![\"Heathershaw](\"http:\/\/www.sportspaper.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/08\/Heathershaw-in-Canadian-Interior-Range-B.C.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nKent Heathershaw in Andes in Peru<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
By Terry Mosher<\/p>\n
Editor, Sports Paper<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Kent Heathershaw for many years to count was an integral part of the outdoors community as the head of the mountaineering program at Olympic College. If you wanted to learn how to climb mountain peaks and do it safely, chances are you learned from him.<\/p>\n
But that is not the complete Heathershaw resume. He also was ski instructor at OC and taught art and other subjects when needed, coached tennis at West Bremerton-Bremerton High School.<\/p>\n
Heathershaw, who lives in Southworth, also continues to hike and camp and climb and play tennis at the age of 84. Just this past weekend he was climbing Lake Angeles, a modest climb of about 4,000 feet.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe were up there surrounded by two to three goats,\u201d says Heathershaw.<\/p>\n
He went hiking the weekend before that with his grandkids north of Hoquiam and along the beach for several miles and then camping.<\/p>\n
Heathershaw and the wilderness, the woods, and the mountains go together like bread and butter. He belongs to the outdoors as much as the mushrooms, the bears, the deer, and moss growing on old growth trees. And his presence in the outdoors started at a young age<\/p>\n
\u201cI started working when I was about 15 years old for the U.S. Forest Service,\u201d says Heathershaw. \u201cI was the lookout for about three different years in the summer in the northwest corner of Washington, and I did it in a couple places in Idaho.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lookout towers began to be built in the early 1900s because of The Great Fire of 1910 that consumed 3,000,000 acres in Washington, Idaho and Montana. The lookouts were usually built at the peak of mountains to give the person in the lookout a maximum view to spot fires and either put them out themselves or to alert fire personnel.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou usually had a stairway (to the tower) and an (Osborne) Fire Finder (that determined the angle to the fire),\u201d says Heathershaw.<\/p>\n
His work required him to be alone in these towers for three months at a time over a summer. He would be supplied every so often by a pack train.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey (the towers) were probably eight-feet square,\u201d Heathershaw says. \u201cIt\u2019s pretty exciting up there. During storms all the nails would turn blue because of lightening. I\u2019d lay on the middle of the floor (to avoid touching any medal) until the lightening passed by.\u201d<\/p>\n
Heathershaw uses \u201cpretty exciting\u201d a lot while discussing his many mountaineering adventures to various parts of the world in 15 different countries. It\u2019s his way of expressing the danger of those experiences, and a way of almost dismissing those dangers, as in \u201cit was pretty exciting.\u201d<\/p>\n
You and me would probably used far different words, as in \u201clet\u2019s get the (blank) out of here.\u201d<\/p>\n
Heathershaw graduated from Lewis and Clark High School in Spokane in 1947 and went on to college at Eastern Washington where he got two degrees, one in education and the other in fine arts.<\/p>\n
He became an illustrator for numerous books, including the \u201cClimber\u2019s Guide to the Olympic Mountains (which has recently been renamed\u00a0 \u201cOlympic Mountains: A Climbing Guide\u201d) of which he is one of the authors. He also has been a life-long painter.<\/p>\n
Heathershaw was not a sports guy in high school, but at Eastern tried out for the baseball team and played tennis for the school and has shown over the course of his life that he has excellent athletic ability.<\/p>\n
He probably inherited some of that athletic ability from his dad\u00a0 \u2013 Earl Heathershaw \u2013\u00a0who was a pitcher and played minor league baseball in the then Brooklyn Dodgers\u2019 organization with the Spokane Indians.<\/p>\n
\u201cHis wife didn\u2019t like baseball so he had to quit,\u201d says Heathershaw. \u201cThere wasn\u2019t much money in baseball in those days.\u201d<\/p>\n
Heathershaw started playing tennis at Eastern when he was a junior. He went undefeated as a senior while playing No. 2 singles behind Jack Dunn, who was from Bremerton. He and Dunn won the conference doubles championship in his senior year.<\/p>\n
After graduating from Eastern Washington in 1951, Heathershaw was taken into the Army (he served from 1951-53), and was sent to intelligence school at Fort Holabird in Maryland. Thus equipped, Heathershaw was sent to Korea where he served as an intelligent officer during the Korean Conflict.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe gathered information on enemy forces,\u201d says Heathershaw, \u201cand what tactics they were using.\u201d<\/p>\n
The information gathered was mostly about the Chinese, who had entered the fray in October of 1950.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey outnumbered us something like eight to one,\u201d says Heathershaw.<\/p>\n
When he came back from Korea he used the GI Bill to go back to Eastern Washington for a year to get his second degree, this in education in 1955. He then taught for the 1955-56 school year at Shelton High School where he played on a semi-pro basketball team.<\/p>\n
Bob Fredericks, a friend and longtime Bremerton activist in the local sports community (also a founder of the Bremerton Tennis & Athletic Club; now the Kitsap Tennis & Athletic Center), jokes about Heathershaw playing against and guarding the great Johnny O\u2019Brien in one basketball game.<\/p>\n
\u201cKent held him to 40 points,\u201d Fredericks says.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was the other guard\u2019s fault,\u201d laughs Heathershaw.<\/p>\n
After one year at Shelton, Heathershaw got a job teaching art at Bremerton\u2019s West High School in 1956 (the first year West High opened its doors). And for 20 years he was the tennis coach at the school, winning several Capitol League championships.<\/p>\n
It was while he was at West an Olympic College administrator, George Martin, recruited him to take over the mountaineering program at the college. Little did anybody know at the time this would be the start of something good, and that Heathershaw would last as the head of the program for 40 years before retiring.<\/p>\n
For the first 30 years he taught OC mountaineering as a part-time job while he continued teaching at West High\/ Bremeton High School (1978 West and East merged back to Bremerton HS). When he retired teaching at the high school he began teaching art at OC along with his mountaineering and ski classes.<\/p>\n
The mountaineering program evolved over the years to where he enlarged classes in backpacking survival and pushed out from basic mountaineering to advance mountaineering.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think I had more students than all the other PE teachers,\u201d said Heathershaw, who never had a student suffer a major injury unless you consider bee stings major.\u00a0 But then Heathershaw had plenty of experience. Before he began taking over the mountaineering program at OC he had interrupted his teaching to enter the University of Oregon for its masters program.<\/p>\n