Dee Molenaar

Dee Molenaar was born to Dutch immigrant parents in Los Angeles in 1918, Dee spent his youth exploring the seashores, mountains, and deserts of Southern California. He extended his climbing horizons to the Pacific Northwest where he spent several years as summit guide and park ranger at Mount Rainier. After climbing Rainier some 50 times via 15 routes, including three "firsts," and traveling the park's high country for many years, in 1971 he authored The Challenge of Rainier, the award-winning and continually updated "definitive work" on the peak's climbing history. In 2011 the book was redesigned for a Special 40th Anniversary Edition. Dee is also the author of Mountains Don't Care, But We Do and Memoirs of a Dinosaur Mountaineer.

During World War II Molenaar served as photographer in the U.S. Coast Guard in the Aleutians and Western Pacific. In 1950 he earned a B.Sc. in geology at the University of Washington--and a "Big W " in pole-vaulting, He then served briefly as civilian advisor in the Army's Mountain and Cold Weather Training Command at Camp Hale, Colorado and Camp Drum, New York. His career in geology took him to Alaska, Colorado, Utah, and Washington, where he retired from the USGS in 1983. Molenaar climbed mountains throughout the western U.S., Canada, Alaska, the Alps, and Himalaya,and geology- and map-oriented treks to Mount Everest and Peru. He participated in major expeditions, in 1946 to Alaska's 18,100-foot Mt. St. Elias, world's highest coastal peak, and in 1953 to K2, on the famed but tragedy-marred American attempt led by Dr. Charlie Houston.

An important part of Molenaar's climbing pack was a small box of watercolors, with which he painted mountain scenes from below sea level in Death Valley to 25,000 feet on K2--the world's highest Earth-bound artistic effort. Dee's love of the high, open world of rock and ice and fringing meadow zone was reflected in his watercolors, oils, and pencil sketches, which are in private collections throughout the U.S., Canada, Europe, New Zealand, Russia, and China. His maps and artwork appear in state park, and Forest Service and Park Service exhibits, ski-area brochures and numerous climbers' guides and autobiographies.

Dee was honored by The American Alpine Club by induction into the club's "Hall of Mountaineering Excellence" and by The Mountaineers club in Seattle by presentation of the Lifetime Achievement Award.

Dee Molenaar died in January 2020 at the age of 101. He is survived by a daughter and two sons, and granddaughter and three grandsons.