Today's Seattle Times (11/11/2006) has a short notice saying that Leland G. (Lee) Crabtree died on November 7. Back in the
"Gnarly Alpental area tracks"
thread, Eric Lindahl mentioned that Lee was the area manager at Alpental in its early years. In the 1970s, Lee's sons Keith and Clark built a jump on the eastbound snowshed of I-90 that they used to jump the westbound lanes on skis.
In the late 1990s, in his seventies, Lee took up paragliding. I met him during this period. Lee was a long-time member of the Northwest Paragliding Club, serving as its president and holding other club offices. He is remembered by club members for starting a tradition of awarding "tree stickers" to pilots who managed to land in a tree, something that happens a lot at Tiger Mountain. The idea was to award the pilot a helmet sticker (in the form of a little tree) in exchange for hearing the story of the tree landing. Lee always handled it in a positive, lighthearted way, making the tradition both entertaining and a learning experience.
According to a message on the Northwest Paragliding mailing list, Lee succumbed to a series of diabetes-related health issues that finally ended in a stroke. The Seattle Times says that a mass will be celebrated at St Ignatius Chapel at Seattle University on Monday, Nov. 13 at 2 p.m.
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