Focus: Adults in the Room - Adults in the Room: Mounting Danger

Episode Date: February 24, 2026

In 1998, a popular teacher at Garfield High School in Seattle — named Tom Hudson — falls into a crevasse while mountain-climbing in Olympic National Park. Hudson is accompanied by six teenage students from the school's outdoor program, who pull off a daring rescue of their teacher using techniques he taught them. Isolde Raftery, a reporter for the school paper, plans to write about the rescue as a hero story validating Hudson’s leadership. But she learns he cut corners during the climb... and it wasn't the first time he'd done so. This discovery leads to a confrontation between Isolde and Hudson, and is the first crack in the teacher's legendary reputation at Garfield — which shatters months later. Get in touch with the team by email at [e-mail]. Support KUOW and projects like this by donating at kuow.org/donate/focus. Adults in the Room is part of FOCUS, a dedicated documentary channel from KUOW Puget Sound Public Radio in Seattle, a proud member of the NPR network. It is hosted by Isolde Raftery. Original reporting by Isolde Raftery, Jeannie Yandel, and Will James. Our producers are Will James and Alec Cowan. Our editor is Jeannie Yandel. Music by BC Campbell. A special thank you to Ella Hushagen, without whom this project would not be possible. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Soundside brings you beyond the headlines with news and conversation rooted in the Pacific Northwest. I'm Libby Dankman. Every week I sit down with local journalists for SoundSide's front page, where we give you a shortcut to understanding the latest news and cultural moments and how they affect us here in the Puget Sound region. It's all here on Sound Side, on the radio or streaming Monday through Thursday at noon and 8 p.m. on KU.O.W. On the KUOW app or wherever you get your podcasts. From KUOW in Seattle, welcome to Focus, your home for immersive audio documentaries in the Pacific Northwest. This season, adults in the room. When I was a senior in high school, my best friend Ella Hushagen and I heard a rumor.

A popular teacher was abusing a boy at our school. Maybe abusing a boy. Maybe more than one boy. Lots of maybes. Zero proof. We told authorities what we'd heard. When they didn't act, we raised hell. And then our friends, parents, teachers,

even a columnist at Seattle's biggest newspaper called us gossips, rumor mongers, character assassins. Our high school turned on us and made us pariahs. And those abuse allegations against our teacher, they were never proven. We graduated high school in 2000, and since then Ella and I have had the same conversation on a loop. How did this man, who we saw as manipulative and potentially evil, convinced the rest of our community to defend him, to celebrate him?

One morning during the pandemic, Ella called. I was in my yard, pruning the roses. We should find out if our teacher really was a predator, Ella said. If, I thought, why was she even questioning this? Everyone was in denial about him, I replied. We weren't. Ella, you know we did the right thing. She got quiet.

Then she said something that hit me in the gut. How can we be so sure? For 25 years, I was positive my instincts were right, and I thought Ella felt the same way. But the past nodded. her and her question ripped a hole in my narrative. Today, Ella is a civil rights attorney in Los Angeles taking on institutions and big companies. I'm an investigative journalist in Seattle. We are the people to figure this out, Ella said. I don't typically say no to her, but boy, did I want to in that

moment. Senior year was one of the worst times of my life. The last thing I wanted to do, was knock on the doors of classmates and parents and teachers who'd made it so bad for us. And if I was wrong about my teacher all those years ago, I wasn't sure I wanted to know. Maybe Ella could sense my hesitation, because then, she said, Isolda, people think we killed a man.

I need to know if we did. We would learn much later. We didn't know the truth. We barely knew anything at all. From KOWW in Seattle, this is adults in the room. Episode 1, Mountain Danger. I'm his older raftery. Over the years, other classmates said I should look into the volatile events of our senior year.

