A memorial service for Lee Adams III, the Seattle scientist and climber who died on Mount Rainier this week, will be held in his hometown of Freeport.
The service will be at South Freeport Church, 98 South Freeport Road, on Aug. 14 at 2 p.m.
Adams, 52, was killed Tuesday while descending the summit with three companions. At 13,000 feet, all four were swept into a crevasse on Emmons Glacier when the last person on the rope tripped. The fall killed Adams, an experienced climber who was an instructor for the Washington Alpine Club. The other three climbers survived.
Adams and his siblings began climbing mountains as youngsters, but he was the one in the family to pursue technical climbing, said his sister, Dale Adams Stair of Cumberland.
“He was so passionate about climbing. He would love to send us pictures of him on very adventuresome mountains. The hairier it was, the more he had to climb it. He would send us photos of him on the tippy tippy top of a mountain,” Stair said.
Stair said the route her brother was taking Tuesday was a very easy one. But the momentum created by three people falling was too much to overcome.
Adams grew up in South Freeport and attended school in town until he went to Phillips Exeter Academy for high school. He graduated from Middlebury College, earned his doctorate from Cornell University and did postdoctoral work at the University of Washington. A molecular biologist who worked with DNA, Adams was a research scientist for the Institute for Systems Biology.
In addition to Stair, Adams’ survivors in Maine include his mother, Evelyn Sawyer of Freeport, and his father, Lee Adams Jr. of New Vineyard. His brother, Ellis, lives in Seattle.
Adams was born loving the outdoors — he was also skilled in sailing, kayaking, canoeing and skiing — and with a great curiosity, Sawyer said.
“If you had to use one word for Lee, it would be ‘energy.’ He had enormous energy,” she said.
Adams’ exit from this world came far too early, Stair said, but it was exactly what he would have chosen: “He died with his boots on.”
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