Inspiring Index

Mount Index stands like a majestic gate where the Skykomish Valley starts to tighten and the climb to Stevens Pass begins in earnest. Here in 1913 the photographer Lee Pickett climbed the hill behind Index, his hometown, and looked not east toward the pass but southwest to both Mount Index, on the left, and Mount Persis on the right. Two years earlier Pickett and three others started scaling Index confident that they would be the first climbers to make the summit. To the quartet's surprise, when they reached the top they found a flagpole, although no flag.

Homesteader Amos Gunn started the town of Index as a roadhouse for miners, lumberjacks and Great Northern Railroad workers. The first transcontinental train through Stevens Pass reached Seattle in 1893, the year Gunn also platted his town and named it after the mountain. Three years earlier he had also named the mountain — peculiarly. For Gunn, the columns standing across the sheer northeast face of the peak resembled fingers, and so he named it after one of them.

From the early 1900s well into the 1940s, Lee Pickett was all over the Skykomish Valley with his camera, and so became a familiar character in the valley. The Pickett Historical Museum in Index exhibits his work, and the negatives are preserved at the University of Washington's Special Collections.

Readers who use the Internet may want to examine a few hundred more examples of Pickett's recordings on the U.W. Libraries Web page. You can go directly to his pictures at http://content.lib.washington.edu/pickettweb/index.html.

"Washington Then and Now," the new book by Paul Dorpat and Jean Sherrard, can be purchased through www.washingtonthenandnow.com ($45) or through Tartu Publications at P.O. Box 85208, Seattle, WA 98145.