Lake name origins

[Brian Curtis]

A.H. “Hal” Sylvester was the Wenatchee National Forest supervisor from 1908 to 1931. During those years, and the previous twelve working for USGS, he named over 3000 mountain features. I spent a day last week at the UW library going through his papers looking for lake name origins. I’ll post some of the fun ones here.

First up are the Ladies’ Lakes. This is excerpted from Place Naming In the Northwest by A.H. Sylvester, 1943

Nineteen-nine was a bad fire year, but rather late in its fall Ranger Burne Canby and I made a trip into the high country of the Icicle Creek Watershed. Trails were very sketchy affairs or there weren’t any. Rather late one evening we camped in a little meadow well up toward the top of Icicle Ridge. It was cold. We didn’t realize how cold until the next morning when we found our meadow heavily covered with white frost. I hadn’t been giving any names thus far on this trip but called the meadow Frosty and the little creek that ran through it Frosty Creek. Packing up we rode to the summit of Icicle Ridge (Named so later) to a fairly low pass which I called Frosty Pass. We turned east along the ridge and hadn’t gone far when we saw below us in a glacial pocket a beautiful lake of perhaps sixty acres. I had with me a copy of the Chiwaukum Quadrangle which covered the area through which we were traveling and turned to it to find the name of the lake, but lo and behold, it was not shown. The topographers had missed it. I sketched it in and asked Burne what we should call it. He had two sisters, Margaret and Mary. I said, “We will call it Margaret.” We had ridden but a little more then a quarter of a mile farther when another lake showed up not very far below us but draining down to Margaret. This promptly became Mary.

We were in mountain-meadow type of country now, than which there is none more beautiful. Somewhat tired from several previous hard days we made camp here for a rest and to let our horses fill up on the best grass we had encountered. The next morning we continued eastward along Icicle Ridge, which shadows Icicle Creek from its head to its junction with Wenatchee River. We climbed over a slippery shoulder and hadn’t gone far when before us, sheltered under a timbered cliff and glittering in the morning sun, was another lake likewise unmapped and unnamed. Margaret and Mary had a friend, so this became Lake Florence.

This was getting interesting so I said to Burne, “If we find another we will name it for Mrs. Sylvester.” We rode on past Florence and rounded the shoulder of a little ridge making down from Icicle Ridge, and looking across a wide grassy slope, an ancient glacial cirque at the head of a small branch of the Icicle later called Spanish Camp Creek from a Spaniard who once ran a sheep there, we saw glittering through alpine fir and hemlock the fourth lake already by agreement christened Alice. We were doing pretty well and getting on our mettle. We decided that if we discovered another lake, Flora, the wife of Ranger Green should have it. Our trail led us up through a pass in the main ridge at the head of Spanish Camp Creek where we looked down on the north slope, and there was lake Flora on a bench breaking over into one of the forks of Chiwaukum Creek. I have seen this lake on other occasions and from other angles, when its waters were as blue as the other mountain lakes in the region, but that morning looking down on it from above because of the angle of observation of peculiar atmospheric conditions it was a deep emerald green, very proper under the circumstances.

Eastward from the pass whence we saw Flora, a high sharp peak (I called it Cape Horn) stood in the way of our progress, but looking closely I discovered a trail climbing steep and narrow up ant to the right. “Somewhat scared we took it, and it led us around the mountain to where we got a view of mountain meadows in the head of another branch of Chiwaukum Creek where nestled in a hollow in a field of barren rock was our sixth lake, Edna, from Burne’s best girl. We made camp in the meadows and thought we had had a pretty good day.

The next day there was considerable difficulty with the trail, but we fund a way through and found three more lakes. Two of these were shown on the topographic map, but one incorrectly as to size. I named these two Augusta and Ida from my mother and my wife’s sister. The third as the largest we saw on the trip. It lies in a deep glacial cirque on the north side of Cashmere Mountain at an elevation of about 5500 feet. I do not wonder the topographers missed it. The point from which we saw it is a high peak on the Icicle Ridge from which we looked straight up the canyon in which it lies. I doubt if it can be seen from any other vantage point. I named it Victoria from England’s queen.

That ended the lake finding and naming for that trip. I have gone into it at such length because it marked the beginning of a practice we followed on the Forest for years. There are approximately 150 lakes and ponds on the Forest, some of the smaller ones not yet named. The numbers of ladies’ lakes grew until practically all rangers’ and other Forest Service men’s wives, sisters, sweethearts, mothers and daughters had lakes named for them. There is a good story in me in connection with the group of lakes in the naming of which I have just gone into detail. After the names got on the Forest map and began to be known, a group of men from Cashmere, game enthusiasts, went out to plant the lakes with trout fry. Near Lake Flora they found still another lake which I and other forest officers had missed and which was neither named nor shown on the map. “Huh!” said Jack Gonser, “This must be Lake Brigham”. When they returned they told me of it with great glee. I told them, “Fine, it shall be Lake Brigham.” And now Brigham is on the map surrounded by his harem.

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