They know what I do for a living, and they want answers to. I always brush them off. But Ella is different. When I met her, it was like love at first. sight. She was the new kid in my sixth grade class, tall, gangly, scowling. We hit it off right away, and Ella says she looked up to me from the start. I remember those, what would Jesus do, bracelets? I sort of in my head will often be like, what would a Zolda do? She always had a lot of friends. And I was her best friend, so I kind of got to go along for the ride. The truth is,

I feel like I'm always following her. Like when she decided to go to Garfield, a big public High School in Seattle Central District, I wanted to go there too. If you could describe a school as extroverted, Garfield was extrovert. Loud, big, and a little obnoxious. It was such a weird, funny place, and we all were just drinking the Kool-Aid, you know. We found our people. We found our people. In Seattle, Garfield isn't just a high school.

It's a calling card. Quincy Jones was a bulldog. Jimmy Hendricks, a bulldog. The guy who designed the World Trade Center in Manhattan, also a bulldog. There were more national merit scholars at Garfield than the private school Bill Gates went to. We had the best jazz band in the nation,

an award-winning student newspaper, and a one-of-a-kind wilderness program that took city kids scuba diving and mountain climbing. The program was called Post-84. and it was run by a teacher named Tom Hudson. Mr. Hudson was legendary at Garfield. He was well over six feet and nearly 300 pounds. I know this because he loved to tell us he weighed more than one eighth of a ton.

He had a voice that purred in a whisper and thundered when he yelled. Mr. Hudson had an inner circle of students. mostly skinny white boys in Gortex parkas looking like a gust of wind could knock them over. Those kids called him Tom. The rest of us called him Mr. Hudson. I had Mr. Hudson for biology freshman year. He was dynamic, entertaining.

But once that class ended, I didn't think about him much. Until July, 1998, the summer before my junior year. Mr. Hudson was headed out with six. six post-84 kids. The plan was to climb Mount Olympus. It's a few hours from Seattle in an extremely remote part of Olympic National Park. The expedition included a 20-mile backcountry hike through the forest and across the blue glacier, one of the most studied glaciers on Earth. Most of us had never done anything like that before. Rosie Bancroft was a classmate of mine and one of the few female members of Post-84.

She was the only girl on the Mount Olympus trip. No, like, radios or communication with the outside world. There were seven of us on two rope teams. Ocean Mason was a year older than me, a towering blonde kid who seemed shy at school. In post-84, though, Ocean exuded confidence. We hiked in for the first two days, so about nine miles each day to the bottom of.

the blue glacier? The blue glacier really is blue, which I guess isn't surprising given its name, but this is supernatural blue, electric. When you peer into the cracks, there's a ribbon of neon light at the bottom that glows, and getting there can be dangerous. Ice climbers often avoid the blue glacier because of all the cracks on its surface. Mountaineers have more than a dozen words to describe those cracks. Cravasse, moat, Berks groaned. They're mostly just slivers.

You can step over them, no big deal, but some are gaping, 15-foot fissures. And others are hidden because snow covers the seams. That's why the post-84 students were tethered to each other with long ropes.

That way, if someone stepped into one of those hidden rifts in the ice, the other climbers could hold onto the rope to break their teammates fall. This usually works, but not always. We were getting near the top, and I heard a yell, and the person in front of me was bracing to hold the rope, was on the ground, and so I dive down and dug in the rope,

but no pull ever came. Mr. Hudson had stepped onto what he thought was solid ground, but the snow gave way under him. He fell 30 feet, the height of a three-story building. Mr. Hudson's backpack wedged into the ice, making it impossible for him to move. He was conscious, but dazed and in pain. He pushed snow off his face so he could breathe and yelled up to his students for help. Six teenagers and one injured adult were now stuck in the middle of nowhere.

They had no way to communicate. with the outside world, and they had to act immediately. If the students didn't rescue Mr. Hudson before nightfall, he could freeze to death. They could all freeze to death. You know, you're a teenager. You think you're totally invincible. We didn't really let in how close we were to really being in trouble. The students lowered their most experienced climber into the crack. He cut off Mr. Hudson's backpack and connected him to a rope.

Up top, the students assembled a pulley system to haul Mr. Hudson out, a pulley system he taught them in safety drills. Slowly, carefully, the post-84 kids hoisted this man. Remember, he weighed more than one-eighth of a ton, up over the steep wall of ice and snow. I don't remember it being hard at all. I remember it working exactly like it was supposed to. Mr. Hudson couldn't move his arm. He couldn't put his full weight on one leg. He was so hypothermic.

