By Paul Delaney
Cover photo courtesy Paul Delaney
When a group of rafters and kayakers from the Northwest Whitewater Association headed to run British Columbia’s Salmo River in 1993, Pat Harbine tagged along. Reaching the border crossing it was time to pull out the photo identification for Canadian Customs. The best Pat Harbine could do that day was to offer his Costco card. It worked.
That was just one day in the immense, adventuresome life for Harbine, who at that time was 62 and hanging out with a bunch of 30 and 40-somethings taking advantage of any opportunity to get in more river miles.
Harbine, an active local outdoors pioneer, passed away Dec. 21, 2024 at 93 and was memorialized Jan. 25. He was honored by his extended paddling and outdoors families, those he worked beside in a physical therapy career, neighbors and friends from Riverview Terrace retirement community, and of course his own family.
“We’ll miss Pat, he was a great mentor for paddling and an all-round humble good man,” Paul Fish, founder of Mountain Gear, wrote in a Facebook post. Born in Ukiah, Calif., on Dec. 15, 1931, Harbine’s family moved to a ranch near Plains, Mont., where his love of the outdoors grew even more. He grew up working on the ranch, logging with his dad, and playing sports at Plains High School.
Harbine’s yearn for adventure, perhaps, was part of his DNA. His father, Elwin, stowed away on a freighter in the late 1920s that took him to Tasmania. Returning home, Elwin participated in a Forrest Gump-style run from New York to Los Angeles in 1929 called the Bunyan Derby.
Working as a smokejumper in 1951, Harbine went from there to service in the Korean War before graduating from the University of Montana as a physical therapist. Harbine married wife Isabelle in 1957 and moved to Spokane in the late 1960s, where they raised a family that included four sons. They were married 66 years before Isabelle passed away in 2023.
It was also in about the early 60s that Harbine found plans in Popular Mechanics and built his first kayak. “He made one out of wood with canvas and water-tight paint,” son Alan says. “It had a big enough cockpit that fit himself and a couple of his boys. I remember going down the river with him with a homemade paddle.”
That piqued his love for the water and led to Harbine being instrumental in the founding of the Spokane Canoe & Kayak Club as well as the Northwest Whitewater Association. He would paddle into his 90s.
One of Harbine’s most memorable adventures came in the early 2000s, when, over a couple of years, he paddled the approximately 750 miles of David Thompson’s early 1800s exploration of the Columbia River system. “He had a pretty epic life,” Alan Harbine says. “It was a good example to follow.”
