Doug Walker
by Mike Thompson, 1/2/2016
Doug Walker died in an avalanche on Granite Mountain on Thursday, 12/31/2015. Jane saw the story in the Seattle Times late last night and woke me up to give me the news. Doug will be remembered - and for a long time in the Pacific Northwest - as a brilliant software developer/CEO/philanthropist who gave generously in support of the outdoors. The list of causes he supported and boards and committees he served on is a mile long, and includes REI, The Nature Conservancy, the American Alpine Club, and the Governor's Blue Ribbon Task Force on Parks and Outdoor Recreation. He will be remembered by his many friends for his brilliance, energy, enthusiasm, and kindness, and as a great hiker, climber, and lover of the mountains. He will be remembered by those of us lucky enough to have written software with him as a genius, with a capital "G". A mathematician who became a self-taught computer scientist, time and time again he created elegant solutions to big, complex problems. In a decade of reading Doug's code I never found a single bug, and I don't know anyone that did.
I met Doug in 1980 when we both were working as software consultants at Western Data near Green Lake. Western Data served as the incubator for Walker, Richer, and Quinn, which became known as WRQ, formed by Doug, Craig McKibben, Mike Richer, Marty Quinn, and George Hubman. I left Western Data for a two-year stint with an insurance company in downtown Seattle, but stayed in touch with Doug. At that time Doug and Marty were writing the first Reflection HP3000 terminal emulator for the then-new IBM PC, which hit the streets in 1981 equipped with Microsoft's DOS operating system. I remember telling Doug about an IBM mainframe CICS file dump utility that I was writing in COBOL (the only language for which I had a compiler at work), and he showed me a little recursive descent parser he had written for fun in COBOL on an HP3000, which was a stack architecture machine. That language was certainly not designed to solve such problems, but if all you've got is lemons, why not make some lemonade?! He was writing the Reflection scripting language and file transfer components, while Marty was working on the emulation, printing, and other components. The WRQ business model morphed from business software consulting to shrink-wrapped PC software, I was hired at WRQ as employee #20 in 1986, and then spent the fourteen best years of my professional life working there with an absolutely stellar crew.
I was a semi-regular hiking/climbing partner of Doug's during most of those years. He took me up Granite Mountain (where he was caught in an avalanche on Thursday), McClellan's Butte, Guye Peak, Mt. Rainier, Mt. Stewart (via the west ridge), the south peak of The Brothers, Mt. Torment, Whitehorse, El Dorado, Mt. Baring, Colchuck, Liberty Bell, and others I've forgotten. He opened my eyes to breathtaking beauty right here in the state of Washington that I otherwise would never have known existed.
For all that hiking and climbing, I have very few pictures. Partly that's because I was too busy trying to keep up with Doug to have time to reach into my pack for a camera. Partly it's because of the "be here now" ethic of the time in which we grew up, a time when taking lots of pictures felt like a violation of the true spirit. If you wanted to experience the beauty of the mountains you were supposed to grab your pack, pull on your boots, and start walking.
Here are the three photos of Doug climbing that I've been able to find. The first is of Doug leading a pitch on Mt. Torment in the North Cascades. The second is Doug (left), me (center), and Eric McNeill of WRQ tech support (right) just below the summit of Whitehorse. The third is of Doug just below the summit of the south peak of The Brothers in the Olympics. The guy at the other end of the rope is Bob Papsdorf, who was one of the tech writers at WRQ.
And here's a picture of Doug pulling on his life vest before going out for a paddle with his daughter, Kina (center) and my daughters Laura (left) and Erika (right). It was taken at Decatur Island in the San Juans, where Doug and Maggie often went for family getaways.
Doug's passing leaves a huge hole in a lot of people's lives. Over the past thirty-five years he has taken hundreds of people like me into the mountains, where they've fallen in love with Doug's playground while building a strong, personal bond with Doug. Many of those people play important roles in the Pacific Northwest outdoor community. All of us are very, very sad today.