He couldn't speak. It's cold down there. It's like a refrigerator, especially if you can't move. Mr. Hudson's pack was still down in the hole. The team thought they might need it to survive the night. They lowered Rosie into the moat to get Mr. Hudson's backpack. Ocean stayed with Mr. Hudson.

He and I huddled together under, a space blanket, but there was too much wind. Like he was just, it was just cold. He wasn't hardly talking. Mr. Hudson couldn't stop shivering. Ocean knew they had to do something. We decided to start moving. And so he and I started hiking down,

and I short-roped him, so I was like holding onto the rope close to him because I was afraid that he was going to fall. The others pulled Rosie and the backpack out of the hole. Then they followed Ocean. and Mr. Hudson down the mountain to their base camp. The post-84 team had 10 hours to hike back down to their tents. It was a race against the setting sun. And by this point, Mr. Hudson wasn't the only one in bad shape.

After the like 45 minutes in that crevasse and then the hike out, I had frostbite in most of my toes. I had like trench foot. I was walking downhill for 20 months. with a huge pack on because we all split up Tom's stuff. He couldn't carry anything. I just was like, yeah, this is the order trained to do. He did great. Yes, the students were in a dangerous situation, but consider how exhilarated they must have felt. These teens gave up weekends to drill for a situation like this. Exercises in drudgery for a moment that would surely never come.

But now, the moment was here. the students rose to it, they saved their teacher's life, the same teacher who trained them how to survive in the wild in the first place. There's something about that that felt very circular. Like being treated as adults as like not just as kids as like people who knew things who had skills. We were able to do these things that are hard, that are complicated. We were proud of it. Mr. Hudson and the students barely made it down the mountain before nightfall and set up camp. A park ranger stopped to chat with the group. The next morning, Mr. Hudson and the kids hiked to the car.

He had recovered well enough to drive them back to Seattle, where the story of the student's heroic rescue started to spread. But at Olympic National Park, the rangers, the people charged with keeping hikers, and climbers safe had a very different view of the rescue. And I would be the first to hear what they had to say. Soundside brings you beyond the headlines with news and conversation rooted in the Pacific Northwest. I'm Libby Dankman. Every week I sit down with local journalists for SoundSides front page,

where we give you a shortcut to understanding the latest news and cultural moments and how they affect us here in the Puget Sound region. It's all here on Sound Side, the radio or streaming Monday through Thursday at noon and 8 p.m. on KUOW on the KUOW app or wherever you get your podcasts. When school started that fall, Ella and I were both reporters for the Garfield Messenger, the school paper. I was old and I both worked hard to be, you know, messenger groupies, not groupies, but you know, we wanted, we took it seriously. We'd stay until 10 p.m. in this big, open classroom that as a journalist today, I can say, was a legit newsroom.

No-it-all's arguing, hashing out stories, lots of bravado and casual cursing. I wore a quasi-uniform, what I thought a real journalist would wear, clogs, a turtleneck, and sometimes a long black peasant skirt. My add-o was Joan Didian. I was a cub reporter looking to prove myself, ambitious and unrelenting. The year before, when I applied to be on the messenger, the teacher who ran the paper told me he didn't want me there. You were the homecoming princess, he said. How serious can you be? So I squatted in his class for the first week. Literally, I sat on the floor next to Ella's desk until he gave in. The Mount Olympus Rescue was my first assignment of the semester. It was a straightforward pitch. Kids saved the mentor who trained them. A narrative Mr.

Hudson was promoting. He had said that after 30 years of climbing mountains, that was the low point since, you know, he almost died up on the mountain. Jonathan Hill was a core member of Post-84, one of those kids who called Mr. Hudson Tom. But also the high point because students who he taught these rescue skills actually saved him. Jonathan skipped the Mount Olympi. his trip. But Mr. Hudson told him what happened. One of his lines that he had after that is, if something is worth learning, it's worth learning well, because you never know when it might save you or one of your friend's lives. I would have reported this story as assigned until I went to a party for my dad's work.

