WILLIAMPOOLE
Looking east up the Columbia River from Cape Horn. Nancy Russell, Friends of the Columbia Gorge, and TPL worked together to protect
the top of Cape Horn from development.
executive director of the Friends group, beginning a
close professional and personal relationship that would
last until her death. They were tennis partners for
years, and after Blair joined TPL, they worked together
to help complete 80 conservation projects that protect
17,000 acres in the gorge.
“Nancy was one of those rare people who in addition
to having the passion, steel, and selflessness necessary to
lead a movement, had the drive to succeed,” Blair told the
more than 600 people who gathered for Russell’s memorial service last October.
CATALYSTS TO ACTION
Nancy Russell began her conservation career as a
homemaker who loved the outdoors, in particular,
botanizing. She and her husband, Bruce, had five children, and when she wasn’t busy tending them, Nancy
raised plants and organized a conservation program for
the Portland Garden Club. In a 2008 profile, The
Oregonian writer Katy Muldoon penned that Nancy
would “put her children on the school bus, race to the
gorge, hike and hunt flowers all day, then bolt home in
time to gather her kids and get dinner on the table.”
Often she explored the gorge with such authorities as
Barbara Robinson from the Native Plant Society of
Oregon and Russ Jolley, author of Wildflowers of the
Columbia Gorge: A Comprehensive Field Guide (Oregon
Historical Society Press, 1988).
In the 1970s, a proposed bridge across the Columbia
River north of Portland threatened to spread suburban
sprawl to the Washington side of the gorge, where development rules were much more lax than in Oregon. Once
again, it seemed clear that a federal solution was the route
to protection. Joining with others who loved the gorge,
Nancy asked Oregon’s then senator Mark Hatfield for
