IATC history book, where he would collate important articles from the Alpiner’s 40-year history (many of them written by Doug) for publication in a printed book. The IATC board greenlighted this project, which is now in progress. In addition to Doug’s article compilation, Tom Anderson, current board member and local history enthusiast, agreed to assist with the publication by supplementing the text with archival newspaper clippings and historical club photos that Tom had already serendipitously already been carefully collecting for the past five years as a personal passion project. Doug, who wants to make sure the IATC is looking to the past as well as the future, feels that the book is “something the club should have, an official document of it’s important history,” Now, with Tom’s visual embellishments and a forward by Dave Kappler, IATC charter member and the longest active member of the board, the archival Alpiner will live on in a commemorative book available to all who enjoy and Issaquah Alps and their history. 

A remarkable feature of the IATC is the inter-generationality of not only the parks’ users, but the club itself: while finding the time to volunteer for conservationist organization may stereotypically be a retiree’s game, the IATC board and volunteers span from recent college graduates to seasoned “oldtimers,” as Doug calls the earlier members. While this mix of perspectives can only be beneficial for the future of the club, Doug wants to make sure that the younger club members, who weren’t part of the establishment of the Mountains to Sound Greenway or the Bullitt family’s donation of Squak Mountain to the state, remember the history just as well as those who witnessed and facilitated these momentous accomplishments. When asked what he hopes readers glean from the upcoming book, Doug said that he doesn’t want “people to forget how much we had to do with all of those mountains,” a desire that has motivated him to pull on his journalistic background to bring to life an IATC time capsule in print form. Doug and Tom, who have both previously authored Issaquah-related publications, are now hoping to complete the book by the end of the year so that it will be available for purchase via Amazon and the IATC by early 2022.

In the meantime, the Alpiner digital archive is worth a visit, as are Doug and Tom’s previous publications. But there’s something special about a good old-fashioned paper book, and we look forward to the IATC’s history, supplemented with archival and current photos, to be available to peruse after a long day on the trails.