And there, I stumbled onto my first, honest-to-God's scoop. One of my dad's coworkers volunteered in Mountain Rescue. So I asked him, Have you ever heard of Tom Hudson? He raised his eyebrows and gave me a look like, ugh, that guy. He said Mr. Hudson would climb mountains near Seattle on his own, and he needed to be rescued a lot. My dad's coworker had been dispatched to save Mr. Hudson more than once.

This was not a good thing, he said. Mr. Hudson had a reputation with rescue volunteers as someone who took unnecessary risks. You should call the ranger station at Olympic National Park, he told me. Find out what the rangers who were there have to say about the rescue. Ocean recalled seeing a ranger at camp. I remember him talking to Tom. I think he was kind of pissed.

I called the ranger station. The guy who answered sounded annoyed. I couldn't tell if it was at me or at Mr. Hudson. Then he explained. He said Mr. Hudson hadn't checked in with them, a protocol for climbs to the Blue Glacier. If he had, the ranger said they would have discouraged him from taking his students up the mountain alone. Just having one additional adult would have made the safety margin so much larger. I think I probably would have, yeah, had probably three adults on a trip like that,

especially with a bunch of relatively new fly nurse with me. That's Nick Gigerre, the ranger Mr. Hudson talked to at the base camp all those years ago. He still remembers the accident. Nick was doing his rounds at the camp when he encountered Mr. Hudson. He asked how the hike went and was shocked when he heard what happened. The first thought was, wow, really lucky, incredibly lucky. I still remember the surprise I felt on the phone in 1998. Mr. Hudson had sidestepped basic safety protocols on Mount Olympus, and this ranger was mad about it.

My Mount Olympus assignment wasn't just a hero story after all. This fueled my ambition like nothing I'd felt before. Mr. Hudson was a demigod at Garfield, but now I had a story that was calling his mythology into question. I thought I was the only one who saw Mr. Hudson's fallibility. but someone else was questioning his judgment too. Rosie Bancroft was one of the heroes of the Mount Olympus trip. I liked Rosie a lot. She was loud with blonde ringlets and a bust-a-gut laugh.

When I started reinvestigating this story, Rosie told me her dad was livid about what happened on Mount Olympus. I mean, Rosie was hypothermic. She lost three toenails to frostbite. Another student got so badly sunburned on the mountain. He was hospitalized. I called Tom several days later. This is Rosie's dad, John Bancroft.

And said, I hope you'll be getting the parents together at some point pretty soon and just telling us what went on. And he basically said, well, it was a fairly typical mountain accident. And that kids did a great job of dealing with it. And I thought, that's it. John kept detailed notes about the Mount Olympus Rescue and wrote at the time that Rosie didn't want him to question Mr. Hudson. She said he was in a fragile state after his fall.

To John, this was a red flag. You're the kid, he thought to himself. Don't worry about the grown-up. First, we just want to talk about some of the kids. some business things. And then we can talk about an accident that happened this past summer with the Post members and Mr. Hudson at Mount Olympus. John decided to confront Mr. Hudson a few months after the accident

at a public Q&A about the Mount Olympus trip. It was hosted by Post-84 at the REI flagship store in downtown Seattle. The audience was mostly parents who admired Mr. Hudson. John remembers it well. I think people already knew that I was really almost a party of one, raising questions about this thing. John set up a video camera in the center aisle of the meeting room, facing Mr. Hudson. Decades later, he shared his video with me. That's Mr. Hudson.

He stood behind a table, a vision. of 90s smart casual, dark crue neck sweater and old khakis, towering over the post-84 students sitting on either side of him. He described falling into the ice on Mount Olympus. I was trapped there by the snow and ice and was unable to breathe for a bit of a period of time. And with the one hand that was free, I was able to move snow from my face so that I could establish it. there right, the box is not. Which is what it could read. After Mr. Hudson finished describing the accident, he took questions.

