Tracing My Parents’ Love Story in a Mountain Logbook

Published March 18, 2025 07:41AM

Four years before I was born, in the summer of 1984, my parents hiked to the fire lookout on Yellowstone’s 10,210-foot Mount Washburn and wrote their names in the lime-green federal supply service logbook stored inside. They were newly engaged. She was a 22-year-old nursing student from rural Minnesota who’d left behind the cornfields for a summer job folding sheets and working reception at the park’s Canyon Lodge; he was a 24-year-old ski patroller who spent off-seasons pumping gas at the Yellowstone Park Service Station (YPSS) at Canyon Village. Taking advantage of the long daylight of the Wyoming summer, they dashed out of work and hiked the six-mile trail from Chittenden Road, reaching the two-story, panoramic lookout with just enough time to get back to the car before dark.

My dad doesn’t remember the flower joke. My mom doesn’t remember why she picked 2018. August 25 was the day summer park employees celebrated “Christmas,” with extravagant holiday decorations and gifts—a way to wind down the season together. This explains the many Merry Christmas messages written in the same register ten days later, including another from my mom after she’d hiked up the mountain again with two of her summer friends.

My parents met at the employee bar in the basement of Canyon Lodge. She was with friends, and he bought her a beer. It was only a matter of weeks before my dad called his sister to tell her he’d met the woman he was going to marry. His grandmother helped him buy a ring.

Over the two summers they worked in the park, my parents went adventuring. They drove my dad’s 1970 green Chevy truck down a nearly impassable road deep into the Beartooths and hiked to Grasshopper Glacier—named for the thousands of extinct insects found frozen in its ice. They paddled a Huck Finn–style log raft around an alpine lake in the Wind River Range. Sometimes they just walked the loop of boardwalks around the park’s Norris Geyser basin after work, or along the rim of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River to the Artist Point overlook. After my mom went back to school in Minnesota, they wrote hundreds of letters. When she graduated, my dad took the bus out to marry her.

I know what they wrote on Washburn because after a lightning strike burned one of Yellowstone’s historic fire lookouts to the ground, my mom texted our family’s group thread, frantic that the summit books might have burned, too. And so I went to look for them. I started thinking about how my family, and so many like ours, had left little fragments of themselves in notebooks and ammo cans on top of mountains. The spontaneous messages drafted in a surge of summit exhilaration, or love or loneliness, or in memory of someone who wasn’t there. Or simply in wonder at the supplicatory beauty of this blue-green earth.

We humans are uniquely drawn to summits. And when we get there, we feel the need to do something. We yell, plant flags, leave stones or cairns, wax poetic. Moses walked up Mount Sinai, talked to God, and came back with a set of ethical directives that guide two of the world’s major religions.

Crosses adorn many European mountains, a practice dating back to the 1400s. The quartzite rock atop Mount Olympus (the one above Salt Lake City, not the Greek one) used to be covered with hundreds of painted names, though they were cleaned up years ago.

Today registers are like public diaries. They are sometimes official logbooks and sometimes spiral-bound notebooks, stored in everything from custom waterproof casing to resealable plastic bags. Some are managed by local mountaineering clubs. Others just show up.

I couldn’t find anyone who could tell me for certain when people started recording ascents in summit logbooks, or when the simple lists of names and dates evolved into the messages and drawings inscribed today. All I found was speculation that the tradition began in Europe and that a formalized system for placing registers was established in the United States with the founding of the Sierra Club in California in 1892. But there were registers here before that.

The oldest register in California’s Sierra Nevada dates to 1863. It was placed on Mount Dana, a 13,061-foot peak marking the eastern boundary of Yosemite National Park, by geologist Josiah Whitney (after whom the tallest peak in the contiguous U.S. is named) and botanist William Brewer while conducting the first geological survey of California, though it has since vanished into time.

I learned this after falling down a rabbit hole of summit forums and Reddit threads, but confirmed the register’s oldest-ness through a man named Harry Langenbacher, the Sierra Club’s official mountain records chair. Langenbacher is a retired engineer who lives five miles north of Disneyland. His jurisdiction is the Sierra Peaks Section—247 mountains that include all the significant summits in the Sierra.

Langenbacher told me that his interest in registers started about 50 years ago when he climbed Mount Baxter, a seldom-visited peak on the Sierra Crest. At the top was an old tobacco tin containing the signatures of climbers dating back to the 1930s. “I thought it was fascinating that apparently I was one of the few people that ever went up there,” he said.

