Page 1 2 3

View Photo Gallery

The requisite scenic drive up to the top of Steptoe Butte is a ritual for students and their families arriving for the start of school or football games, for foreign students eager for a bird's eye view of their new home, for couples searching for the most romantic sunset, for paragliders learning to take flight, for professional photographers from all over the world.

The pool is shaded by maidenhair ferns and thirsty red cedars, but his initials, “VTM 1964,” are still visible, etched in shaky script at the bottom of the concrete basin that captures spring water off the mountainside.

Virgil Talmadge McCroskey, a Colfax pharmacist from one of eastern Washington’s most prominent pioneering families, carved his initials into the bottom of this concrete basin at age 88.

Though he passed away a quarter of a century ago, the spring and the forested ridge from which it bubbles up are part of the legacy of land left by a man ahead his time: The wheeling, dealing Whitman County bachelor—one the first graduates of Washington State University—spent his life and fortune amassing thousands of acres for the rest of us to enjoy.

In the beginning, the odds were overwhelmingly against him—state legislators repeatedly refused his gifts, locals gossiped about his eccentric ways, family members were convinced he was squandering their wealth, and there was no end to the red tape and backbreaking labor the parks would require. But by the time he died in 1970, McCroskey’s visionary conservation efforts had made headlines in Life magazine, which heralded him by the nickname locals had been calling him for years: The Man Who Gave Away Mountains.

Today, most residents of the Palouse have benefited at least once from McCroskey’s gift of Steptoe Butte. A narrow road winds several times around the naked peak, which rises abruptly from the soft folds of farmland between Colfax and Spokane. The view from the top spans 360 degrees—from the Palouse Country’s gentle hills, quilted in a colourful patchwork, to the mountains beyond. The requisite scenic drive up to the top of the butte is a ritual for students and their families arriving for the start of school or football games, for foreign students eager for a bird’s-eye view of their new home, for couples searching for the most romantic sunset, for paragliders learning to take flight, for professional photographers from all over the world.

“Steptoe Butte could be developed. There could be houses on top and at the base of it, says heir Lauren McCroskey, who works as an architectural historian for U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Center for Expertise for the Preservation of Historic Buildings and Structures. “Instead it is something for everybody to enjoy.”

Like water, open space is an increasingly precious commodity in the West. The yarn goes that Daniel Boone would always move westward whenever he saw smoke from another man’s cabin. McCroskey heard that “me first” attitude knocking at the door of the nation’s most treasured places long before the region’s salmon runs became threatened and clearcutting left scabs of barren land visible to every jet passenger crossing the West. He had plenty of his own property to preserve and improve, but he knew such efforts wouldn’t endure.

“Some folks spend their whole lifetime beautifying an estate,” he once said. “They spend a lot of money, but sometimes all that beauty disappears after they are gone, particularly if the property falls into the hands of someone who has no similar interests.” McCroskey envisioned what he called “enduring projects,” and as the conservation fervor of the early 1900s began to spark state movements across the nation, he wasn’t alone. Like Gifford Pinchot, Aldo Leopold, John Muir, Bob Marshall, and other key conservationists who gained prominence in the 1930s, Virgil McCroskey had not only affection for nature, but a utilitarian vision of access for “everyman” and a steadfast determination to save it through his own personal efforts.

Page 1 2 3

Continued