John stood up to speak. So, well, I guess I have a question about having Tom Ugo is the only adult on the trip, and that's not in any way to, you know, minimize the skill that the other climbers had, but it just seems like a trip where something this serious can happen. I guess I question that. Yeah, we were registered. We had a backcountry permit indicating our intent to climb to glance them out. And there is a law again.

Hudson's response is hard to make out, but he said they'd gotten the necessary permits. And they'd registered with the National Park Service as a climbing party. As for not signing in at the trailhead, well, it was dark. and it was difficult to see the sign-in station from the entrance they used. Also, sure, more adults would have been great, but the young man who pulled him out of the ice was just as experienced as any adult. Mr. Hudson said the parents knew beforehand that he was the only adult on the trip, And parents who were uncomfortable with that, well, they probably shouldn't have let their kids go in the first place.

I don't think we were understaffed, he said. I would climb it again with the same kind of leadership. I would climb it again with the same kind of leadership. And with that, the Q&A was over. Thanks a lot. Mr. Hudson didn't think he'd done anything wrong. That worried John. I was starting to think, I don't want this guy to be teaching and running this post to my daughter, first of all, and then the other kids.

I wasn't sure exactly what that would mean. John saw how students and parents loved Mr. Hudson. They were almost reverential toward him. That scared John, too. This is a pattern of you're doing wonderful things for kids. and then the next step is always doing bad things with kids. John was uneasy. He'd seen this behavior before.

When he was young, John had a camp counselor he idolized, who would later sexually abuse him. Mr. Hudson reminded him of this counselor. But in the end, John told me he stopped pushing Mr. Hudson. His daughter, Rosie loved post-84 too much. much. But he still felt uneasy about him. So did I. For one thing, Mr. Hudson really liked practical jokes. One time in my first period biology class, in the middle of a test, Mr. Hudson dropped a live tarantula on a kid's desk. The kid froze, and then he screamed. Mr. Hudson laughed and laughed.

Another time, Ocean found a dried-up deer leg during a post-84 outing and gave it to Mr. Hudson. Mr. Hudson put the deer leg in his biology classroom. And I remember a kid fell asleep during class, and he rubbed the deer leg like across their shoulder to wake them up. The kid freaked out, and Ocean felt badly about it. Like any good journalist, I asked Mr. Hudson for an interview from my Mount Olympus article. To my surprise, he declined.

Let the kids shine, he said. But then, Mr. Hudson heard about the more critical direction my reporting was taking. And suddenly, he wanted to see me. Hi, I'm Monica Nicholsberg. And I'm Joshua McNichols. We host KOWW's Economy Podcast, Booming. For decades, the University of Washington has received more federal research money than almost any other public university. and the research that's come out of the institution

has fed the growth of the region's biggest employers. On the latest episode, what could cuts to federal research funding mean for Seattle's future economy? Listen to booming on the KUOW app or wherever you get your podcasts. I was in sixth period journalism when a big kid named Bubba walked in. Tom wants to talk to you, Bubba said. Bubba was close to Mr. Hudson. If you saw one, the other was probably nearby.

Bubba and I walked down the long hallway in silence to Mr. Hudson's empty classroom. We went to the back, into Mr. Hudson's small office. He was standing there. His mouth set in a grim line. Bubba shut the door and stood next to our teacher. They looked like a wall of man. Mr. Hudson told me not to write anything that suggested he'd been careless on Mount Olympus. He said I could ruin his program.

Then Mr. Hudson reminded me once again that he weighed more than one eighth of a ton. And he laughed. Why is that so funny to him, I wondered. And also, why was Bubba part of this conversation? Bubba goes by a different name now, Ocean. Did we have Japanese together too? Yeah, okay. I was trying to remember.

I was like, wait a minute. Like, I know we had a class together at some point. Do you remember that I was writing an article about the Mount Olympus trip? No, I don't remember that. And he dispatched you to come get me out of the messenger room. And you brought me back to his office, which you recall is a tiny little office. And you were there, and he was there kind of looming over me. and he was telling me not to write the story.

