Skier, climber and photographer George Henderson has lived a life of adventure and now in his 90th year relives some of those adventures in this memoir, Lonely on the Mountain. However, the book is more than the memoir of one man - it is also the memoir of a mountain - Mount Hood - from the 1920s to World War II.
The book begins with an account of George's childhood. In 1920 the family moved to Montana where his father built a modern sawmill on the Flathead Indian Reservation. During the next 10 years, they lived in western Montana and Idaho, following the fortunes of the lumber business. By 1930 when George entered high school in Portland, Oregon, he had trapped fur in the Bitterroot Range, panned gold and driven four-horse freight wagons in the Clearwater Range at Headquarters, Idaho, and learned downhill skiing from a protege of Austria's Hannes Schneider. Right after finishing high school, he climbed to the summit of Mount Hood five times, the summit of Mount Adams twice, and the summit of Mount St. Helens once.
In 1935 in the middle of the Great Depression George quit his mind-numbing job as a variety store trainee and struck out on his own as a freelance writer, photographer, and publicist. Downhill and slalom skiing were just emerging in the western United States. For the next eight years, he rode the ever-increasing wave of its popularity and was somehow involved in almost every winter sports event on Mount Hood before World War II, from publicist to organizer and often as a participant.
Perhaps his most visible and lasting contribution to the history of Mount Hood was his early involvement in the growth of world-renowned Timberline Lodge. It started with a publicity picture he made of 18-year-old Delores Enebo, standing on a snow bank in a bathing suit at the future site of the lodge. It ended, temporarily, on December 7, 1941, when just as he returned from a three-month publicity tour of the Midwest and East Coast the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.
In his dual roles of publicist for Timberline Lodge and ski columnist for the Oregon Journal, George made the acquaintance of many national and international celebrities including President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Norway's Crown Prince Olav, writer Ernie Pyle, designer Emilio Pucci, and Sir Arnold Lunn.
George M. Henderson was born August 19, 1915, on a showplace Indiana farm. His mother, Verlinda Miller, was a frontier aristocrat and his father, Ben Wymond Henderson, a Montana lumberman. Most of his first 30 years were spent in the mountains as a youngster in Montana and Idaho logging camps, as a Forest Service lookout and smoke chaser in Oregon, as a pioneer in the early development of skiing on Mount Hood, and as an outdoor writer and ski columnist.
George served three years in the in the Merchant Marine during World War II, and after the war, worked for 30 years in the banking industry, eventually becoming Executive Vice President of First National Bank of Oregon. After retiring from that job at age 65, he spent 16 years as President of the Oregon Independent College Foundation.
George and Janice Himmelwright were married in 1952 and had four daughters and one son, all living in Oregon.
