Mount Adams: Pahto, the Sacred Mountain

The Yakama Nation knows the mountain to the north of the Columbia River as Pahto. It is not a geological feature to them and was not a geological feature to their ancestors. It is a presence, a being, the same spirit whose rivalry with Wy'east and Loowit, the mountains we call Hood and St. Helens, the oral tradition places at the center of how this landscape came to be.

Mount Adams, by the names the United States uses, is the second-highest peak in Washington, reaching twelve thousand two hundred eighty-one feet. The mountain's slopes, particularly the huckleberry fields at Bird Creek Meadows on its south side, were traditional Yakama harvesting grounds for generations. Huckleberries were dried, traded, and stored as winter food. The meadows were managed land, not wilderness; the Yakama had cultivated their productivity for centuries.

In nineteen seventy-two, the United States government transferred a significant portion of the mountain's slopes into Yakama jurisdiction as part of a land return agreement. It was one of the few such restorations in the Pacific Northwest, a moment when the federal government acknowledged, in at least one instance, what had been taken. The Yakama Nation manages the Bird Creek Meadows area today; access for non-tribal members requires a tribal recreation permit.

The mountain itself is visible from much of the Columbia Gorge on a clear day, its broad, glacier-draped summit rising above the eastern Cascades. It does not erupt with the drama of Mount St. Helens or the symmetry of Mount Hood. It simply sits, twelve thousand feet and more, over territory the Yakama Nation has held in memory and in law for as long as the mountain has stood.