Langenbacher has plenty of stories. The register on Black Kaweah, for example—a Class 4 climb that sees very few ascents—once contained the signature of a man named Walter Starr Jr., who in 1929 reached the top without a pen or pencil, pricked his finger, and scrawled his name and the date with his own blood. A search and rescue team also used summit registers to try to locate where Starr went missing in the Minarets in 1933 (his body was eventually found). Even now there are peaks in the Sierra that get climbed so rarely that the signatures stretch back more than half a century. Some of them are still housed in stylish aluminum boxes, designed by a man named Kasper Casperson in the 1920s.

“The original intent with the registers was, you know, there’s no Facebook in 1890, no websites,” Langenbacher told me. “These registers became like a catalog of routes,” meaning that once a register was placed on a peak, the next person to arrive would know that it had been climbed. Some of his favorites are the registers on unnamed peaks.

As mountain records chair, Langenbacher manages the Sierra Nevada Summit Registers website, which looks like it was designed in the nineties and never updated. It lists the various peaks that could use new registers (“Clyde Minaret — Needs small book 8-27-21”), requests help constructing register containers, and admonishes climbers against giving away the specific location of discovered registers on some of the more remote peaks in the Sierra. “This serves only the braggart, the thieves, the vandals, and armchair climbers,” it reads in boldface.

Summit forums and old blogs from Sierra peak baggers often lament the registers that have already disappeared.

Theft is a problem not just in the Sierra. Some people view registers as antithetical to the philosophy of Leave No Trace. Others take them as souvenirs. Langenbacher mentioned one instance in which a group of climbers watched a man toss the register box off a mountain as an act of revenge against some injustice he felt another climber had committed. A group of climbers who called themselves the Purple Mountain Gang were known for taking registers and leaving them on mountains in other states. They are alleged to have stolen one register with signatures dating back to 1912.

Thefts like these are what led an Eastern Sierra photographer named Claude Fiddler to rescue a register from California’s Mount Woodworth that had signatures dating back to 1895. When he and his wife climbed the peak and signed the register in 1992, the letterhead listed John Muir as Sierra Club president (Muir was president of the club from its founding until his death in 1914). But in the early 2000s, Fiddler learned that someone had published detailed directions to the register online. Fearing that the logbook was in peril, he hiked in on a snowy November day, carried it off the windy peak, and hand-delivered it to the Bancroft library at the University of California at Berkeley, which is where most recovered Sierra registers are now housed. (Part of the collection is also at UCLA.)

From 2016 to 2020, I lived in coastal California and drove to the Eastern Sierra most weekends to maintain some proximity to mountains. My partner, Matt, and I had been pulled apart by work, and I missed big, craggy, humbling ranges almost as much as I missed him. My parents moved me and my brother to Montana when we were little, and in so doing had taught us to love rugged landscapes, the kind that give weight to the word awe. During the time Matt and I spent apart, the toothy granite peaks of the eastern side held something that needed holding.

One weekend, a few days after my 30th birthday, I drove to Bishop late on a Friday night, slept in a friend’s van, and ran up the scrambly and exposed north ridge of Bear Creek Spire early the next morning. It was hot. I was alone, and happy in that aloneness. I took a bad selfie at the top and wrote my name in the spiral notebook tucked below the summit block.

Two years later, Matt and I drove a U-Haul from Santa Fe, New Mexico, to California and back again in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic in order to move me out of my coastal apartment. We stopped in the Sierra and climbed Mount Emerson on a day that reminded me why a friend calls Bishop “the prettiest brown place in the world.” Tucked into a rock cleft at the top was a Sierra Peaks Section ammo can. I can’t remember what I wrote, but I signed for both of us, before we descended to a plunge in a freezing alpine pool and more of our lives together.

One of the most thorough register-preservation efforts was led by a local climbing guide in Grand Teton National Park. In the winter of 2007–08, Paul Horton, a former owner of Jackson Hole Mountain Guides, started organizing what at that point was a collection of boxes, loose papers, and government-issue binders, most of which were stored at a log-cabin ranger office in Moose, Wyoming.

The collection is now in the custody of the national park, in an archival storage unit in Moose, but a digital version is available to read on Horton’s website. It recounts dozens of historic ascents, including Glenn Exum’s first ascent of his eponymous route up the Grand Teton, recorded on yellowing ledger paper. There’s also a scrap of paper from the first ascent of Mount Moran in 1922.

“I like summit registers,” Horton told me in an email. He described their historical value but also noted, “I think they are basically a harmless device for people to fulfill what seems to be a basic human need to record their names.”