And at the time, I mean, I would have weighed 80, 90 pounds soaking wet, right? Like, I was tiny. And so to have him say all that, I remember thinking, is he, he can't be threatening me. Is he threatening me? He's definitely trying to intimidate me. And I just remember he had kind of used you to put me in the room with him. And I wonder, do you remember that at all? I don't.

I don't have any memory of that. I'm so sorry. Oh, no, no, no, no. I know you're not. I just feel just a tremendous, like, sadness and compassion for you in that situation. Ocean has a really big heart, and I wasn't surprised they felt sadness for teenage me. But grown-up me does not feel sadness for teenage me, because in that moment, in Mr. Hudson's office, something clicked into place. Mr. Hudson was using his body and Bubba's body to try to get me to change my Mount Olympus story.

But he slipped up. Mr. Hudson showed me he was worried what my article would reveal about him, that he cut corners and endangered the lives of students on the mountain. That's when my anxiety gave way to a sense of total calm. I didn't need to be afraid of this man. He was afraid of me. Grown up me looks back on teenage me with pride and fondness. Like hell, yeah. Because in 1998, there was no narrative for girls my age to feel powerful

when up against middle-aged men. This was the year everyone blamed 22-year-old intern Monica Lewinsky for seducing the 49-year-old president of the United States. Indeed, I did have a relationship with Ms. Lewinsky that was not appropriate. The year when 17-year-old Britney Spears wore a bra and underwear on the cover of Rolling Stone. You're really young. What are you, 17? I'm 17 yet. I'm old enough to be your mother.

I don't want to see you in that shirt again. I let you ever go. The country was obsessed with girls my age. And not because of our brains. We were bodies to look at, bodies to use, bodies to intimidate. As an adult journalist, I notice this thing sometimes when I'm reporting a contentious story. Some men will get just a little too close, and it feels kind of threatening, like they want to remind me how much bigger they are.

When that happens, often in hallways, outside school board rooms, or at protests, I think about being in Mr. Hudson's office, and I tell myself, they're puffing up their chest to get me to back down. They're scared of me because I know their truth, and I am not going to keep their secrets. I published the article about the Mount Olympus Rescue in the Messenger. I wrote that some kids felt ill-prepared. The headline was mounting danger.

This wouldn't be the last time I'd investigate Mr. Hudson. Senior year, Ella and I would hear secrets about him that we couldn't ignore. Secrets that would cost us friendships and turn us into outcasts. Secrets that would eventually lead to tragedy at our beloved Garfield. Secrets that after 25 years I'm not keeping anymore. That's coming up on adults in the room. In episode two of adults in the room, Garfield High School is shaped. shaken by a scandal.

They put out this announcement that was very vague. It was like, oh, you know, inappropriate relationship with a student. What Ella and I chose to do next put a bullseye on our backs and forever changed our school and our lives. I have no idea what to do about it or who to tell. I think I was like, this. This is the chance. Adults in the room is part of Focus, a dedicated documentary channel from KUOW Public Radio

in Seattle, a proud member of the NPR. PR network. KOWW podcasts are made possible because of listener support. If you enjoyed this podcast, please make a donation or become a monthly member at kowow.org. Original reporting for this project was done by me as older raftery, Jeannie Yandel and Will James. An extra special thank you to Ella Hushagen, without whom this project would not have happened. Our producers are Will James and Alec Cowen. Our editor is Jeannie Yandel. Music by B.C. Campbell. Additional music by Alec Cowan. Logo designed by Alicia Villa. Amelia Peacock manages our marketing and promotions.

KU.O.W.'s director of new content is Brendan Sweeney. Our director of marketing is Michaela Giannati Boyle. KU.W.'s chief content officer is Marshall Eisen. I'm his older raftery. Soundside brings you beyond the headlines with news and conversation rooted in the Pacific Northwest. I'm Libby Dankman. Every week I sit down with local journalists for SoundSides front page, where we give you a shortcut to understanding the latest news and cultural moments and how they affect us here in the Puget Sound region. It's all here on Sound Side, on the radio or streaming Monday through Thursday at noon and 8 p.m. on KU.O.W. On the KUOW app or wherever you get your podcasts.