The Dan Evans I Knew: Wilderness Hiker and Inspiring Story Teller

Gov. Dan Evans left this world better than he found it, fulfilling the oath he took as a Boy Scout. His recent passing, a few weeks before his 99th birthday, is an opportunity to reflect on Dan’s many accomplishments and lasting influence.

Like a scoutmaster around a campfire, my friend and mentor Dan wanted his stories to inspire us, to let us see a path to our own better future. Dan’s storytelling included a strong focus on family, optimism for the power of democracy, and a lifelong hiker’s courage to blaze new trails where others had not yet gone.

Dan was a great storyteller, as I saw when he joined my law firm Foster Pepper after deciding to leave the United States Senate in 1989. My boyhood hero now sat down the hall. As Governor a decade earlier, he wrote notes to boys achieving the rank of Eagle Scout, assuring us that with scouting’s lessons we could reach great heights. For a kid whose dad came here as a refugee, that was a needed push to become the first in my family to go to college.

Dan and his wife Nancy shared some of their stories in 2020 as Mainstream Republicans of Washington threw Dan a 95th birthday party (mostly virtual). The country was still in the grip of COVID, and it was just a few weeks before the 2020 election when Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump. Dan and Nancy were joined by a few of us at a Ballard soundstage.

Family was their core. Nancy said she and Dan and some of their other remarkable friends were successful because “so much of what they did was always really for their own family and for the future generations.”

Dan agreed, saying the “most joyous” day in his life was when Nancy, after keeping him nervously waiting for three days, finally said “yes” to his marriage proposal. Together the Evanses would have three sons and daughters-in-law and nine grandchildren. 

Dan guided those around him like a scout troop family, with stories not directions. Just after my wife Camille and I had our first son, I mentioned to Dan I would be away with a  with a heavy travel schedule. “I’ll make up the lost family time when Grant is older.” The very next day, Dan presented a The New York Times article about how a child’s personality and other traits were mostly developed in its first year. Lesson received.

Dan remained ever optimistic about democracy. As recounted at his 95th birthday party, in the early 1960s a young Dan Evans teamed up with an even younger Slade Gorton to lead Republicans from the political wilderness.  Republicans in the state house were then a small and powerless minority. The two started recruiting candidates whose views fit the district more than a partisan litmus test. Eventually Dan and Slade, taking great political risk, convinced a half-dozen Democrat legislators to cross the aisle and form a bipartisan ruling coalition in the state House.

Dan then became Washington’s youngest elected governor in 1964, beating the two-term incumbent, Al Rosellini. That victory almost never happened. Polls placed Dan last in the primary, and the campaign ran out of money. He and some supporters discussed shutting down the campaign, but a crucial dose of Evans’ optimism led the campaign consultants to work for free and business leaders pledging to raise more money.

During his 1968 re-election campaign, Dan pushed “to get the young really involved.” He recruited future Secretary of State Sam Reed to create Action for Washington, where “we didn’t even ask if they were Republican or Democrat.” We just wanted “young people who were really enthusiastic about being politically active.” Also, during that time of racial strife, Evans recruited Art Fletcher, a Black and successful young community leader from the Tri-Cities, to run for Lt. Governor, which he lost in a close race.

Dan’s optimism meant that failure was temporary, merely preparation on the path to success. When I sought his advice on how to pass the Sound Transit light rail plan, he noted that three prior light-rail votes led by his friend Jim Ellis had failed, and that it was the hardest thing our region had tried. He then said, you’ve just got to “keep pushing.” We did, and voters finally approved the plan in 1996.

As for politics today, Dan said “we’ve had hard times before, and we’ll have them again, but I’m optimistic that we will find a way to get over and beyond the extraordinary
partisanship of today.” He said every citizen should volunteer for policy or political causes, and that if “you’re not an active participant … in politics, you’re sitting on the
bench while everybody else is playing the game.”

At his 95^th birthday, Dan was asked to name his favorite hiking trail.  A vastly experienced hiker, Dan had convinced President Jimmy Carter to preserve the Alpine Lakes wilderness from development in the 1970s. To recognize his wilderness-preservation successes, a bipartisan act of Congress renamed the Olympic Mountains area the Daniel J. Evans Wilderness. Dan had hiked in that high country since he was a scout, including several times to the top of Mt. Olympus.

Instead of a naming a specific favorite hiking path, Evans described a place in the Olympic mountains where you “get off trail and you’re through meadows and up over ridges” where “perhaps your footsteps are the first that have ever been,” and “it’s a glorious country on a sunny day with wildflowers in full bloom.”

Dan Evans left us with that story because he wanted again to inspire us, to give us optimism that blazing new trails, even getting lost in the wilderness, is a worthy adventure that might result in a path toward a brighter future.

Lawyer and civic activist Mike Vaska was a political disciple and close friend of Gov. Dan Evans.