GOLDENDALE, Wash. -- Ray Mitchell kept close to the earth.

For years he ran Ekone Ranch, a summer camp where adults and youth stayed in earth-floor huts, learned to make fire, grow food, skin and cook buffalo and work with horses.

He wanted people to connect to the earth and understand what it has to offer.

To that end, he believed that our bodies do not belong to us, but to nature, said his longtime friend, Daniel Dancer.

His dream was to establish a cemetery where people could return to the earth without unnatural obstructions that embalming fluid, metal caskets and concrete vaults cause.

"We figured we'd do it when we were old and gone," said Dancer.

But on Dec. 11, 2007, Mitchell died unexpectedly at age 62.

His death helped launch the White Eagle Memorial Preserve, one of only four conservation burial grounds -- an arrangement that preserves natural landscape and prevents development -- in the country.

Situated within the 1,300 acres of pristine forest, meadows and sageland of the ranch, the cemetery covers 20 acres overlooking Rock Creek Canyon, a Columbia River tributary held sacred by the Yakamas about 10 miles east of Goldendale.

Here, people can be buried the natural way, amid trees, wildlife and natural ground cover while avoiding the cost of more formal cemeteries. When it's all said and done, a person can be buried for as little as $3,000. According to funeralplanner.com, the typical funeral costs about $7,000.

"Our costs are low because of how we are doing it," said Mitchell's widow, Nancy Davis, who helps run the cemetery. "I mean, we're not mowing the grass or anything."

The ranch and cemetery property is held in trust by a foundation Mitchell established and is under a conservation easement, meaning that it must remain in its natural state.

Mitchell's death followed a saying he often shared: "Do something while on the way to doing something else."

"His death was his way of doing something while on his way to doing something else," Dancer said.

The first green cemetery was established in England in 1993, where the number has since grown to nearly 40. In the United States, the first was established in South Carolina in 1996 and there are now green cemeteries in 10 states, according to the National Funeral Directors Association. A mound of dirt near the ridge of Rock Creek Canyon marks Mitchell's grave. Only pine cones surrounding the mound and a flat stone serve as a marker.

Mitchell, who lived at the ranch after establishing it in 1972, was the first of three to be buried here.

After acquiring a 160-acre homestead, he found supporters to help purchase and put into trust adjacent lands now totaling 1,300 acres. It was here that he learned to mostly live off the land and began to teach others the same, Davis said.

One recent afternoon, Mitchell's dog, Star, lay atop the mound of his grave as Davis and Jade Sherer, who also helps with the cemetery, reminisced about the work involved in getting the cemetery going.

In addition to the conservation easement, a biological survey was conducted. The cemetery, which operates under a county permit, is a part of a larger conservation project to re-establish and protect native habitat in the area, Sherer said.

"When you take off the topsoil, you have to put it back so seeds will take," she explained about each grave.

Mitchell's body was kept in a freezer at Columbia Hills Memorial Chapel funeral home in town for a few months until the cemetery was licensed, she said.

He was wrapped in a buffalo hide and buried in a casket made of wood he milled.

"It's certainly the most ancient way, natural way of taking care of our dead," she said. "So that they're actually feeding the earth rather than poisoning the earth."

A gentle breeze swept across the ridge as Sherer and Davis walked through trees to another grave where a woman was buried in only a cloth shroud. A rock cairn was erected nearby.

"We ask the people if they want to mark the grave to only use a stone that is no larger than a stone that would be found here," Sherer said.

People can be buried in a wood casket, animal skin or cloth.

"As long as it's earth-friendly," she said.

It's a practice that resembles the way the Yakamas bury their dead, without embalming fluid, steel caskets and elaborate gravestones and in remote areas unobstructed by any development that could keep them from their journey into the spirit world.

"They don't want anything put on a person," said Mavis Kindness, a member of the tribe's Rock Creek band and vice chairwoman of the Yakama General Council. "They're just supposed to go natural. You're not even supposed to touch them once they're in the coffin. You're not supposed to put anything on top of them."

She said she hasn't heard of the group operating the cemetery, but may be interested in what they're doing because her band's cemetery is getting full.

"I'd have to see the place, to see how well it would serve as a cemetery for our people if they would let us use it," she said.

So far, three people have been buried in the cemetery, and more than a dozen have reserved plots, Sherer said.

When the group first began the project, they were told that they would be flooded with inquiries.

"That hasn't been the case," Sherer said. "I think it's because we're so remote."

Those interested in the cemetery are allowed to choose the place they want to be buried.

Davis chose a spot not far from Mitchell's, and recently spent the night there just see what it was like.

"And last night the deer were running through the area," she said. "You could hear their hooves -- it was wonderful."

Although there are other natural cemeteries often called green cemeteries elsewhere, there aren't too many as remote and only four in the nation that serve as a conservation grounds, said Joe Sehee, founder and director of the national nonprofit Green Burial Council.

"They're looking for a funding mechanism to conserve that land and they think burial is the way to go, and I think that's a great idea," he said.

It's an idea that will catch on, especially in Washington, where there are a lot of earth-conscious people who fit the profile of a person that would want to be buried that way, he said.

"I think this thing is going to be enormously successful where it's situated and a model for the rest of the country of how burial grounds can be utilized to protect natural areas," he said.

Some funeral directors may not get too excited about green cemeteries because of the fear of losing the high-end casket sale, said Derek Krentz, funeral home director at Columbia Hills Memorial Chapel in town.

"I think its great -- just kind of old school," he said. "The business has gotten so caught up in sales, sales, sales and has gotten far away from what it's all about. It's not green in my mind, it's traditional. It's the way they did it on the Oregon Trail."

He said he wants to be buried the natural way, explaining that body fluids can remain in air-tight concrete vaults and steel caskets up to 30 years.

"I don't want that -- I don't want that for my family," he said. "Let me become the dirt."

* Phil Ferolito can be reached at 509-577-7749 or pferolito@yakimaherald.com.

Funeral facts

Each year America's 22,500 cemeteries bury approximately:

* 827,060 gallons of embalming fluid (mostly formaldehyde)

* 104,272 tons of steel for caskets and vaults, enough to build another Golden Gate Bridge!

* 2,700 tons of copper and bronze for more caskets

* 30 plus million board feet of hardwoods

* 1,636,000 tons of concrete ... enough for a 2-lane road between San Francisco and Phoenix

-- Source: Mary Woodsen, science writer at Cornell University and founder of Green Springs Natural Burial Grounds in Ithaca, N.Y.

White Eagle Memorial Preserve

206-350-7353

www.naturalburialground.com