My dad climbed the Grand Teton in running shoes and signed the register shortly after he and my mom got engaged in 1983, but the Grand’s registers between 1981 and 1986 are all missing. Horton told me that by the late seventies the registers on the Tetons’ most popular peaks were filling up too fast for the rangers to maintain them. When the official registers were removed, people continued to leave sheets of paper behind for others to sign. These unofficial records were harder to keep track of, and the ones that didn’t make it into the archive were lost, damaged, or stolen.

Instead, I looked through the Grand Teton entries from the eighties and earlier that had been preserved, many written on scraps of brittle graph paper.

Summit registers are like treasure hunts. While searching for entries from my parents, I saw photos of famous signatures—one belonging to Alex Honnold from the Clyde Minaret in the Sierra, another from pioneering climber Fred Beckey’s first ascent of Alaska’s Devil’s Thumb. I learned that Larry Penberthey, the man who founded the gear brand Mountain Safety Research, recorded a “very grueling climb” up Rainier in 1938 “from Paradise by way of Kautz Glacier.” The register he signed is now stored at the University of Washington alongside others from the Cascades.

In a collection of firsthand accounts of early travel in Yellowstone, I read that in 1879, just seven years after Yellowstone became America’s first national park, a woman named Elizabeth Wickes from Boulder, Montana, climbed to the summit of Mount Washburn as part of a six-week tour of the newly created park. Writing about her trip, she described a line of perpetual snow and the bluebells they picked and pressed into notebooks, and this:

I learned that registers were stored in everything from homemade jars to custom bronze cylinders. But mostly I learned what people write. Cultural references, jokes, weather conditions, or the difficulty of an ascent. Sarcastic comments about needing to quit smoking or arriving stoned. A lot of humorous begging for a helicopter ride down. Catalogs of wildlife spotted or lamentably not. A lot of misspellings (which I’ve retained). A lot of thanks to God. You can see trends in handwriting styles (neat cursive, like the kind taught by nuns, giving way over time to chicken scratch), as well as music and literature (lots of Grateful Dead and Dharma Bums). Some writers refer to previous entries. Most seemed not to have thought about what they’d write until they arrived. Instead, the words left in registers are simply tactile evidence that someone was there at a certain point in time: alone, with friends, or with the people they love.

We spent a lot of my childhood summers in Yellowstone. I remember rocky-road ice cream, the smell of sulfur, and the charred bark of trees that burned in the historic fires of 1988, the year I was born. My brother and I both took early steps on pathways winding through geyser basins and watched bison through windows before there was so much traffic. When I was one, exactly five years and 22 days after they’d last been there, my parents carried me up Washburn in a backpack.

In June 2024, I returned with them to see what we could find of us in the park’s archival register collection. There isn’t an organized or concerted effort to preserve Yellowstone’s summit registers, but the ones that have been recovered are housed in the park’s research library in the gateway town of Gardiner, Montana. Past the display cases of black-and-white photographs and suspended animal bones is an otherwise normal-looking library. There my parents and I paged through logbooks from the years they’d hiked Yellowstone’s summits and the years we’d hiked Washburn as a family. At a volume too loud for appropriate library etiquette, they talked and laughed while trying to recall dates and stories.

The most complete collection of Washburn registers is from the nineties, though the library also keeps a few from the eighties and the early aughts. We also found two logbooks from Electric Peak, a more remote and less visited summit. My dad climbed it when he worked in the park, and told me that it was long and difficult, and mostly done by park employees. We didn’t find his entry, but we did find others.

We found a few entries from my parents’ friends and coworkers in the 1984 Washburn book, including a very convoluted inside joke that showed up on one page with my dad’s signature and reappeared months later when their friend Paul Cimino climbed it again. “Too tired, must turn back, live to climb another day.”

My parents have been married for 40 years, and don’t really talk to each other anymore like newly in love people do, which is what made this discovery so delightful.

After we found the note from my parents about eating flowers and returning in 2018, my dad said, “Let’s keep looking. There might be a lonely one from me, pining for Mom after she left for the summer.” And a dozen or so pages on, there it was. One of the last of the season, and the final entry of the day:

At the end of our trip, I drove with my parents to the Washburn trailhead and carried my two-month-old son to the summit. It was raining sideways. He was zipped up inside my jacket for protection. The clouds parted on the way up, and we could see all the way to the Tetons. And there were flowers. When we reached the top, another storm rolled in and my parents and I watched lightning ping off the surrounding peaks while my baby gazed out the window of the lookout and listened to the rain plonking on the metal roof above us.

There isn’t a register at the top anymore. Maybe they were filling up too quickly, or the books were removed during COVID and never put back. But I knew what I’d write had one been there. Something not too long, in order to save space for the next person. Something like this.

Why Do We Leave Notes on Top of Mountains? It’s Personal.