Saying Goodbye

RACHAEL WOODHOUSE KESTER

NOVEMBER 26, 1916DECEMBER 23, 2021

Rachael Kester with some of her needlepoint in 2014, when she was 98. Rachael and Randall Kester on top of Mitchell Peak in May of1941, their first summer in Portland.

by Sylvia Oboler

Rachel W. Kester died at home on December 23, 2021, at the age of 105, surrounded by her loving family. Rachel Lenora Woodhouse was born November 26, 1916, in Bloomington, Wisconsin, the middle child of Linn A. and Esther Perky Woodhouse. She graduated from Bloomington High School in 1933 and, at the height of the Great Depression, the family moved to Madison so she could attend the University of Wisconsin, where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa with an AB in French and Spanish in 1937. In 1940, she married Randall Blair Kester, and the two of them settled in Portland, Oregon, where Randall practiced law and where they lived until 2012. Rachael then moved to Boulder, Colorado, to be near her three daughters.

When the children were young, Rachael was a stay-at-home mother devoted to the family. She was a Girl Scout leader and took the troops camping in Oregon and Washington, often primitive camping at Spirit Lake (since buried by the Mount St. Helens eruption) and sailing in the San Juan Islands. When the troop was locked out of Duck Lake Lodge at Wind Mountain Girl Scout Camp, she pulled her trusty Swiss Army knife out of her knapsack and took the door off its hinges. Since then, her daughters always have a pocketknife in their purses. She supported her daughters’ swim teams, becoming a timer and driving endless hours to practice and meets. She sewed many of their clothes, and even wove the cloth and sewed the wedding dresses for two daughters. She encouraged a love of reading, with weekly library visits a part of our childhood.

Once her youngest daughter left for college, Rachel became an accomplished fiber artist. She started with weaving and then expand to spinning, knitting, needlepoint, and natural dyeing, eventually teaching spinning and natural dyeing at the Oregon School for Arts and Crafts. In 2000, she had a one-woman fiber art show at the Doll Gardner Center. In 1966, she took a class at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI) on petroglyph rubbing, and many of her rubbings from the Northwest are now hanging in museums and tribal buildings. She believed that lifelong learning kept her young and continued to learn new art techniques throughout her life. She always maintained that she was not an artist, just working hard at it, but we really know that she really was a talented artist. In 2010, at the age of 93, she learned pastel portraiture and became a certified teacher. In 2019, at the age of 102, she had a show of her life’s artwork, showing 20 different techniques starting with metalwork in the 1950s to watercolors at the age of 100.

When Rachael arrived in Oregon after their marriage, the first thing Randall bought her was a pair of hobnailed hiking boots. From then on, she was a northwestern outdoorswoman, participating in mountain climbing, camping, hiking, powerboating, rafting, canoeing, and bicycling. She was a life member of the Mazamas. She was a longterm member of the West Hills Unitarian Fellowship and especially active in WHUF outdoor activities as the gummy worm lady.

Rachel was preceded in death by her parents, her sister Ella Jane Swan, her brother Milton K. Woodhouse, and her husband of 71 years, Randall Kester. She is survived by her daughters Laura Castor and Lynne Kepter-Meyer of Boulder, Colorado, and Dr. Sylvia Oboler of Denver, and granddaughter Virginia Kester-Meyer of Boulder. In lieu of services, please remember Rachel by enjoying time outdoors or taking up a new art project. Contributions to the food bank would be appreciated.

CECILLE O. BEYL

MARCH 3, 1935 DECEMBER 20, 2021

Cecille grew up in New York City and later graduated as one of only two women in her class of 100 at SUNY Upstate Medical School. She became a physician and later chair of the Department of Pediatric Cardiology at Oregon Health Sciences University. Following her retirement in 1995, she went on to earn masters degrees in both history and French.

Cecille joined the Mazamas in 1974, and in 1981 she met her life partner, Gary Beyl, on a Mazama climb. During their subsequent 40 years together, they traveled the world, sometimes on Mazama Outings, visiting friends and studying. Cecille traveled to all seven continents. In 2002, she earned her 16 Peaks Award for climbing major mountains in the Pacific Northwest.

She was also a Mazama hike leader from 1994 to 2009, leading nearly 50 hikes during that time. Her trademark hikes were 15+ miles and included plant identification; Cecille would stop to identify local wildflowers by their Latin names. She was also an expert in orienteering with a map and compass.

Here is an excerpt from her originally published obituary that seems apt—“The astrophysicists remind us that we are all made of stardust. The stardust that in life made up Cecille Beyl, though no longer contained in that tiny body, remains a part of the Universe.”

JANET MCCALL

APRIL 2, 1948 JANUARY 25, 2022

Janet McCall, a Mazama member since 1992, died unexpectedly from a stroke in late January. She had recently attended the Classics holiday luncheon in early December.

After Janet joined the Mazamas she took to climbing like a natural. Before her first year of membership was out she had climbed the Guardian Peaks and gotten that award. The Oregon Cascades Peaks followed the next year. By 1995, she had climbed all 16 Major Peaks and began her brief career as a Mazama climb leader. For the next three years, she was concurrently a Mazama climb leader and hike leader, and assisted on climbs with other leaders. She served on the Climbing Committee in 1995 and on the First Aid Committee from 1994–1996.

Professionally, she was a delivery driver for UPS until fellow Mazama leader Bill Dewsnap got her into union construction work as a Journeyman Pipefitter with Local 290. After many years of that, she became a Pipefitter Foreman for several different contractors in the Portland area, mostly working on the Intel plant in Hillsboro.

Janet is survived by her oldest sister, Anne, children Kristen Holt, Mark Pflug, and Andrew McCall, son-in-law Jay Holt, daughters-in-law Melanie Kebler and Jenn McCall, and grandchildren Jeffrey and Cameron Holt, Elise Kebler, and Fiona and August McCall.

A date for a service had not been set as this issue of the Bulletin went to press.

C. WILLIAM “BILL” SAVERY

JANUARY 3, 1935 JANUARY 14, 2022

CAROLYN W. WENRICH

AUGUST 22, 1946 JANUARY 14, 2022

NICKOLAS JAUREGUY

JULY 26, 1926 MAY 21, 2021

LATHROP GLACIER

???CA. 2020

Lathrop Glacier, Oregon’s smallest and southernmost glacier, died after a long battle with climate change. Lathrop was born on the steep north slope of Mt. Thielsen, in the Cascade Range. It grew up—or, rather down—in two steep chutes, comprising a double-armed field of ice about half the size of a football field. The chutes were so steep that Lathrop’s movement could not be tracked with stakes. Instead, a geochemist tracked its gradual shrinkage in photographs, last capturing an image in 2016. Lathrop’s exact date of disappearance is not known, but the Oregon Glacier Institute visited the site in 2020 and found it had vanished.

Lathrop is preceded in death by its namesake, Mazama Ted Lathrop, who encountered it during a hike in 1966. It is survived by a small, lush ecosystem at the base of the mountain sustained by Thielsen Creek. Without the glacier’s snowmelt, that ecosystem will likely perish in 10 to 20 years.