Community activists and civic leaders sometimes are described as trailblazers. That wasn’t just a figure of speech for Don Cannard.
Hiking trails around Southwest Washington are the legacy of the retired educator and outdoors activist, who died Friday in Vancouver. Cannard was 88; the cause of death was congestive heart failure.
A funeral Mass is scheduled for noon on Feb. 15 at St. Joseph Catholic Church, 400 S. Andresen Road.
Sue Cannard, his wife of 67 years, said that they met at Vancouver High School and started dating in her second year at Clark College. She traced her husband’s love of the outdoors to his childhood.
Recognitions
Some of the awards and recognitions Don Cannard received as a trail activist and outdoors advocate.
• 2000: First recipient of Clark College’s Anna Pechanec Award for Lifetime Service to the Environment.
• 2002: Named volunteer of the year by the Washington Parks and Recreation Commission.
• 2006: Received a Vancouver Sparkles award.
• 2012: Received a Florence B. Wager Award from the county’s Parks Foundation.
• 2015: Received a Mac Award for making a significant and positive impact on Vancouver’s urban forest.
“He grew up on 6 acres of woods in Hazel Dell. One thing that impressed me, he knew the names of all the evergreen trees. I thought they were all evergreens,” Sue Cannard said.
And now her husband’s name is part of the Northwest nature map, at Beacon Rock State Park.
“There is a trail, Don’s Cutoff, along the Hamilton Mountain Trail,” she said.
The name reflects one of Cannard’s significant pieces of trail building. He coordinated and supervised a trail reconstruction project at Beacon Rock State Park. The Washington Parks and Recreation Commission named him volunteer of the year in 2002.
Cannard’s 33-year career with the Vancouver school district included a significant moment in Clark County history. Cannard was principal at Peter S. Ogden Elementary in 1972 when a tornado destroyed the school.
Covered with blood
While no students were killed, about 40 people in the school were hospitalized. (Six people were killed in the collapse of two other buildings.)
“When he came home that night after visiting students in the hospital, he was covered with blood,” Sue Cannard said. “It was pretty traumatic.”
Cannard’s hair turned gray a month later, she said.
Cannard found ways to combine education and the natural world, he helped start Vancouver’s outdoor school program in the 1960s. He was active in the National Environmental and Outdoor Education Association and trained teachers on the weekends.
“We must have taught 10,000 to 15,000 teachers,” he told The Columbian in 2011.
Cannard retired in 1982 and began to focus on trail planning and building.
“Don always had something going as far as trail construction and maintenance,” said Ted Klump, the Chinook Trail Association’s office manager. “He was very instrumental in getting a lot of projects built.”
One ambitious project is still a work in progress.
Cannard and the late Ed Robertson, another retired school administrator, envisioned a loop trail encircling the Columbia River Gorge and co-founded the Chinook Trail Association. It’s still a work in progress, but several legs of the proposed loop are walkable, including routes that piggyback on established trails, Klump said.
While he was recognized for his community efforts, more people probably knew Cannard through his career in the Vancouver school system. He started as a teacher at Hough Elementary and was principal at a dozen other schools, including Peter S. Ogden Elementary.
His memories of the tornado of April 5, 1972, remained vivid.
“I was in a part of the building where several hallways came together. The storm came whipping and I remember kids whirling past like leaves,” Cannard told The Columbian in 2012. “They’d been blown out of the gym.”
If the storm had hit a few minutes later, Cannard said, “more than 600 kids would have been in the gym for a spelling bee.”
