Multifaceted Harriet Bullitt honored for long environmental fight
Those were the days before a series of dams blocked fish from swimming upstream and turned the currents into stagnant pools.
"That's 60 years of environmental degradation," said the unconventional Bullitt who, at various points in her 80 years, has been a socialite, a flamenco dancer, an airplane pilot and a tugboat captain, but always a champion of environmental causes.
Last night in Seattle, Bullitt received the National Audubon Society's highest honor — the Audubon Medal — joining a distinguished line of recipients that includes former President Carter, author Rachel Carson and actor Robert Redford as well as the late U.S. Supreme Court justice from Washington state, William O. Douglas, and Seattle's Hazel Wolf, who died in 2000.
The youngest of three philanthropic siblings — her brother is Stimson Bullitt and sister is the late Patsy Bullitt Collins — Harriet Bullitt always has been more comfortable riding horses and camping out in Eastern Washington than spending time in Seattle's exclusive Highlands, where she grew up.
Over the decades, she has helped clean up nuclear waste, prevented the logging of 600- to 800-year-old trees on Vancouver Island and preserved Siskiyou mountain wilderness areas in Oregon. She has contributed much of her own fortune and that of the Bullitt Foundation to such causes.
"She has a national and a global perspective," said John Flicker, Audubon president.
At Icicle Creek, in her own back yard, personal memories fuel her thus far unsuccessful attempt to fully restore the creek. She's taken that battle to congressional offices in Washington, D.C., and brought it to the attention of Department of the Interior Secretary Gale Norton.
Not just about fish
For the slight woman with the keen blue eyes and wide smile, it's about maintaining the creek of her childhood, which lulled her to sleep at the family lodge where the three Bullitt kids spent their summers from the late 1920s on.
"The strongest human emotion there could be is a sense of place," she said. Although she spent most of her childhood in The Highlands, it was here in Leavenworth where she camped, built bonfires and rode her sorrel gelding, Danger, through the woods.
"My mother never worried about me. She said, 'Just stay with your horse, dear. He'll take you home.' She worried about those boys at the CCC [Civilian Conservation Corps camp] but not about anything in the woods."
Sometimes, she recalled, "We sat on a rock and listened to the splash of spawning salmon, watching as their fins scooped out a nest." The eggs were laid and then "the male covered them with his milt. It was very romantic."
It was the beginning of her appreciation for nature, which would lead her to give millions of dollars to environmental and arts groups, and to build her Sleeping Lady Mountain Retreat, which opened here in 1995.
She keeps an office here with a woodstove and a bed, for when she's snowed in and can't get to her home across the creek. She has cut her ties to Seattle, instead supporting the arts in Leavenworth, adding musical and drama groups at the retreat and converting an old church into a theater.
"She's a marvelous asset to the community and very deserving of that [Audubon] award," said Bill Taylor, executive director of the Leavenworth Chamber of Commerce.
"She contributes to the quality of the environment and life in this area."
Defying conventions
With three marriages already behind her, Bullitt defied convention in 1991, marrying Russian immigrant Alexandre Voronin, now 43, and 37 years her junior.
At the time, he was in this country working as a carpenter's assistant, trying to earn enough for a plane ticket back home. He now has his own place and his own life in Seattle, as well as one they share together. "He is an excellent partner," she said.
"Maybe she needed someone so much younger to keep up with her," said her longtime friend Emory Bundy, a former executive at both King Broadcasting and the Bullitt Foundation. "Alex is prepared to do anything, learn anything and try anything."
A few years ago, Bundy, his wife and Bullitt took an arduous backpacking trip into the Alpine Wilderness area. Well into the five-day, 40-mile hike, Bundy learned that Bullitt had had a hip replaced just six months earlier.
She has taken rafting, kayaking and camping reconnaissance trips through remote areas to assess whether to support various environmental projects.
"She not only loves supporting the environment, she loves being outdoors," said the Audubon's John Flicker, who took a trip with her down the Colorado River five years ago. "We all climbed and worked to keep up with her. She was amazing. ... She genuinely glows when she's out in nature."
Bullitt says she is the happiest she has ever been, having returned to Leavenworth around 1990. Her daughter, Wenda O'Reilly, spends a lot of time next door at the lodge of Bullitt's childhood, Coppernotch, as do Bullitt's grandchildren and son Scott Brewster.
Bullitt is low-key about her varied accomplishments and interests. She has been a flamenco dancer, was once a nationally recognized fencing champion, learned to fly as a young woman, and to pilot a tugboat — which she bought and lived on for several years.
She received a natural-sciences degree from the University of Washington and once had a job milking poisonous snakes for their venom. She's an excellent equestrienne.
She also started Pacific Search magazine and, with her sister, saved Seattle's classical-music radio station, donating KING-FM to a nonprofit group. In 1991, the Bullitt sisters sold KING-TV, the station their mother founded, and poured the $100 million into the Bullitt Foundation.
It was about that time she purchased 67 acres and built her retreat. Taylor, of the chamber of commerce, said Bullitt has made many friends in and around Leavenworth, but that "this is a small town.
"Does everybody agree with her all the time? Probably not."
Not without critics
A neighbor, for one, is currently at odds with Bullitt.
Cot Rice opposes an underground science laboratory the UW wants to build under Mount Cashmere. Bullitt, surprising some, favors it, given that it would serve scientific research while bringing jobs to an area that struggles to survive on tourism alone.
Rick McGuire, former president of the Alpine Lakes Protection Society, also was disappointed when Bullitt came out in favor of the lab. Years earlier, Bullitt had helped publicize McGuire's struggle to save the Boulder River Wilderness area east of Everett from logging.
Environmental activism is always controversial, and "there are going to be those who resent that kind of powerful influence," said Jeff Parsons, manager of the Barn Beach Reserve, a joint Audubon and community center in Leavenworth, created from funds Bullitt donated.
"The Bullitt Foundation certainly has strengthened the environmental community's ability to compete in court, in the Legislature and in Congress."
Bullitt is happiest outdoors. Sometimes her friend and environmental ally Dick Rieman goes riding with her, he on his mule, she on her Icelandic horse.
She backed his unsuccessful bid for Okanogan County commissioner some years ago, and he's helped her campaign to restore Icicle Creek.
Restoring Icicle Creek
After fighting the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for years, Bullitt thought she'd won when she agreed to pay about $250,000 for the removal of three dams. They're gone now, but when it came time for the department to open the gates to two other dams, hatchery officials balked at reversing what had been in place since 1939.
Instead, they have designed a fish ladder to sort which fish go upstream, insisting that farm-raised salmon should not mingle with wild salmon above the hatchery.
It will be in place next summer, officials say, assuming the federal government provides the hatchery with $3.7 million it has requested.
Bullitt could be like other wealthy women, living a life of ease, said the president of the Bullitt Foundation, Denis Hayes.
Instead she runs her Sleeping Lady Mountain Retreat, refereeing meetings of sometimes bickering environmentalists, nurturing local artists and arranging for out-of-town performances. Coming soon to the woodsy retreat: bluegrass musicians, a Celtic violinist and a flamenco guitarist.
Nancy Bartley: 206-464-8522 or nbartley@seattletimes.com
