Bob and Ira Spring

There are those legends, the Ed Abbeys and Fred Beckeys and Yvon Chouinards of the world, who define what it means to be an outdoor person. We hold images of them — Beckey hitchhiking with a sign penned “will belay for food,” Chouinard wild and rambling down the Pacific Coast — in our minds as if they were the patron saints of dirtbaggery, conservation, and heart for wild places. Growing up in Washington State, however, two lesser-known names figured prominently in my introduction to the outdoors.

Bob and Ira Spring photographed the spiral-bound wildflower guide I still religiously carry with me on summer hikes in the Cascades, carefully documented hundreds of trails in the state for best-selling guidebooks that opened up Washington’s wilderness areas to thousands of new hikers, and contributed to the original edition of the mountaineer’s bible, Mountaineering: Freedom of the Hills. They were part of a broader community of climbers and hikers who doubled as writers and photographers in the Pacific Northwest, but their